After their first 100 days in power, the cracks are beginning to show in the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Speaker Kevin McCarthy is going to try to pass a bill with a bare-bones summary of a budget within the next few weeks, but at this point no bill has actually been written and no GOP consensus has emerged about what that bill should (or shouldn't) contain. It is still unclear whether any plan is going to get the 218 votes to pass. Factionalism within the Republican conference is a tough hurdle to get over, what with the razor-thin majority McCarthy has to work with. But the debt ceiling looms, so it is now "put up or shut up" time for McCarthy's Republicans.

McCarthy, up until now, has attempted to paint the entire crisis as somehow being President Joe Biden's fault. McCarthy complains that Biden won't come to the table to negotiate. This is laughable, because until McCarthy actually puts a few numbers on paper, there simply is nothing to negotiate about. Biden has released his budget -- a full budget, hundreds of pages long, with specific numbers for everything in the federal budget. McCarthy is desperately trying to come up with a summary of the Republican budget -- a short overview with general spending guidelines but no detailed specifics (other than the ones McCarthy chooses to include, as part of his agenda). But until McCarthy does put his cards on the table, there is no reason for Biden to negotiate, because there isn't anything to negotiate about yet.

McCarthy always was going to have his work cut out for him, herding the Republican cats. His torturous election as speaker showed this clearly -- any handful of House Republicans have the power to derail everything at any time. And McCarthy doesn't just have two or three competing factions, he's got five of them to deal with. Fittingly, since the party is still the party of Donald Trump, these are usually referred to using a moniker drawn from The Godfather -- the "five families." Mobster references seem somehow very appropriate.

The Washington Post took a fairly deep dive into McCarthy's woes today, which began with an overview:

After 100 days in control, House Republicans have not reached consensus on how they will handle a vote on raising the debt ceiling -- a critical piece of legislation that, if not passed, has global economic implications. They have not agreed on what their budget should, or should not, include, with various factions of the conference preparing their own versions. They are once again uncertain about when to vote on a major midterm promise -- border security legislation -- after not being able to secure support for its passage. And behind all of these public debates, skepticism and distrust is growing among GOP leaders.

The growing rancor and the lack of progress on major legislation have set the stage for months of tumult ahead for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), who has struggled to shepherd his narrowly divided conference as both moderate and extreme GOP members seek to leverage their power in the party's four-vote majority. The coming battles could have profound effects on the U.S. economy as well as on the 2024 election, as House Republicans pursue numerous right-wing policies that could influence races for Congress and the White House.

. . .

McCarthy has now taken a key aspect of the budget process into his own hands. He is devising a bill that would lift the debt limit for one year and propose up to $2 trillion in budget cuts over a decade. While the bill is based on the areas that have the most consensus within the conference, it's still unclear if it -- or any proposal -- can gain the support of 218 Republicans.

. . .

And according to people familiar with the discussions, leadership's initial directive to each ideological faction was to avoid putting out their own position statement related to the debt ceiling without first informing one another about it. The House Freedom Caucus bucked that ask, shocking some members, when it released what demands it has in exchange for its votes in raising the debt ceiling. The White House has highlighted those demands, which Biden referenced in his response to McCarthy, as unreasonable.

Now the Republican Study Committee, the Main Street Caucus, the Republican Governance Group and possibly even the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus will release their own plans. Meanwhile, Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Tex.), who was described in [a] New York Times article as lacking McCarthy's confidence, presented a budget at the Republican retreat last month, but it's unclear if it will ever be released.

"This is a failure of the five family meetings," said one person familiar with internal dynamics of House Republicans, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal frustrations. "We wanted to avoid a fractured caucus," but it "didn't work out as intended."

McCarthy is aiming to release the text of some sort of budget plan within days. But from what other Republicans are saying, he's still got a long way to go to get there:

"I don't know when this legislative package the speaker talked about today is coming to the floor, because I don't know when it's going to have 218 votes," said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, referring to the number of votes required for legislation to pass.

Asked if the bill currently had sufficient support, he continued: "No, because it doesn't exist in writing yet. We still have to resolve major questions, like the dollar amount and the duration and the policy concessions we seek from the Senate."

Politico had a different quote from Gaetz:

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), one of McCarthy's harshest critics in the past, said leadership doesn't yet have the votes because members haven't seen the full plan on paper.

"We still have to resolve major questions like the dollar amount, and the duration, and the policy concessions we are seeking from the Senate. So it couldn't possibly have 218 votes, because it doesn't even exist," Gaetz said, adding that he won't "prognosticate the end-zone dance before we draw the game plan."

They had one other quote which shows that at least some Republicans still have a functioning sense of humor:

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a close McCarthy ally, dryly summed up the meeting's tone: "It's a chorus of unity and sunshine."

The debt ceiling "crisis" is, of course, nothing of the sort. It is a made-up "crisis" that Republicans are attaching to an entirely unrelated issue. They're trying to use it as leverage in their budget talks with Biden and the Democrats, but raising the debt ceiling has nothing to do with the budget process. But it does have dire consequences, and the clock is ticking. Just today one economic prediction came out that the U.S. will hit the debt ceiling in June. This may prove to be wrong -- it could be as late as September -- but we can't afford to take the risk of waiting. This issue has to be solved in the upcoming weeks before we even get in danger of actually defaulting on the public debt. So there's only so much time McCarthy will have to get his fractious caucus together. Since they are the ones tying the debt ceiling to the budget, this means they have to at least pass a budget overview plan through the House, just to prove that they can pass something.

Of course, they always have the option of just not taking hostages -- they could just raise the debt ceiling without any links to the budget. So even at the last minute, there will be a way forward, although this is exactly what President Biden is asking for, so it would be a major victory for him if a clean debt ceiling bill passes.

The Republicans have already been forced to abandon their most ambitious campaign promises on the budget. They promised their voters that they'd balance the budget within 10 years. Then during the State Of The Union speech, Joe Biden rope-a-doped them into loudly and vocally opposing any cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- which makes it almost impossible for a balanced budget to even be created (at least, without Draconian cuts elsewhere). Reportedly, now McCarthy is only looking at rather modest budget cuts. Again, this has all represented movement by the GOP towards reality (rather than their feverish campaign promises).

But even the more-modest things McCarthy is working on now are still going to be politically painful for Republicans to support. To achieve any budgetary savings means cutting money out from various departments and groups. Biden and the Democrats are champing at the bit to see the Republican numbers, because they will then immediately begin pointing out to the public precisely who is going to lose out under the GOP plan. This is the entire reason why McCarthy has waited this long to put any sort of numbers out at all, of course. Big Republican donors love to talk about budget-slashing, but when Republican voters hear exactly what this means, they usually don't like it very much.

House Republicans are going to have to vote for something, in order to give McCarthy his list of things to bargain over with Biden. But getting 218 votes for some budget overview isn't the end of the road, but merely a starting point. Even in the best-case scenario for Republicans, Biden's not going to go along with everything they want. So they're going to all have to vote for budget cuts that won't actually happen, and then defend those votes in the 2024 election.

No wonder Republicans are in such disarray.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant