Good morning. I'm playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Thursday, September 21st. If you want to know how

grim things are in the House of Representatives right now, look no further than what happened last

night in the basement of the Capitol. House Republicans emerged from a closed-door conference meeting,

basically jubilant and patting themselves on the back for progress on spending plans

that have really bedeviled the Republican conference lately. The upshot of that meeting was that

they finally have a deal to take up the Defense Department appropriation bill that conservatives

blocked earlier this week. And they appeared to flip some conservative holdouts to the continuing

resolution to fund the government for a short time at the end of the month. Kevin McCarthy was saying

we're in a good place. Dusty Johnson was saying they made tremendous progress. The RSC chairman,

Kevin Hearn, was giving a shout out to

his colleagues, saying they were working very well together. But we just want to be clear this

morning that this celebration is very premature at best. There are a ton of serious questions

that remain even after last night's kumbaya moment. Do Republicans

actually have the votes to pass the Defense Department Appropriations bill? We don't know yet.

Do they have the votes to pass the GOP's new continuing resolution? We also don't know that either.

And most importantly, do they have a strategy for what they're going to do when the

Senate totally ignores their latest spending gambit and sends back a clean CR with Ukraine funding

and none of these policy writers? Absolutely not. The truth is that while Republicans were very happy

coming out of their meeting last night, this is just the beginning of a very long, ugly, drawn-out war. And it's a reality that longtime appropriator Steve Womack hinted at when he was leaving the meeting. The Arkansas Republican stopped and talked to reporters about how Republicans keep getting, quote, wrapped around the axle about what they're doing right now,

negotiating with themselves. But eventually the Senate is going to have a say in these spending issues.

And when they do, it's going to look a lot different than what the House is doing right now.

That means that this whole fight is going to come back to the House and totally erupt in a new fashion

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