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Good morning. I'm Anna Palmer. And I'm Jake Sherman. And welcome to The Daily Punch, brought to you by Punch Bull News. It's Wednesday, December 18th, 2024. Let's get into the mix. Here are your Washington headlines of the day. Number one, finally, we've got a CR.

Number two, what's in it for members? And number three, troubled Trump noms skirt thems.

All right, Jake, let's get into it. We have been waiting with bated breath all week for the lawmakers to release the government funding bill. And finally, we have ACR.

Shocked to no one, probably. House Republicans are in an uproar about what's in it, including a pay raise,

which we'll talk about later for lawmakers. House and Senate leaders released this 1500-plus page bill Tuesday evening that funds the government through March 14th.

Let's talk about kind of the size of the bill, what's in it.

It's not just keeping the lights on.

There's a slew of other things.

Merry Christmas to so many lawmakers who are getting their things in it.

But then let's also talk about Speaker Mike Johnson, the strategy and what's next here.

Yeah, listen. So, okay, so the 1,500 page bill is out. It is, you're right. Everybody's pissed off,

and I get that. And here's why I get it. because Mike Johnson said he wasn't going to do this.

And he said, you know, we were very clear, again, punchball news, opinions on strategy,

not on policy. But it seemed to make sense to us, given all the equities at play in the government funding process and in the House Republican Conference and everything happening, that Mike Johnson would have seen it back in this late summer or early fall in his interest to do a large omnibus. Remember, an Omni would have funded government until September.

Except that would have made sense because Donald Trump then could have spent all of the first,

all of the, you know, until, you know, August passing his agenda without a government funding

fight. Johnson took a different path. He decided to do what he,

...