So what? If you know that a bill is extremely toxic and would fail to get a majority of your own caucus, why bring it up at all?

Unless you...wanted it to fail.

Because it wasn't going to fail. Had Musk not intervened on Wednesday, it would have passed easily. There's plenty of Republicans who would have been perfectly happy to avoid this mess and just get the spending bill done so they could have gone home for the holidays without shutdown chaos.

What possible motive would Johnson have to do any of this if he thought it would fail? They do whip counts, you know.

The GOP has been saying 'do clean relief bills and those will pass easily'. If someone was arguing that it all had to be bundled together, let them explain that to North Carolinians.

No, they haven't been saying that - because they know it's not true. If it were true, then Johnson would have brought a clean relief bill to the floor and passed it easily.

But Johnson knows it can't pass easily. He's got a section of his caucus that won't vote for a clean CR - they won't vote for any CR. There's a section of his caucus that insisted on the disaster relief and the farm relief - several Reps had staked out public positions that they would not vote for a spending measure that didn't include them. So he needs to include them to get votes in his caucus, and he needs to get some Democratic votes. And he can't get Democratic votes without including Democratic priorities.