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The US is on track to narrowly avoid a damaging government shutdown that lasts into Monday, but only after House Republicans had to again seek Democratic support following two days of self-inflicted political wounds.
Congress is now moving ahead with a plan to fund the government until mid-March, along with a package of hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster and farm aid. Importantly, the legislation abandons Donald Trump’s demand that Congress deal with the expiration of the debt ceiling before he takes office, which Republicans’ own members rejected earlier this week.
House Speaker Mike Johnson “got bush-whacked with that,” Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., told Semafor of Trump’s insistence on addressing the debt limit as part of any funding bill.
The House cleared the legislation, 366-34, on Friday evening. It now heads over to the Senate — where the agreement among all 100 senators that is required to pass it by midnight may not materialize, but where passage before Monday morning is near-guaranteed.
“I am certain it will be a tricky thing to do,” said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, of steering the spending bill through the upper chamber.
Even if there is a short-term shutdown at midnight on Saturday, its effects would not seriously be felt until Monday morning, at which point federal agencies would start to be furloughed and see their paychecks cut off.
That painful outcome looked entirely possible as recently as Friday morning, with Trump suggesting on his Truth Social platform that any potential shutdown would be better off starting before he took office.
In the end, though, Johnson’s House GOP had to take a tough failed vote Thursday night on Trump’s debt limit demand before discarding it in order to keep the government open. Republicans instead reached an informal agreement to tackle the issue early next year.
Thompson said he had voted for the government funding plan with the debt limit added while being “pretty confident” about its failure. Republicans went through that exercise, he said, as a way to “show some favor to [Trump’s] becoming the 47th president.”
Trump expressed his displeasure on Friday afternoon that the legislation did not include raising the debt ceiling, according to a person who spoke with him. The president-elect may not try and stop the bill over the omission but is still peeved the primary reason he called for the bill to be negotiated — the debt limit — was not included after House negotiations.
Now he will have to deal with it the first year of his term and either pass it on a party-line bill, which will be very hard with Republicans’ current position on the debt, or negotiate with Senate Democrats.
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If the government had shut down, Republicans’ agenda would have taken the most damage. The lengthy shutdown that began close to Christmas 2018, during Trump’s first term, ended with him gaining no new ground in the push for a border wall that prompted the entire battle.
And there was even more at stake this time around, with the GOP weighing an ambitious target of a party-line bill on border security within Trump’s first month in office. Even as it stands, with a significant shutdown unlikely, House Republicans are leaving Washington for the year with palpably diminished unity and trust in their leadership.
That means there may be a deeper toll exacted by the shaky near-shutdown — one felt within weeks, when Congress returns on Jan. 3 and has to elect a speaker for the next two-year session. Johnson’s hold on the House’s top gavel was seen as firm as recently as a week ago, thanks to his strong relationship with Trump; this week has changed all that.
“The House can’t figure out how to do their job,” Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., told Semafor. “We make an agreement with these folks and then it’s, ‘oh, can’t do that, because Elon Musk said we couldn’t’.”
The View From The Republican Optimists
Despite this week’s evidence that the GOP will struggle to enact Trump’s agenda with a House majority that will temporarily shrink to one vote, some Republican lawmakers kept calm about the messy nature of the funding talks.
To those members, the failure of three separate funding plans before Johnson was forced to rely on Democratic votes amounted to the price of doing business with narrow margins of control.
“If this sort of sets the mechanism of how you work through difficult math for the next two years, it’s been absolutely worth it,” Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., told Semafor.
Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., sounded a similar note: “This is how the process is supposed to work.”
Notable
- Democrats see Musk’s central role in the near-collapse of government funding as a political boon, reinforcing their argument about the dangers of government by unelected wealthy people, Semafor’s Dave Weigel reports.
- The GOP also reached an unofficial agreement to seek savings from mandatory spending like entitlements as part of its future push to raise the debt limit — and a prominent House chairman-to-be says he’s looking to trim Medicaid, according to Axios.