The House of Representatives is set to vote on Johnson’s plan to avoid a shutdown
The House of Representatives on Tuesday pushed for a vote on legislation to keep federal funding flowing through early 2024, after a bloc of Democrats tacitly signaled their willingness to support a plan opposed by many Republicans to impose a shutdown at the end of the week.
With funding for federal agencies set to expire at midnight Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson acted late Monday night to bring the spending bill to the House of Representatives under special expedited procedures that require a supermajority for passage, meaning substantial Democratic help would be needed. The maneuver by the newly elected president – who only won his post three weeks ago – came after far-right lawmakers increasingly said they would not support the measure because it maintained government spending at current levels.
A vote was expected late Tuesday afternoon.
Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives have yet to take an official position on the bill. Many of them have questioned the proposal because it includes two staggered deadlines for funding different parts of the federal government, one on January 19 and one on February 2. But a growing number of Democrats said privately that they planned to vote for it because it included no cuts or policy changes — both demands of far-right Republicans — and because they saw no other way to avoid a shutdown.
“Our current assessment of the continuing resolution presented by Speaker Johnson is that it does not contain any extraneous and far-right policy provisions,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic leader, said on NPR, adding that some in his caucus continued to raise concerns about the proposal’s two funding deadlines.
House Democrats met in the basement of the Capitol on Tuesday morning to discuss how to handle the bill.
In addition, Mr. Johnson predicted the measure would get a “bipartisan deal” and defended it as a way to buy Republicans more time to pass the dozens of individual spending measures that lawmakers would have to pass each year to fund the government.
“I think we’ll find bipartisan agreement that this is a better way to do it, to have the actual appropriations process,” he said in an interview on CNBC. “I started doing that immediately after I got the gavel, but here we are on the eve of November 17. A shutdown is looming and we must prevent that.”
The plan’s passage will likely depend on the same coalition of Democrats and mainstream Republicans that Johnson’s predecessor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, used to avoid a shutdown in September and suspend the debt ceiling earlier this year. Those moves cost Mr. McCarthy his job.
Mr Johnson has inherited the same spending dilemmas that dogged Mr McCarthy. Far-right Republicans have pushed to fill the government’s individual spending accounts with deep cuts and conservative policies that mainstream, politically vulnerable Republicans have refused to support.
At the same time, some conservatives have flatly refused to support any kind of stopgap measure, including one put forward by Mr. McCarthy in September that included drastic cuts to government programs — in many cases as much as 29 percent.
On Tuesday, some of the same hardline Conservatives who wanted to oust Mr. McCarthy expressed their anger at Mr. Johnson. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of about three dozen far-right lawmakers, announced they would oppose the measure.
“It contains no cuts, no border security, and no meaningful victory for the American people,” the group wrote in a statement. “Republicans must stop bargaining with ourselves over the fear of what the Senate might do with the promise of ‘move today and tomorrow we will fight.’”
But in a sign that there was little appetite to oust Mr. Johnson because he trusted Democrats to pass the legislation as they did with Mr. McCarthy, the lawmakers continued: “While we remain committed to working with Chairman Johnson, we need bold changes. .”