Johnson Gets One Last Chance to Avoid Government Shutdown

Governing is hard! Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

From one perspective, the news from the U.S. House today was totally ho-hum. A fourth fiscal year 2024 stopgap spending measure passed by a comfortable 320-99 margin, giving congressional negotiators a bit more time to work out the details of appropriations bills, in accordance with a deal House Speaker Mike Johnson struck with Democrats in the Senate and the White House. Yet again, Congress has managed to avoid a government shutdown, which would have occurred for part of the federal government on March 1 and another part on March 8 when earlier stopgaps expire.

But embedded in that 320-99 vote is a sign that this may be Johnson’s last opportunity to kick the can down the road before the inevitable confrontation with conservative hard-liners in his conference flares up into a real revolt. Of those 99 “no” votes on the stopgap bill, 97 were Republicans. It is gospel in the House GOP that if more than half of its members are opposed to major legislation, it should not proceed; relying mostly on Democrats is precisely the sin that got Speaker Kevin McCarthy thrown out last year. Yes, House Freedom Caucus types like Johnson more than they liked McCarthy. But there are limits, as the growing mutterings of incipient rebellion indicate. Lightning rod Chip Roy called the latest stopgap deplorable, as the Daily Beast reported:

“Kicking the can down the road,” Roy told The Daily Beast, “a two-week CR at Nancy Pelosi spending levels, no policy changes — it’s just more of the same.” …

Roy told The Daily Beast earlier this week that, while he disagreed sharply with [Kevin] McCarthy’s handling of a debt ceiling deal, he credited the former speaker for working with a “large number” of members “across the spectrum.”

McCarthy’s method, Roy said, “largely worked.”

When it comes to Johnson’s leadership, however, Roy said he’s largely failed to lay out a plan and stick to it. Unless, he said, “you consider capitulation a plan.”

The unkickable can may arrive when Johnson brings full appropriations bills negotiated with Democrats to the House floor beginning next week. They will not, of course, include the kind of anti-abortion or anti-Biden policy riders that hard-core conservatives have been demanding. Democrats won’t abide them, and they control two-thirds of the policymaking apparatus; Johnson, moreover, may need at least some of them in the House to beat back a revolt. In the absence of their policy hobbyhorses, what Freedom Caucus members want is spending cuts, and they have a plan to secure them, as The Hill reported last week:

The House Freedom Caucus pressed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) to put forward a yearlong stopgap funding bill, which would trigger automatic cuts to government spending, if he can’t win concessions on controversial conservative policy riders …

“If we are not going to secure significant policy changes or even keep spending below the caps adopted by bipartisan majorities less than one year ago, why would we proceed when we could instead pass a year-long funding resolution that would save Americans $100 billion in year one?” the group asked. 

Under a budget caps deal brokered between President Biden and then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) last year, lawmakers agreed to set new spending limits to adhere to for fiscal 2024, as well as a penalty for automatic cuts that could take effect in April if Congress didn’t finish its funding work on time.  

There’s not much question that if it’s necessary to force this course of action, House conservatives will be willing to fight against adoption of appropriations bills, even if that means a government shutdown finally occurs. If they get a majority of House Republicans to agree with them, then Johnson might risk exactly the same fate as McCarthy if he side-steps them and lets Democrats pass these spending bills over the objections of his conservative allies. You can expect the threat to become explicit as the moment of truth on the House floor grows near.

It’s always possible, of course, that the Freedom Caucus folks will blink, or even decide a government shutdown is too high a price to pay for the pleasure of a collective temper tantrum over spending. It’s possible Donald Trump will intervene and either support Johnson or demand that he bend to his right-wing critics. But the one thing that’s not going to happen is much more in the way of delaying the inevitable. Either Congress is going to pass appropriations bills as Johnson and the Democrats want, or they’re going to let those across-the-board cuts happen with or without a nasty little government shutdown in the interim.

Johnson has given himself one last length of rope in cutting an appropriations deal with the hated opposition and getting the House to give him time to bring the fruits of his negotiations to the floor. He may survive once again, or he may hang himself among Republicans with his handiwork.