Congress was able to avoid yet another government shutdown on Friday after the House passed a new continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government hours before the deadline. The chaos began Wednesday, when Donald Trump and his top adviser, Elon Musk, derailed Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan for a stopgap spending bill, insisting the bill also raise the debt ceiling. Then on Thursday night, dozens of House Republicans voted against an alternative CR backed by Trump and Musk. On Friday, the debt-ceiling demand was dropped from the stopgap bill, and the impasse came to an end. Below is what happened as it happened.
The U.S. Senate passed the bill with an 85-11 vote early Saturday, sending it to Biden’s desk for a signature. Though Congress missed the deadline, the shutdown was still technically averted and the government will now be funded until mid-March.
A lot got cut from the original bipartisan spending bill that Trump and Musk derailed, including funding for pediatric cancer research — though the Senate was able to restore some of that, as ABC News reports:
Since President-elect Donald Trump helped to torpedo the original bipartisan funding deal in the House, Democrats have decried the fact that a measure to reauthorize National Institutes of Health funding for pediatric cancer had been removed.
But it turns out that a clean version of that bill — albeit with less money — has been sitting in the Senate since the House passed it in March. On Thursday night, without much fanfare and ahead of approving the stopgap funding bill, the Senate unanimously approved the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0. The bill reauthorizes a pediatric disease research initiative within NIH through fiscal 2028 and requires the agency to coordinate pediatric research activities to avoid duplicative efforts.
Axios reports that Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “has privately floated embracing the wholesale elimination of the debt limit next year rather than simply raising it”:
When the funding fight is wrapped up, Jeffries has said, his party may engage with Trump’s demand that the debt ceiling be done away with, according to a senior Democratic lawmaker and two other sources familiar with the matter.
Trump stunned Capitol Hill on Thursday by vowing to “lead the charge” to abolish the debt ceiling as part of a government funding bill. Democrats opted for formal opposition to the idea — with many arguing it would simply be a blank check for Trump’s tax cuts.
But scrapping the debt ceiling is a proposal many in the party have long embraced — and some Democrats like Representative Don Beyer and Senator Elizabeth Warren couldn’t help but endorse Trump’s stipulation.
As I conclude in my new post on the averted shutdown:
The programs saved from a shutdown or immediate cuts this week have a shaky future ahead, and Democrats will have to show the kind of strategic chops they displayed this week again and again.
Read the rest here.
Speaker Johnson’s celebration of the stopgap bill:
Democrats’ framing:
Meanwhile, in right-wing media:
It’s not clear what they actually got, other than avoiding the debt limit Trump wanted.
The White House is out in support of the bill:
Some of those circumstances, of course, were Musk blowing up the previous plan.
But it looks like the government won’t shut down tonight, though we still need to see the vote totals.
Per the House Dem meeting:
Voting is now underway.
Connecticut congresswoman Rosa DeLauro is speaking out against it while we wait to see what will come of the House Democrats meeting:
It’s been a long wait, and Jake Sherman is using siren emoji:
The bill is two pages longer than the one that failed on Thursday:
It’s not yet clear what House Democrats will do, but they are reportedly meeting at 5 p.m.
It’s also not clear what this means:
It’s a valid question:
It’s not clear how Democrats will respond, but it’s at least possible they could go along with the plan:
Amid all the murky reports of options House Republicans are kicking around to avoid or mitigate the government shutdown due to start at midnight, there’s a conspicuous absence: the debt-limit increase, suspension or abolition that Donald Trump, the lord and master of all Republicans, insisted upon as he cooperated with Elon Musk in blowing up the stopgap spending agreement that was about to be enacted the day before last. Yes, the vote on a “plan B” bill that included Trump’s debt-limit demand failed dismally yesterday, losing 38 Republican votes and all but two Democrats. But it’s not like Trump to just give up on an unreasonable and unpopular demand, particularly at a moment when he probably thinks of himself as the king of America.
But it appears Johnson is considering a “promise” to take care of Trump’s debt-limit plans manana:
What sort of agreement would this be?
A later dispatch from Sherman calls it a “handshake agreement,” with apparently a lot of hands shaking to rule out politically disastrous interpretations:
A $2.5 trillion cut in “net mandatory spending” could be explosive even if it excludes Social Security and Medicare, another wildly popular entitlement program Trump has promised to protect. Sure would be terrible news for Medicaid, the entitlement program covering the health needs of low-income Americans, and for the states that administer and co-finance that program.
In any event, if you take this “promise” and “handshake agreement” seriously it could make that first budget-reconciliation bill of 2025 which, we’ve all been told will focus on immigration and energy provisions, into something altogether different. Unclear if that’s a good idea or, for that matter, that the president-elect trusts anybody enough to accept a “handshake agreement.”
Per Politico, the speaker outlined two possibilities in a closed-door House GOP meeting midday Friday:
Option one was moving a stopgap bill that funds the government through March that largely matches the package endorsed by Donald Trump that failed in the House on Thursday evening, except it wouldn’t include raising the debt limit. Johnson said that package would pass via suspension, meaning it would need a two-thirds majority to pass and therefore a lot of Democratic votes.
The second plan he laid out would involve three separate votes on a stopgap funding bill into March, money for natural disasters and aid for farmers. Johnson would try to pass that plan through the Rules Committee, meaning it would have to clear a couple of hurdles before a simple passage vote.
But there are signs of angst within the caucus:
Still not clear this is a viable path forward:
Politico adds:
The new plan will test [the Speaker’s] ability to wrangle his conference. Members believe Johnson is taking the proposal through the Rules Committee, trying to pass it through regular order so it only requires a simple majority on the House floor. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who is on the panel, said that he will back the plan, meaning it should have enough support to get out of the committee.
But then things get trickier. Johnson would need near unity from his conference to bring it up for debate on the floor, known as voting for the rule. Democrats typically don’t vote for rules and are loath to help bail out Republicans after they backed away from a bipartisan funding agreement earlier this week.
If Johnson can manage to clear that hurdle, members could then vote for the individual bills that they support and vote against the ones they don’t — meaning Congress could avert a shutdown while other pieces of the previous GOP-backed bill could be dropped, at least for now. The fallback plan is that Johnson will try to pass the individual bills via suspension, which requires a two-thirds majority to clear the House.
One thing for Democrats to keep in mind if they seriously consider a very short stopgap spending bill that gets the federal government through the holidays is that the minute Republicans gain their trifecta (partially on January 3 when they take control of the Senate, totally on January 20 when Trump is inaugurated) is that they are going to insist on very, very, very deep cuts in non-defense discretionary programs (e.g., most of what the federal government does other than Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense). The fiscal hawks of the House Freedom Caucus who are once again showing their leverage within the House GOP have been demanding these cuts for years now, and once Democrats are no longer part of the equation, it will very likely happen once that short-term CR runs out. It’s not likely that congressional Republicans will be restrained by Trump’s proposed OMB director, Russ Vought, whose own administration budgets are likely to propose similar austerity measures.
So the current negotiations over spending may be the very last time Democrats have much involvement or leverage, unless Johnson and Trump disappoint the extreme HFC hardliners and risk losing their votes for major legislation. Odds are very high they’ll give the government-haters pretty much everything they want.
Making it official:
Sounds like there will be a new vote. Also:
Looks like House Republicans are going to try again soon:
It’s not clear what the plan is or whether there’s any chance Democrats will support it. Jeffries says he and Johnson have been chatting:
As the embattled Speaker Mike Johnson examines options for a stopgap spending bill that look like a faulty Rubik’s Cube, the odds increase that we are looking at an insoluble situation that means a government shutdown, with the big issue being the assignment of blame.
It’s the Republicans who run the U.S. House, and whose president-elect and his buddy Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan agreement that was on the brink of enactment. No prominent Democrat has been out there on social media building a firestorm of criticism for the deal; the most that can be said is that Democrats have been slow to express much interest in rescuing Johnson and Trump for the mess they are in.
But responsibility for mistakes and blame for them are two different things. And Vice-President-elect J.D. Vance has taken the lead in blaming Democrats for not accepting Trump’s proposal of a skinnier CR and a two-year suspension of the debt limit:
The Democrats just voted to shut down the government, even though we had a clean CR, because they didn’t want to give the president negotiating leverage during his first term — during the first year of his new term. And number two, because they would rather shut down the government and fight for global censorship. They’ve asked for a shutdown and I think that’s exactly what they’re going to.
Vance is talking in Washington-speak, which indicates his object is to buck up Republican morale rather than to persuade the public that Democrats are perversely refusing to accept a new deal. The reality is that it’s hard to say what the public will think (though it will certainly be divided on party lines) about this mess, since it’s happening right before the transition from divided to one-party GOP government. What should worry federal employees and anyone relying on federal government programs and services is that an extended shutdown may be necessary to properly adjudge the winner and loser of the blame game. With no bipartisan solution (other than perhaps a very brief CR to get the country past Christmas) in sight, letting things sit while constantly looking at the polls will be the path of least resistance.
It’s not clear if or when there will be another vote this morning. Here’s what may be in Speaker Johnson’s playbook:
Also:
Meanwhile, across the aisle:
Per Fox News’ Chad Pergram, the VP-elect is going ahead with his plan to pin the impending shutdown on Democrats, even though dozens of House Republicans just shot down the new Trump-backed plan:
With a Simpsons meme:
The very next day after Elon Musk and Donald Trump blew up a stopgap spending bill that was previously almost certain to pass in time to prevent a government shutdown on December 20, Speaker Mike Johnson’s hastily prepared substitute that deleted some spending and added a two-year suspension of the debt limit went down to defeat on the House floor, losing 174-235 despite needing two-thirds approval. Trump and Musk had endorsed this version, but Democrats (who had no input into the bill) whipped against it, with only two of them voting for it — and Republicans suffered 38 defections. Yes, we are told Johnson will try to get the bill back to the floor for a simple majority vote via the Rules Committee, but there’s no simple majority favoring it.
It’s unclear whether Johnson’s race for a vote on this measure was motivated by a desire to put things right with Trump, to show the president-elect his demands are unrealistic, or to set the stage to blame Democrats for the government shutdown that will arrive tomorrow night. But for now, House Republicans appear to remain in a state of disarray, and it’s a very bad omen for the unanimity they will need in the next Congress to get Trump’s agenda through a chamber where their tiny majority has actually shrunk.
Jake Sherman calls the failed vote “an inauspicious start to Trump’s reemergence into the legislating world”:
NOTUS adds:
Johnson now heads back to the drawing board — or not. While a government shutdown is now less than 24 hours away, it’s unclear if the bill going down will actually bring Johnson back to the negotiating table with Democrats.
For the first time in days, Donald Trump praised Johnson on Thursday when he released the new legislation, which would fund the government for three months, issue $110 billion for disaster aid, reauthorize the current farm bill for a year and extend certain expiring health policies. At Trump’s insistence, the bill also would have frozen the debt limit for two years. But now, after Johnson pulled the original bipartisan agreement and this one failed, Congress is headed toward a shutdown. And there isn’t a clear plan on how to avoid it. …
Where the vote came out is that Democrats are mostly united in their opposition and Republicans aren’t united in their support. Even if Johnson tried to pass the bill under a rule, which would allow him to get it through his chamber under a simple majority, it’s clear he wouldn’t have the votes. He might not even have the votes to get the bill onto the floor.
It will fail, but that’s expected:
Meanwhile across the aisle:
A light moment among incredibly wealthy and powerful friends earlier:
That doesn’t mean it will pass, however.
Politico reports that they have come up with a three-month CR:
The plan Johnson is expected to put on the House floor later Thursday includes, according to three Republicans familiar with the deal, a stopgap measure that funds the government through mid-March, a clean farm bill extension, the $110 billion disaster aid package previously negotiated with Democrats, clean health care provision extenders and a two-year suspension of the debt limit, kicking a new deadline into January 2027.
Bice said Republicans have kept Donald Trump apprised of the deal. The goal is for the House to vote Thursday, she added.
Given House Democrats did not appear to be read in on the deal, it’s unclear if they will support it, and Johnson will almost certainly need their votes to pass it through the chamber.
Shortly after the agreement was announced, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) already said he was opposed to the plan — an attitude other conservatives are certain to share.
MTG and others floated the idea on Thursday, though it’s not clear how serious they were being. NOTUS’s Haley Byrd Wilt talked to some House Republicans about it:
[The prospect of an outsider becoming House speaker seems close to impossible, even if it’s allowed. Members have historically preferred to elect one of their own — a leader who understands their conference, the legislative process and the institution. (Musk’s complaints about the spending package on Wednesday were riddled with factual errors, raising questions about his own knowledge of Congress.) …
Musk would certainly face opposition: “The idea of Musk becoming the speaker is about the most stupid thing I’ve ever heard,” a different GOP lawmaker, who asked to speak anonymously, told NOTUS after Greene’s post.
Other Republican lawmakers weren’t familiar with the chatter. “I haven’t heard that,” Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden told NOTUS. “I don’t know,” he added.
Rep. Mike Collins also said he hadn’t thought about it. “We’ve got a lot of pressing issues right upon us right now,” he said.
Rep. Robert Aderholt of Alabama, meanwhile, wasn’t too sure. “I’m not sure he would want the job,” he told NOTUS. “I think he’s got his hands full.”
Whatever happens next, his speakership is now in serious peril, as I explain in my new post:
[T]he days and weeks just ahead look like pure hell for Mike Johnson, and he may just decide to go back to being an obscure back-bencher without the cares of the world on his shoulders and an erratic and irascible president (not to mention his scary sidekick, Elon Musk) firing phone calls and social-media posts at him 24/7. Nobody would blame him for sparing himself this agony, though it’s likelier he’ll lose his gavel the old-fashioned way by being cast aside by his colleagues.
Read the rest here.
Per Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman:
That’s what Aaron Blake wonders at the Washington Post, noting how much attention the billionaire is now attracting:
Perhaps most striking is how solicitous Republicans are acting toward Musk. House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana) went on Fox News on Wednesday morning and gamely tried to assure they were on the same page. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Rep. Dan Crenshaw (Texas) tweeted pleadingly at Musk suggesting he misunderstood the details (Crenshaw qualified this with an, “I love you Elon.”) And by Thursday morning, Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) and others were pitching Musk as a potential House speaker.
Democrats are now gleefully suggesting Musk is running the GOP rather than Trump — a not completely ridiculous talking point, given the events of the past 48 hours.
And worth noting, per the above:
The House minority leader said “hard pass” to the debt-ceiling brinkmanship on Thursday in a post on BlueSky:
GOP extremists want House Democrats to raise the debt ceiling so that House Republicans can lower the amount of your Social Security check.
Hard pass.
As I noted in my new post today, Trump’s behavior makes little sense beyond making Republicans jump when he says:
The statutory debt limit, which was suspended for two years via a bipartisan agreement in 2023, will be breached by the federal government next year (likely in June, according to most estimates). The Republicans who will be running Congress in January had planned to deal with the debt limit as part of some much larger springtime measure, probably a budget reconciliation bill that will include extension of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. But now we learn Trump has been grumbling about having to deal with the debt limit at all. So now he’s insisting that Republicans (many of whom have never voted for a debt-limit measure in their entire careers) pass it right now or stand accused by their leader of a “betrayal of our country.”
Some of the same hard-core MAGA Republicans who hate debt-limit increases also habitually vote against any spending measures (and certainly the “clean” stopgap bill Trump is talking about) that aren’t accompanied by deep domestic-spending cuts. But they can’t be given a “pass” to vote against Trump’s wishes, because Democrats are not about to provide any votes for a bill that abandons the deal they made with Johnson. And even if nearly all GOP House members bend the knee and vote for this package that they will hate, they have only a three-vote margin of control of the chamber and don’t control the Senate or the White House at all until next month.
Read the rest here.
As Ed Kilgore noted on Wednesday, the shutdown would be an enormous mess:
This will make the many people in the Southeast still waiting for disaster-recovery assistance after Hurricane Helene very unhappy, along with a lot of farmers in deep-red Trump country. And there is zero assurance that taking this big step back will attract any Democratic votes to offset the House Republicans who will vote against any and all spending bills until the end of time. For that matter, any “clean” continuing resolution will have to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate and be signed by Joe Biden. And all this needs to happen by midnight December 20 to avoid a shutdown …
No matter how it turns out, this is a disaster for Johnson, who will soon face a close reelection vote for speaker. A sudden humiliation at the hands of the unelected co-director of an unfunded and unofficial entity won’t make it easier. And it’s also bad news for the incoming administration, the Congress, and the country. If Elon Musk can work this sort of destructive wonder in a matter of hours, who’s going to tell him there are limits to his power? Probably not Republicans in Congress.
