Hours after House Republican leaders announced a “deal” on a stopgap spending bill, Democrats and Republicans proved on the House floor that more lawmakers disapprove of the new legislation than support it.
The House voted 174-235 on the continuing resolution, with two Democrats and 172 Republicans voting yes, and 197 Democrats and 38 Republicans voting no. One Democrat, Marcy Kaptur, voted present.
More troublingly for Speaker Mike Johnson, the threshold for this vote was a two-thirds majority, meaning Republicans needed an additional 100 votes to pass the bill. In short, the bill went down in flames.
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.
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On Thursday, for the first time in days, Donald Trump praised Johnson 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.
“We’ll just have to see what the play is,” Rep. Kevin Hern, a GOP leadership ally, told NOTUS. “That’s why we’re doing the vote, so we can see where it comes out.”
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 that would allow him to get it through his chamber with 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.
Multiple conservative members of the Rules Committee — including Rep. Chip Roy — have indicated they won’t support setting up consideration for the bill. And other Rules Committee members voted against the bill Thursday night, including Reps. Thomas Massie and Ralph Norman.
After the vote, Massie suggested the whole ordeal was a referendum on Johnson’s speakership. He noted that Johnson is only speaker until Jan. 3, and said threats to primary the Republicans who voted against this bill were empty.
“You’re not gonna primary 35 people. I mean, you can. Weed out the weak. But the rest of us will have antibodies,” he said.
As the failed vote began, Norman suggested Republicans needed to “go back to the drawing board” and renegotiate a deal.
And just minutes before, as Republicans and Democrats spoke for and against the plan, Roy looked at his GOP colleagues and said they didn’t have “an ounce of self-respect” for voting to suspend the debt ceiling.
“It’s embarrassing. It’s shameful,” he said, claiming they were effectively raising the debt limit by $5 trillion.
If that’s the position of the 38 Republicans who voted against the bill Thursday night, GOP leaders would need Democratic votes to pass a continuing resolution. But that’s always been the case in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to clear the filibuster.
In that sense, the vote Thursday night does just as much to illustrate to Republicans — both in Congress and outside of it — that they’ll have to negotiate with Democrats.
After the vote, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Republicans weren’t bringing the bill to the Rules Committee, suggesting GOP leaders may actually recalibrate the plan.
At this point, the official Democratic position is that they’ll accept nothing less than the original 1,547-page continuing resolution that Johnson released Tuesday. But there are already signs that Democrats may be open to taking less.
Rep. Ami Bera told NOTUS on Thursday that the standoff probably ends with a “clean” CR that has disaster aid, farm bill provisions and “maybe a couple of other things.”
“That’s not a bad deal,” he said.
But Johnson doesn’t appear to be in a negotiating mood, with a speaker vote just a couple weeks away. Giving in to Democratic demands and simply putting the original bill on the floor could come at the expense of Johnson’s job.
Rep. Mark Pocan described the situation as a “clusterfuck,” telling NOTUS that anything short of Republicans negotiating with Democrats would amount to the GOP playing “their own game of fantasy Congress.”
“If they really are going to need votes, they have to work with us,” Pocan said. “We had a deal. They blew it up.”
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.
Ben T.N. Mause and Katherine Swartz, who are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.
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