The House of Representatives on Wednesday evening rejected Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to avoid a government shutdown at the end of the month, delivering an embarrassing blow to the Republican leader with 12 days to go until the federal funding deadline.
The bill was defeated 202-220, with 14 Republicans joining 206 Democrats in opposing it. Three Democrats supported the bill, and two Republicans voted “present.”
Johnson’s failed strategy: Congressional lawmakers failed to complete their work on the 12 annual appropriations bills needed to fund agencies and programs for the coming year, making it necessary for them to push through a short-term extension before fiscal 2025 begins on October 1. Johnson chose to pursue a spending bill extending into late March, hopeful that Donald Trump might win a second erm and be able to exert more leverage on the full-year spending plans. And Johnson chose to pair that stopgap with a controversial measure favored by Republicans requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections. Yet he could not round up enough votes to pass his plan.
Democrats called the voting legislation unnecessary and compared it to a modern poll tax. Some Republicans questioned the duration of the spending bill or the wisdom of voting on a plan that had no chance of being approved by the Senate of White House. And some Republicans oppose the very idea of a “continuing resolution” or stopgap spending bill.
Faced with mounting Republican opposition to his plan, Johnson was forced to pull a planned vote on it last week. He and his leadership team were then unable to convince enough lawmakers in the Republican conference to support the bill — but Johnson brought it to a vote anyway, baffling members in both parties.
“I don’t talk about plan B,” he told Fox News this morning. “I’m the quarterback on the field. … Now there’s a big playbook, lots of ideas, but this is the play. This is the right one.”
Fourteen members of Johnson’s team disagreed.
“This bill is an admission that the House Republican majority cannot govern,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said before the vote.
What’s next: Democrats are urging a bipartisan approach. “For the last two weeks, Speaker Johnson and House Republican leaders have wasted precious time on a proposal that everyone knows can’t become law. His own Republican Conference cannot unite around his proposal,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said earlier in the day. “I hope that once the Speaker’s CR fails he moves on to a strategy that will actually work: bipartisan cooperation.”
And DeLauro urged her colleagues to get serious. “I believe that every appropriator on both sides of the aisle would prefer a three-month continuing resolution. Republicans and Democrats need to come to the table. Let us move to setting a date in December,” she said. “To my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, particularly my Republican colleagues, it is now time to govern. Stop the game-playing, stop the foolishness and the wasting of the time we have and let’s get on to the business of the American people.”
But Johnson also faces pressure from Trump, who demanded Wednesday that Republicans include the voting registration bill in any government funding package or let the government shut down. “If Republicans don’t get the SAVE Act, and every ounce of it, they should not agree to a Continuing Resolution in any way, shape, or form,” Trump wrote in a social media post.
The bottom line: A clean, three-month continuing resolution passed by Democrats and some Republicans may still be the most likely outcome, but with Trump pressuring his party members, the path to avoiding a shutdown is unclear.
