GOP budget hawks balk at a provision to suspend the debt limit in the new government-funding proposal.
After throwing out Speaker Mike Johnson’s first legislative attempt to avert a shutdown, House Republican leadership is still struggling to rally House Republicans behind a new proposal — a Donald Trump–endorsed 116-page bill that would fund the government through March, suspend the debt limit for two years, and pass billions in disaster relief and emergency aid to farmers.
The legislation’s fate remains uncertain after House Republican leadership failed to muscle the bill through the lower chamber Thursday evening through a rules-suspension process that required two-thirds support to pass, escalating tensions on Capitol Hill ahead of a government shutdown deadline that will go into effect after the clock strikes 12 a.m. Saturday. The effort failed after 38 Republicans opposed the proposal and an almost entirely united Democratic caucus voted “no,” leaving Washington in limbo as the clock ticks toward a shutdown.
“I did not run for office to raise the debt ceiling, and I’ve never done that,” Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri, a fiscal hawk, told NR in the Capitol shortly after voting against the bill. “There’s tons of places where we can go get some money to help pay for” the bill’s costly provisions, he added. “And the truth is that this debt-ceiling provision — that’s really last-minute.”
The legislation will now head to the Rules Committee as the proposal continues to face opposition from deficit hawks in the House GOP like Representative Chip Roy, a Rules Committee member who called the legislation “a watered-down version of the same crappy bill people were mad about yesterday.”
Fellow Rules Committee member and fiscal hawk Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) says the best path forward to avoid a government shutdown is to draft a new rule that would break up the bill into separate components. This strategy, he maintains, would allow members to vote the way they please on individual provisions that would fund the government, pass disaster relief, and raise the debt limit, etc.
Johnson’s last-minute bill has also infuriated House Democrats, who insist they were iced out of the latest negotiation process. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the new 116-page bill “laughable.”
Johnson is hoping that the president-elect’s support for the bill will give his conference the political momentum to push the legislation across the finish line ahead of this weekend’s shutdown deadline so that lawmakers can head home for the holidays.
“All Republicans, and even the Democrats, should do what is best for our Country and vote ‘YES’ for this Bill, TONIGHT!” Trump wrote in a social media post Thursday afternoon endorsing the deal.
The latest negotiations come during a tense week on Capitol Hill that is testing the leadership prowess of the speaker, who had to draft new legislation from scratch after throwing out the original deal he’d struck with congressional Democrats.
House GOP leaders spent all day Thursday cobbling together a new deal after President-elect Trump, Elon Musk, and a flurry of House Republican lawmakers threw a wrench into Johnson’s original 1,547-page bill over frustrations with its price tag and buffet of unrelated spending provisions, including a cost-of-living increase for lawmakers.
Throughout the day Wednesday, Trump confidant Elon Musk fired off a series of posts on X urging House Republicans to vote against Johnson’s first bipartisan proposal. The final nail in the coffin for Johnson’s first plan came shortly before 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, when Vice President-elect JD Vance posted a joint statement with Trump on X advising Republicans to throw out the current deal and rally behind a new plan instead — pairing a debt-ceiling increase with a temporary government-funding bill devoid of “Democrat giveaways.”
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” the joint statement said. “If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
The president-elect has doubled down on this demand in a series of follow-up posts over the past 24 hours, threatening primary challenges to any GOP lawmaker who does not get behind a debt-ceiling increase. On Thursday, he told NBC News that a hypothetical congressional effort to do away with the debt ceiling completely would be the “smartest thing it could do. I would support that entirely.”
This demand raised alarm bells among deficit hawks in Washington. As Yuval Levin observed in these pages on Thursday, “Many House Republicans have never voted to raise the debt-ceiling in their congressional careers.”
This week’s scrambled government-funding negotiations raise new questions about Johnson’s ability to read his own conference ahead of next year’s speaker vote on January 3, when he will have to lead his already fractious and slim majority alongside a Republican White House and Senate that are eager to govern.
That’s if he can keep his job. A handful of House Republicans have already expressed openness to voting against him as speaker.