House Republicans are planning to move forward with a last-ditch effort to avoid a government shutdown by voting on Friday afternoon to extend current government funding levels until mid-March, dropping a demand from President-elect Donald Trump to attach a debt limit increase to the spending package.
The House will vote on a clean continuing resolution to maintain current spending levels until March 14 combined with $110.4 billion in disaster aid and economic assistance for farmers, according to lawmakers familiar with the plans. The spending package is the same bill that was shot down by the House on Thursday but excludes the debt limit provision opposed by GOP deficit hawks.
The package will come to the floor under suspension of rules, meaning it will require a two-thirds majority to pass. As a result, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) will need to rely on a significant number of Democrats to help push it across the finish line — something Democratic leaders have said they will not do.
If that vote fails, GOP leaders could move forward with another proposal to advance separate single-subject bills, dividing the CR proposal into three components: the clean CR, disaster aid standalone, and an economic package for farmers.
Those three bills would likely be advanced by the Rules Committee, which would mean they’d only require a simple majority to pass on the floor — increasing Johnson’s chances of success. However, if the bill is pushed through the committee, lawmakers would not be able to vote on final passage until Saturday morning due to House procedures.
That means the government is likely to enter a temporary shutdown, although lawmakers say the weekend offers some cover for those who would be most affected.
“There may be a technical shutdown over the course of, you know, the evening or the weekend. Those generally don’t mean anything,” Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD), who has been at the center of negotiations, told reporters on Friday. “I mean, nobody gets furloughed, nothing really happens … if there is a few-hour lapse.”
MEET THE NEW CONGRESS: THE HOUSE AND SENATE FRESHMEN ELECTED TO SERVE NEXT YEAR
That way, Johnson would not need to rely on the entire Democratic caucus, who, in recent days, have refused to support any funding legislation other than the original bipartisan spending deal that was scrapped earlier this week. However, Democrats could be warming up to the new idea, and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) told members in a closed-door caucus meeting Friday morning that lines of communication have been reopened with GOP leadership — signaling some sort of cooperation.
However, not all Democrats said they would be on board with stripping the CR into separate pieces.
“We have a compromise that’s on the table,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told the Washington Examiner. “I don’t know how separating all of these things is substantively different than passing them together. I would imagine if you’re separating them, that means that they’re changing the language in them, so they’re trying to ask people if we’re going to pass something that they’re not telling us, what’s inside, right? So the answer is no.”
Even if the single-subject bills manage to pass the House, it is unclear how they would fare in the Senate. Lawmakers would likely need to negotiate some procedure to combine the separate bills into a single package for the Senate. Otherwise, it could take days for senators to process the individual measures without unanimous consent.
The new funding proposal comes after members of the conservative Freedom Caucus met with Johnson and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance in the speaker’s office Friday morning, particularly lawmakers who voted down Johnson’s short-term CR the night before.
After scrapping their initial funding bill negotiated by both parties in the House and Senate, House Republican leaders put forward their own proposal to keep the government open. That included a measure to suspend the debt ceiling for two years — a provision that caught many lawmakers off guard, especially deficit hawks in the House who are staunchly opposed to raising the debt limit.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Those members were included in Friday’s meeting, likely resulting in the omission from the latest package. Instead, the speaker and rank-and-file members entered into a handshake agreement to enact spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling raise in Republicans’ first reconciliation package next year.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was the first to suggest separating the main components of the funding legislation into separate bills to hold votes on each portion. Massie was involved in the closed-door negotiations Friday.
Hailey Bullis and Marisa Schultz contributed to this story.