UPDATE (Nov. 14, 2023 6:00 p.m. ET): The House passed the GOP's stopgap funding bill by 336-95 with mostly Democratic votes. The bill now goes to the Senate.
It’s not often that the House of Representatives is united these days. But with a new bill to avoid a federal government shutdown, Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has managed to draw together the chamber’s disparate factions. Unfortunately, the general consensus toward Johnson’s proposed solution is less a “hell yes” and more of an “um, what?”
The Washington Post summed up the overall reaction perfectly: “Instead of appeasing just one ideological faction, the proposal has angered the hard right, puzzled the middle and was mocked by the White House.” And yet, wildly enough, Johnson might manage to avert yet another self-inflicted wound for House Republicans without actively hurting government workers and vulnerable Americans. For now, at least.
After a bruising fight for the speaker’s gavel, Johnson has been riding on his colleagues’ goodwill. A dyed-in-the-wool conservative with little history in leadership, Johnson has had more of a grace period than his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. Accordingly, the short-term funding bill that he introduced Saturday isn’t stacked with potential bribes to the far right like McCarthy’s first attempts to keep the government open in September.
After a bruising fight for the speaker’s gavel, Johnson has been riding on his colleagues’ goodwill.
It does include a “laddered” approach, an idea that originated with a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus. The bill splits the short-term funding into two tranches, each with a different expiration date. The first would extend the funding covered by four spending bills — Agriculture, Energy and Water, Military Construction-VA and Transportation-HUD — until Jan. 19. The rest of the government, notably the Defense Department, would be funded until two weeks later — Feb. 2.
Conservative supporters think the ladder structure would “keep the heat on the Senate to pass individual appropriations bills while giving hard-line Republicans in the House, who typically balk at stopgap funding measures, incentives to vote for them,” according to NBC News. Personally, I think it’s a ridiculous idea, one that just means more scrambles to avoid a shutdown in the coming months. But here’s a plot twist: Even as Democrats are giving Johnson’s idea some serious thought, some conservatives are balking at the resolution he has put forward.
The rebel GOP contingent — which already includes enough Republicans to potentially tank the bill — is mad that despite the laddering, funding levels are set to remain at their current levels. Johnson’s approach would also separately extend the current version of the farm bill — which sets agricultural policy, as well as authorizing nutrition programs like food stamps — until next September. And while it doesn’t include supplemental funding for Ukraine and Israel, it also doesn’t have House Republicans’ harsh border bill tacked onto it, either.
So instead of the deep cuts conservatives have been clamoring for, what the House is considering is in essence a clean continuing resolution, or CR, but with a weird herky-jerky mechanism built into it. That’s much more in line with what Democrats and swing-district Republicans have supported, hence the general sense of “wait, what?” that the bill has engendered. Accordingly, as of Monday evening, while House Democrats expressed skepticism about the broader concept of a laddered CR, they had yet to come out firmly one way or another on this particular proposal. There’s a sense that this may be the best chance to avoid a shutdown, even if the bifurcated setup serves no purpose except to cut off any chance of a consolidated spending bill like the one that passed last year.
The bill faced its first real hurdle Monday in the Rules Committee, which helps set the agenda on the House floor. One Republican member — Texas’ Chip Roy, an archconservative and major thorn in leadership’s side — had already come out against the bill Monday. But the committee adjourned for the night without a vote, setting up a big test Tuesday for Johnson’s strategy of “make nobody fully happy.”
I have to point out that even if this passes, sails through the Senate and makes it to President Joe Biden before 12:01 a.m. Saturday, there’s still no long-term plan in place.
Both in committee and on the House floor, rules are usually passed entirely on the votes of the majority. That is what made a couple of recent spectacular failures stand out, as well as the need for Democrats to help pass a bill raising the debt ceiling in June. Instead of taking that chance, GOP leadership instead appears to be setting up a vote to pass the CR under a “suspension of the rules,” basically skipping the normal process.
Given Democrats’ concerns about a government shutdown, it’s pretty clear that at least some will support this gambit. But there’s a fine line between “enough Democrats that the rule passes” and “so many Democrats that Johnson looks like he sold out.” And while House Republicans are still most likely too exhausted from dumping McCarthy to repeat that process so soon, “too many Democrats” would make it harder for Johnson to drag the far right along on future efforts at governing.
I’m left with three main takeaways from this latest bit of drama. First, I agree with Democrats who think that the bill could be a lot worse and that this is probably the best chance to avoid a shutdown that nobody wants. Second, I worried originally that the split would cluster together GOP-friendly areas like defense and leave Democratic priorities out in the cold. But with Veterans Affairs funding facing the shorter deadline, even a two-week gap would still be more of a major headache than I think Republicans will want to handle.
Finally, I have to point out that even if this passes, sails through the Senate and makes it to President Joe Biden before 12:01 a.m. Saturday, there’s still no long-term plan in place. Johnson may buy himself some more time with this trick. But there are still huge gaps in his own conference on the annual spending bills that remain unfinished, several of which have already been pulled from the floor. And that’s before one considers the gaps between the House and the Democratic-controlled Senate. The rungs of Johnson’s ladder are in danger of cracking beneath him, leaving things as unstable as they were two months ago.