By Catie Edmondson
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday was toiling to find a way out of a shutdown after President-elect Donald Trump torpedoed the spending deal the speaker struck with Democrats this week, leaving Republicans without a strategy to fund the government past a Friday night deadline.
As Johnson met with his deputies Thursday morning in his office in the Capitol, lawmakers eager to return home before a scheduled winter recess were left in limbo with no clear solution to keep federal funds flowing past 12:01 a.m. Saturday.
“The situation is fluid,” Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota, the Republican whip, told reporters Thursday morning in what appeared to be a major understatement.
Johnson was caught between two seemingly untenable options. Trump has effectively killed the massive bipartisan deal, loaded with unrelated policy changes, that the speaker negotiated to fund the government through mid-March. That plan would have drawn substantial votes from Democrats, but a Republican revolt over it fueled by Trump and Elon Musk sapped it of even the modest GOP support it would have needed to pass the House.
What the president-elect demanded instead — that Republicans pair a stripped-down government funding bill with a measure raising the debt ceiling or getting rid of it altogether — is also likely to be opposed by a number of Republicans. And it would be a tough sell to Democrats, who are furious that Republicans have jettisoned their agreement.
Johnson’s plan to avert a shutdown imploded Wednesday amid a backlash by GOP lawmakers that was driven in part by Musk, who spent much of the day trashing the measure on social media and threatening the political future of any Republican who supported it.
Then Trump weighed in, insisting that Republicans not only reject Johnson’s plan, which connected the government funding measure with $100 billion in disaster aid and a slew of policy changes, but also raise or terminate the debt limit.
The borrowing limit is expected to be reached sometime in January — though many expect it could be stretched into the spring — and a failure to increase it would cause a default on the nation’s debt. Trump acknowledged that he did not want to shoulder the responsibility for doing so.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great,” Trump said in his statement, “but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch.”
That demand has greatly complicated the path forward. Many Republicans strongly oppose raising the debt limit. Some have refused to do so at all, and others have agreed to raise it only after extracting steep spending cuts.
The blowup could not come at a worse time for Johnson, who is hoping to be reelected as speaker on Jan. 3. Trump on Wednesday night issued a veiled threat to him over the imperiled stopgap spending bill, telling Fox News Digital that the speaker will be “easily” reelected to the role next year if he does what Trump wants.
Asked in a telephone interview Thursday whether he still had confidence in Johnson, Trump told NBC News, “We’ll see,” adding that the spending deal he negotiated was “unacceptable.”
At the same time, the speaker’s handling of the spending deal has left a number of conservatives openly mulling whether to support him in a vote on the House floor early next year, when he can afford only a few GOP defections to win the necessary majority to keep his gavel. At least one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who led the charge to oust Johnson earlier this year, has said he will not vote for him for speaker.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said in a statement on the social platform X that “Johnson needs to stop the same failed pattern of making dirty swamp deals behind closed doors and keeping everyone in the dark. Republicans need to be working together to deliver the mandate. That requires big changes in behavior.”
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