Speaker Mike Johnson has a bill to prevent a government shutdown until January and February 2024 that might have enough Democrats on board to pass
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 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.
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.
