WASHINGTON (CN) — Facing a fiscal deadline in just over two weeks, House Republicans on Wednesday abandoned plans to vote on a budget patch that would have kept the government funded into the new year after support for the plan cratered.
House Speaker Mike Johnson pulled his proposed six-month continuing resolution just hours before the chamber was set to vote, faced with an ever-steepening path to success as Republicans on his right flank expressed malaise about approving any bill that would keep government spending at current levels.
The speaker said that the GOP would focus on building consensus, adding that his caucus was having “thoughtful conversations” about the path forward.
It’s unclear when Johnson might bring forward a new spending plan. The current federal budget lapses on Sept. 30 — if Congress fails to act before then it could lead to a costly government shutdown.
Republican leadership had hoped to garner consensus for a short-term budget patch by coupling it with the language of the House-passed Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE, Act. The measure, a political nonstarter for Democrats, would require people to present proof of citizenship when registering to vote.
But the GOP’s more conservative members, who have long opposed the idea of maintaining current spending levels, weren’t convinced. Some framed the move to bundle a six-month continuing resolution with the SAVE Act as a cynical attempt to sweeten the pot.
“I refuse to be a thespian in the speaker’s failure theater,” Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie wrote Monday on X. “The six-month continuing resolution with the SAVE Act attached is an insult to Americans’ intelligence.”
Massie added that the packaged legislation was a “shiny object” that he forecast would be dropped by leadership as it worked to pass the stopgap budget.
Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed, arguing that passing a continuing resolution would only be worthwhile if it included a 1% cut in spending and if Johnson would be willing to risk a government shutdown to ensure the SAVE Act becomes law.
“Johnson won’t,” she said.
Montana Representative Matt Rosendale, Arizona Representative Andy Biggs and Tennessee Representative Tim Burchett also all expressed opposition to the speaker’s proposal.
On Wednesday, Massie celebrated the death of Johnson’s stopgap, saying the “production of failure theater” had been postponed.
Meanwhile, Democrats seized the opportunity to accuse their Republican colleagues of once again playing politics with the federal budget, and urged them to come to the table and negotiate a bipartisan solution.
“House Democrats will never yield to MAGA extremism,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X Wednesday. “A bipartisan path forward is the only way to keep the government open.”
Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro, ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, similarly branded the scuttled continuing resolution as partisanship and called for “four-corners” negotiations from congressional appropriators of both parties.
“For the good of the American people, Congress must move on from House Republicans’ partisan continuing resolution proposals and begin negotiating a funding bill that can earn the support of both Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate,” she said in a statement.
The death of Johnson’s proposed stopgap is only the latest example of intra-party squabbling among Republicans that has hampered attempts to fund the government. Congress only managed to pass a set of full-year spending bills for 2024 in the spring after months of delays — thanks in large part to complaints from some conservatives that the speaker chose to compromise with Democrats on the final legislation.
Even if House Republicans had managed to secure the votes necessary to push the bundled continuing resolution through the lower chamber this week, it likely would have been dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate.