Johnson rallies House for third shot at stopping shutdown

House Republicans are planning to move forward with a last-minute deal to advance three separate single-subject bills to extend government funding and provide disaster relief, with lawmakers rushing to finalize spending legislation hours before the shutdown deadline.

Lawmakers are poised to vote on a bill to fund the government until mid-March 2025 in addition to two separate measures to provide disaster relief and farmers’ assistance, multiple sources familiar with the plan told the Washington Examiner. That plan simply divides the latest CR proposal into three separate parts rather than advancing them all together in one bill, which prompted opposition from some lawmakers.

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However, the latest funding deal drops a demand from President-elect Donald Trump to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, instead entering an agreement they would deal with the debt limit when Congress reconvenes next year.

New: The rough plan for CR deal is to move forward on three single subject bills, sources tell me and @marisa_schultz

1) clean CR
2) disaster relief
3) farm aid

Then handshake agreement for spending cuts in exchange for debt ceiling increase in reconciliation pckge

— Cami Mondeaux (@cami_mondeaux) December 20, 2024

Lawmakers involved with talks say details are still fluid and that the legislation must still be discussed with the full GOP conference before it is moved forward. Republicans are set to meet in a closed-door conference meeting Friday afternoon.

It is not yet clear how House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) plans to move the new legislation through the House. He could advance it through the Rules Committee, which would then only require a simple majority vote on the floor to pass the lower chamber.

That way, Johnson would not need to rely on a significant number of Democrats, 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.

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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.

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