Showdown, Smackdown…Shutdown?

A battle within the GOP leads once again to a defeat for Trump and paralysis within the House.

Photos by Jean Catuffe/GC Images, Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

The clown show in the GOP-controlled House continued yesterday, but this time with not one but two leaders of the three-ring circus. The short version of this is quite something:

1. Republicans killed their own government funding bill at the 11th hour after unelected oligarch Elon Musk launched a tweet storm against it;

2. The GOP hastily created a new pared-down bill based on what Trump now said he wanted in it;

3. Democrats said “Hell no!” and 38 Republicans joined them to kill the new bill; and

4. Now there’s no government funding bill on the table, and the entire government will shut down tonight at midnight unless they pass one.

The somewhat longer version of this, which I’ll lay out below, exposes a bigger question about who exactly is in charge, how strong a hold Trump has on his own party, whether the Republicans are really going to drive us all off a cliff just days before Christmas, and whether Speaker Johnson will soon be out of a job.

Since it’s Schadenfriday, sit down with me at this rather insane buffet and enjoy the fine, if fleeting, taste of “We told you so.”

“National Search Underway for Even One Person who Voted for Elon Musk” — Andy Borowitz

Speaker Johnson thought he finally had it all wrapped up. And by “it” I mean the Continuing Resolution, or CR, to fund the government through March 14. Republican leadership has been kicking the budget can down the road for the entire year after finally striking an agreement with the Democrats on funding levels this past spring. The problem was, their conference was so fractured that they could never actually pass all the appropriations bills needed to implement that budget.

Instead, they just kept the doors open by passing CRs. As Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) explained in a tweet,

Since the GOP won control of the House 2 years ago they have not passed a single appropriations package into law. Government has operated at funding levels set by Dems 2 years ago via continuing resolutions every few months. This is not normal.

When the House Republicans did manage to pass partial appropriation measures, they loaded them down with so much culture war nonsense that they were rejected out of hand by the Senate, which is still nominally controlled by the Democrats.

The idea this week was once again to pass a CR to keep the government running another few months, at least until the new Congress is sworn in and has settled and the new president is in office. After protracted negotiations, House leadership agreed upon a CR that included hurricane and other disaster aid, critical relief for farmers, and even funds for kids’ cancer research.

Then Elon Musk, whom no one ever voted for, started tweeting. He lobbed more than 150 messages at Republicans via his X platform, urging Republicans to reject the bill their own leadership had just negotiated. As the New York Times reported, Musk

vowed political retribution against anyone voting for the sprawling bill backed by House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called Mr. Musk on Wednesday to ask that he stop posting about the bill.

Mr. Musk also shared misinformation about the bill, including false claims that it contained new aid for Ukraine or $3 billion in funds for a new stadium in Washington.

In the end, the GOP was completely routed by scores of mean tweets by the world’s richest man. Republican members began declaring they would oppose the CR, and Speaker Johnson once again lost control of his own party’s agenda.

Trump had been fairly silent about the CR until yesterday, but perhaps sensing the political winds rapidly shifting, he also issued a statement on his platform, Truth Social, calling the proposed bill “destructive to our country” and threatening primaries against anyone who backed it.

With both Musk and Trump opposed, that pretty much sealed the fate of the CR, and Johnson obediently yanked it.

If killing a bill that GOP leadership had already agreed to sounds eerily familiar, you get a gold star. Trump did the same thing to the bipartisan border security bill after negotiators spent months coming to an agreement.

Democrats, who watched the meltdown in real time and realized that the government was now likely to shut down entirely, began mocking the GOP, asking who really was in charge, Trump or Musk?

“Is Elon Musk the new dictator of the Republican Party?” asked Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “Who is our leader, Hakeem Jeffries, supposed to negotiate with?” he wondered. “Is it Mike Johnson? Is he the speaker of the House? Or is it Donald Trump? Or is it Elon Musk? Or is it somebody else?”

After it became clear that Musk was driving the bus with Trump merely in the passenger seat, reporters began pressing the question. Trump’s team and House leadership both responded defensively.

Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt proved the saying that if you’re explaining, you’re already losing. “As soon as President Trump released his official stance on the CR, Republicans on Capitol Hill echoed his point of view,” she said, awkwardly trying to give credit to Trump when it was really Musk who tanked the CR. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party. Full stop.”

Sure, Karoline.

And as reporter Bo Erickson of Reuters posted,

After Elon Musk helped sink the Republicans’ govt funding bill, House Majority Leader [Steve] Scalise exiting late night follow-up negotiations says Musk is not in charge. “No, President Trump is going to be the president of the United States and we are excited about it.”

You sure sound excited, Steve!

A leaner, meaner, nowhere-to-be-seener CR

Once it became clear that the hard-fought, fully-negotiated and already-approved-by-GOP-House-Leadership CR was now DOA, thanks to the unelected and unaccountable Elon Musk, Trump sought to reassert his relevance to the process and the government by demanding a new CR.

Together with JD Vance, Trump stated he would back a pared down version of the CR if it raised the debt ceiling for another two years. This was an entirely new wrinkle, bringing the question of the debt ceiling prematurely into a CR to fund the government.

So what’s going on? Trump wants two things here.

First, he would love to start his presidency off without the spectre of the debt ceiling looming over it. And second, Trump wants that debt ceiling raised so he can hand the billionaire donor class another gigantic tax break and spend another five trillion dollars doing so.

Two years ago, Republicans under Kevin McCarthy sought to hold the nation hostage by threatening to blow up the debt ceiling and cause a default, which would likely trigger a global recession and even an abandonment of the dollar as the default global currency (something Musk may want in the end anyway, but that’s for another discussion). Trump understands that a similar fight over the debt ceiling could be brewing with the Democrats. This fight could grow particularly nasty if Trump seeks to increase the debt by as much as he did last time just to hand money to the wealthy and big corporations.

Speaker Johnson, ever dutiful, agreed to push ahead with Trump’s new CR that included a two year lifting of the debt ceiling. And Trump warned GOP House members to fall in line.

But then something unexpected happened.

Trump reveals a weak hand

The Democrats, as expected, were a very fast and explicit “Hell no!” to the proposed CR, especially given the proposed waiver of the debt ceiling. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries warned us about Trump’s plans for increasing the debt and blasted Republicans for their hypocrisy. “In our nation’s 248-year history, 25 percent of our nation’s debt was accumulated during the four years of the former president. 25 percent! How dare you lecture America about fiscal responsibility, ever.”

But how did budget hawks in the GOP respond to Trump’s proposal?

Not positively. Freedom Caucus radical Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) led the charge against Trump’s new CR, rising on the House floor to disparage his fellow Republicans as “never having any ounce of self-respect." Roy noted, “You've added to the debt since you were given the majority again on November 5th. It's embarrassing. It's shameful." Then added, “I am absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible,” Roy declared, referring to the debt ceiling limit raise in the proposed CR.

When the Trump-backed proposal came to the floor, a total of 38 Republicans opposed to increased deficit spending voted no, defying Trump and dooming his proposal. Democrats joined them in voting it down, with only two in swing districts voting yes. That meant the measure went down to defeat by a vote 174-235.

A side note here: Speaker Johnson was forced to bring this CR to the floor through a special mechanism that by-passed the normal Rules Committee and required a vote of two-thirds of the House to pass it. But he couldn’t even get a majority to favor it.

The fact is, the only kind of bill with any chance of achieving the two-thirds vote needed to pass at this late hour will be one supported by the Democrats with enough GOP members willing to vote along with them. That is how the House has run for the past two years, with Speaker Johnson being the one able to get important bills to the House Floor, but Minority Leader Jeffries being the only one able to get them off the Floor and into law.

It is noteworthy that 38 Republicans voted against Trump’s proposed CR despite his threats that he would seek political revenge upon any who defied him. As the New York Times noted,

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump had warned that “any Republican that would be so stupid” as to vote against a bill like the one offered on Thursday “should, and will,” face primary challenges. More than three dozen House members were not dissuaded.

Most of these far-right extremists are solidly ensconced in their own districts, protected by gerrymandered maps. They likely don’t fear a primary from the right because there really aren’t any MAGA candidates more extreme than them.

And if they’re willing to break with Trump over the issue of deficit spending, it will be interesting to see whether Trump can enact any of his legislative priorities next session, given the unforgiving margin in the House.

Shutdown blues

Besides the House Republican conference, Donald Trump, and kids with cancer, the real losers from this fight over the CR could be government employees and recipients of SNAP and other benefits who rely on money from the government to make it through the holidays. Without a CR in place by midnight tonight, much of the government must shut down.

While essential government services will remain functional, we are looking at some 800,000 workers who could be furloughed as part of standard shutdown plans. The last shutdown, which occurred again under GOP House control in 2018, lasted 35 days. That’s a long time for many families to go without pay or benefits.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre criticized government shutdown threats in a statement Wednesday.

“Triggering a damaging government shutdown would hurt families who are gathering to meet with their loved ones and endanger the basic services Americans from veterans to Social Security recipients rely on,” she said. “A deal is a deal. Republicans should keep their word.”

Republicans are scrambling to find a short term solution that kicks the can another few weeks, at least into January. But even if Democrats went along with this to spare millions the misery of a holiday season government shutdown, Republicans face another quandary: Who will be leading them?

Speaker Johnson, you in danger

It took fifteen rounds of balloting from a GOP majority bigger than the upcoming one for Kevin McCarthy to ascend to House Speaker in 2023. Along the way he gave so many concessions, including the right for a single member to move to vacate the chair, that he basically wrote his own political epitaph.

Now Speaker Johnson faces a similar tough fight ahead. With the House split at 219 to 215 (Matt Gaetz is gone, bye!), the hard math says Johnson will need 218 votes to be reelected as Speaker, meaning he can’t lose more than one vote. And he’s already reportedly lost the support of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who declared he would be voting “present” instead of “yes” for Johnson.

Ruh-roh.

Johnson angered a number of his colleagues by not letting them know the CR had ballooned to 1,500 pages and contained concessions to the Democrats that hardliners found unacceptable. It would only take one more of them to abandon Johnson for the GOP to be thrown once more into disarray, with more battles among contenders who want to replace Johnson.

And this time, Jeffries is in no mood to help bail Johnson out. Why should he, when he went back on his own negotiated CR?

If you recall, the last time a battle for the Speakership happened within the GOP, MAGA extremists started threatening the lives of Congressmembers and their families and staff. Real ugly stuff.

The possibility of the House being leaderless in January raises another issue that no one really has a good answer for. What happens if there is no Speaker come January 6, 2025, when Congress must convene to certify the election of Donald Trump as president? As Jordain Carney and Kyle Cheney of Politico warned back in November,

The inability of a fractious Republican conference to choose a leader would render the House virtually powerless, unable to do anything except keep voting to pick a speaker. If that fight dragged on for more than three days, it would threaten Congress’ ability to hold a constitutionally mandated joint session on Jan. 6, 2025 to certify the results of the presidential election.

That would set up a constitutional crisis with no obvious solution. Congressional aides and constitutional experts have been puzzling over this scenario for months and have yet to arrive at a strategy.

Perhaps the threat of sufficient chaos in the House to derail the certification of their guy could compel Republicans to get in line, but this is a very unruly bunch. I wouldn’t discount the possibility that we are without a Speaker, in the middle of a government shutdown, without a mechanism to certify the election, and in something of a constitutional crisis, all in January.

Welp. This is what the voters chose. Perhaps it’s time for them to find out that elections carry consequences, and bad choices can lead to very bad outcomes.