Congress averts shutdown after House GOP drops Trump’s debt limit demand
(CNN) — Congress voted to avert a shutdown early Saturday morning after House GOP leaders dropped a demand from Donald Trump over the debt limit, highlighting the limits of the president-elect’s influence on Capitol Hill despite his position as leader of the party.
The House voted Friday evening and the Senate voted shortly after midnight to pass a bill that extends government funding into March and provides disaster relief and farm aid, but does not include a suspension of the debt limit, which Trump had called on Republicans to address. President Joe Biden must still sign the stopgap bill into law.
Trump upended the effort to prevent a shutdown earlier in the week by coming out against an initial bipartisan deal, leaving Republicans scrambling to find a path forward.
As a result of Trump’s opposition, House Republicans tanked the bipartisan deal, infuriating Democrats. The GOP-led House then tried and failed on Thursday to pass a funding plan backed by Trump that would have included a two-year suspension of the debt limit after the president-elect called on Republicans to take up the issue.
Democrats balked at the plan, arguing that the GOP effort to suspend the debt limit would help Trump pass his tax plan. But it wasn’t just Democrats who voted against the Trump-backed bill. A significant number of House Republicans joined with almost all Democrats to vote it down, kicking off a tumultuous 24 hours on Capitol Hill where Congress appeared headed toward a shutdown.
In a move that ultimately broke the impasse, House Speaker Mike Johnson brought a stopgap funding bill to the floor on Friday that did not include the debt limit suspension. It passed by a vote of 366 to 34. One Democrat voted present, and all of the votes against the bill were Republicans. The Senate vote was 85 to 11.
The bill will fund the government through March 14, 2025, and includes roughly $100 billion in disaster relief, as well as a farm bill extension.
The outcome of the funding fight offers a preview of how challenging it will be for Republicans to enact Trump’s agenda in the new Congress, despite a GOP trifecta in Washington.
Republicans will control the House, the Senate and the White House early next year. But an extremely narrow House majority means that any significant division within GOP ranks can derail the efforts of House Republican leadership. Johnson has frequently faced that dynamic in the current Congress, and the House GOP majority is set to shrink even further in the next.
Following the House vote, Johnson told reporters that he spoke to Trump earlier in the evening and said he thinks the president-elect is “happy” with the outcome.
“I was in constant contact with President Trump throughout this process. Spoke with him, most recently about 45 minutes ago. He knew exactly what we were doing and why, and this is a good outcome for the country. I think he certainly is happy about this outcome as well,” he said.
Johnson said he also spoke to Elon Musk about the difficulty of serving as speaker with such a slim majority.
“We talked about the extraordinary challenges of this job. And I said, ‘Hey, you want to be speaker the House? I don’t know.’ He said, ‘This may be the hardest job in the world.’ I think it is. But we’re going to get through this,” he said.
Musk was vocally opposed to the initial bipartisan deal, but the billionaire Trump ally said on X on Friday that Johnson did a “good job.”
“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” Musk posted on X ahead of the vote. “It went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces. Ball should now be in the Dem court.”
On Friday evening, ahead of a vote on the government funding bill, the Senate unanimously passed the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act 2.0, which reauthorizes a pediatric cancer research initiative through the National Institutes of Health into 2028.
The provision had originally been part of the funding deal negotiated by congressional leadership, but was dropped after Trump pushed for a “clean” short term spending package, without extra measures included.
House Republicans pushed back on outrage over the funding being cut from the package, arguing that Senate Democrats were to blame for waiting months to bring up the bill. The House had passed the research funding reauthorization in March.
This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Sarah Ferris, Aileen Graef, Kit Maher contributed to this report.
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