Republicans Might Not Have the Votes To Keep Government Open Despite Calls by Trump for Lawmakers To Unify

Republicans may not have the votes to keep the government open ahead of a Friday shutdown deadline, despite the fact that President Trump is demanding all GOP lawmakers get on board with the new proposal. Democrats are unlikely to bail out their colleagues given the spending cuts included in the nearly 100-page piece of legislation. Speaker Johnson and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Congressman Tom Cole, released the bill proposal on Saturday afternoon, and conservative hardliners who typically vote against such funding measures quickly fell in line — for the most part. The government is due to shut down at the end of the day on Friday if the new spending deal can’t be passed. The House Freedom Caucus began reposting messages on X supportive of the continuing resolution, and even Congressman Chip Roy — who rarely votes for these kinds of bills — said he will support the legislation because Mr. Trump will likely use his impoundment authority to simply not spend the money that he and his colleagues are appropriating. “You’ve got great patriots like Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget prepared to use impoundment and all the tools at the president’s [disposal] to restrict spending,” Mr. Roy said in an interview with Steve Bannon on Friday. “I am not a big proponent of a C.R. as a general rule, but when you’ve got this president, when you have these guys down here doing the hard work of cleaning out the clutter — I wanna keep the lights on.” In the House, it is so far unclear if Mr. Johnson has the votes to pass his spending legislation with only Republican support. He has just a one-vote margin of error to succeed, meaning that he can only afford to suffer one GOP defection and still pass the legislation. Mr. Roy confirmed on Fox News on Sunday that there are “a few” House Republicans not yet on board. Democrats, meanwhile, are planning to show a united front in opposing the spending legislation because of the funding cuts included in the bill, as well as the lack of language to rein in Elon Musk’s mad dash through executive agencies. “This continuing resolution is a blank check for Elon Musk and creates more flexibility for him to steal from the middle class, seniors, veterans, working people, small businesses, and farmers to pay for tax breaks for billionaires,” the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, said in a statement.In an effort to win over some of those debt hawks, Mr. Cole included in the bill about $8 billion worth of net spending cuts, though some of the reductions come from politically sensitive areas like veterans’ healthcare and housing subsidies. Even if Mr. Johnson can get his resolution through the House, Senator Thune would need at least seven Democrats to join him — assuming no Republicans defect — in order to get the bill through the upper chamber. The top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, Senator Murray, is urging her colleagues to vote no on the legislation, saying it hands the executive branch “more power over federal spending — and more power to pick winners and losers.”Ms. Murray and other Democrats had hoped that a bipartisan funding agreement would include language to somehow restrict Mr. Musk’s ability to access certain federal agencies, to halt payments, and to fire federal employees. Mr. Cole told reporters last week that Republicans would never go along with any bill that hamstrings the current president. “Do you think a Republican House [and] a Republican Senate is gonna send language that limits a Republican president [whose] name is Donald Trump, and expect him to sign it? That’s your position?” Mr. Cole said just off the House floor. “It’s not politically possible, and I don’t think we ever asked them to do things that were politically impossible when the roles were reversed.”

Republicans Might Not Have the Votes To Keep Government Open Despite Calls by Trump for Lawmakers To Unify

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