Vance meets with Johnson after Trump torpedoes spending bill
Vice President-elect JD Vance met with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday night, hours after President-elect Trump torpedoed the GOP leader’s spending deal.
Vance was in Johnson’s office for nearly an hour, as a handful of Republican lawmakers huddled to discuss government funding and Friday’s looming shutdown deadline.
Emerging from that meeting, Vance said the group had a “productive conversation.”
“I’m not gonna say anything else, more about it tonight because we’re in the middle of these negotiations,” he added. “But I think we’ll be able to solve some problems here and we’ll keep working on it.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), similarly, said the group had a “good, productive meeting” after emerging from Johnson’s office Wednesday night, but said “we’re still working through it.”
“We're gonna continue to work through the night, in the morning, to get to an agreement we can bring to the floor,” he added.
The late-night huddle comes as Republicans, led by Johnson, regroup and chart a path forward to avert a shutdown by Friday’s deadline after Trump and his allies slammed the funding measure congressional negotiators rolled out on Tuesday.
That legislation would have funded the government through March 14, extend the farm bill for one year and appropriate roughly $100 billion in disaster relief and $10 billion in economic assistance for farmers, among other authorizations.
House Republicans of all stripes came out against the legislation even before it was released. Once Johnson rolled out the particularly, Trump, Vance and their close allies joined the fray.
Trump and Vance issued a joint statement on Wednesday criticizing the package and calling on Congress to pass a temporary funding bill that includes an increase in the debt limit.
“Anything else is a betrayal of our country,” they wrote.
Trump continued his criticism on Truth Social, at one point threatening primary challengers against any Republican that supports the funding deal.