Shutdown odds rapidly rise as House seeks plan B

The odds of a shutdown were rapidly growing on Thursday after President-elect Trump upended the talks by urging GOP lawmakers to shutter the government unless Democrats agree to a clean stopgap spending bill that raises or abolishes the debt limit.

“If we don’t get it, then we’re going to have a shutdown, but it’ll be a Biden shutdown, because shutdowns only inure to the person who’s president,” Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Trump’s blunt demand leaves leaders in Congress scrambling for some kind of compromise measure, and they have less than 36 hours to do it, heightening the chance of a federal shutdown over the weekend and possibly past Christmas.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is the figure at the center of the storm, and he and other Republicans in the House were seeking to pick up the pieces after their initial compromise bill was toasted by Trump and his allies on Wednesday.

The House GOP is eyeing a plan B that would cut some of the parts of the bill that caused Wednesday’s political storm, including a pay hike for lawmakers.

Yet their new plan would not include Trump’s demand for a debt ceiling increase, a move that risks triggering his opposition.

Instead, two sources told The Hill, GOP lawmakers would commit to raising the borrowing limit twice next year through reconciliation, the budget process that Republicans are relying on to pass Trump’s agenda without Democratic support.

“They want a commitment from the Republicans that we can move during reconciliation and support a debt ceiling increase so that President Trump can function and do what he needs to do,” one of the sources said.

Some of Trump’s government affairs staffers are in the meeting, the source said.

Republican senators said Thursday that they have little idea how a shutdown will be averted given that Trump has shifted the debate so dramatically only a few hours before federal funding is due to lapse.

“I honestly don’t know what the endgame is,” said one GOP senator who requested anonymity to comment on the sense of confusion in the Senate Republican Conference. “I don’t get a sense of where the House is.

“I just don’t have any idea how they’re going to get out of this,” the senator added.

Doubts were also being expressed on the House side of the Capitol. 

Asked about the odds of a shutdown, Freedom Caucus member Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said: “Well, I’ll say it is, in fact, noon, 36 hours before we run out of funding.”

“When you’re 24 hours out, you never know,” Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) told reporters when asked about the likelihood of a shutdown. “We’re trying to work on something that we could either get done tomorrow or over the weekend, so it’s mitigate and minimize.”

Trump’s intervention in the talks, which came after his allies Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy railed against the bill on social media, has left plenty of observers doubtful of the GOP’s chances.

It has also raised risks for Johnson’s Speakership. Two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), said in the last 36 hours they would not back Johnson for Speaker. He faces a vote two weeks from Friday.

Trump offered only a muted endorsement of Johnson keeping his job as Speaker, despite having endorsed him strongly in a meeting with GOP lawmakers a week after the election.

“We’ll see,” Trump told NBC when asked whether he still has confidence in Johnson.

One Republican lawmaker who had spoken to Trump recently said the president-elect was not aware of the scope and many of the details of the government funding and disaster relief bill that Johnson put together behind closed doors with a handful of other leaders.

One source close to Trump's orbit told The Hill that getting rid of Johnson could create even more complications for an already fractious GOP at a time when they are hoping to unify around Trump's agenda.

“There are a lot of people that aren’t happy with Johnson, but you get rid of Johnson, then what?” the source said. “It’s the ‘then what’ that's part of the issue.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a staunch Trump ally, said it wouldn’t be the end of the world if the government shut down over Christmas, arguing that most people will be on vacation and federal employees will get paid anyway.

“Everybody’s on vacation, nobody’s not going to get paid,” he said, arguing that it would be better for President Biden, President-elect Trump and congressional leaders to have some time to think about how to solve the government funding and debt-limit impasse over Christmas and New Year’s Day.

The House Republican leaders gathered midday in Johnson’s Capitol office to hash out a plan-B stopgap included House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (Minn.), House Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole (Okla.), Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (Fla.) and leaders from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, the more centrist Republican Governance Group, Main Street Caucus and Republican Study Committee.

James Braid, the incoming White House head of legislative affairs, was spotted walking into the Speaker’s suite.

Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), the chair of the Main Street Caucus, told reporters the internal talks were “making progress” but declined to reveal any details.

A big and important question to any internal GOP plan is whether House Democrats will back it.

Republicans are almost certain to need Democratic votes, and if they take the bill to the floor under a suspension of House rules, it will need to pass with a two-thirds majority.

Democratic support will also be needed in the Senate.

But there’s no guarantee that Democrats will be ready to accept a new offer from Johnson after spending the last several weeks negotiating the continuing resolution that sparked strong pushback from Trump and House conservatives Tuesday and Wednesday.

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) insisted Thursday that the spending deal that Johnson had agreed to initially was the “best path” for avoiding a shutdown.

“We are prepared to move forward with the bipartisan agreement that we thought was negotiated in good faith with House Republicans, along with Senate Democrats and Senate Republicans, that meets the needs of the American people at this moment in time,” he said. 

But Jeffries also left the door open to supporting a new stopgap that would include only government funding, farm aid and disaster relief.

He rejected the idea that Democrats would agree to extending the debt limit for a significant period of time without getting major concessions from Republicans.

“The debt-limit issue and discussion is premature, at best,” Jeffries said.

Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis contributed.