By House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled a planned vote Wednesday on a stopgap funding bill that could keep the government open for the next six months after more than a dozen of his fellow Republicans walked back their support for it.
“We’re going to work through the weekend on that,” said Johnson, R-La., less than five hours before the scheduled vote.
“No vote today because we’re in the consensus-building business here in Congress with small majorities,” he said.
The U.S. government is set to partially shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 1 if a funding deal is not passed by Congress. That is slightly more than a month before the November elections, which will determine which political party controls both chambers of Congress and the next president.
Johnson and other Republican congressional leaders expected as many as 15 defections from the GOP caucus on the funding measure if the vote happened Wednesday, NBC News reported. On Monday, only two Republicans had pledged to vote against the bill.
Johnson has a razor-thin GOP majority in the House. He can afford to lose only four Republicans if every House member votes.
And on Tuesday night, Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., was hospitalized in Washington after collapsing at an event, likely making him unavailable Wednesday. His son in a social media post reported that doctors said Wilson was experiencing “stroke-like symptoms.”
Complicating Johnson’s vote-corralling efforts is former President Donald Trump, who has said that Republicans should not pass any spending plan without the so-called SAVE Act attached.
The SAVE Act would require people to show proof of citizenship to register as a voter.
Congressional Democrats have vowed to vote against any spending plan paired with the SAVE Act. That means the bill would be dead on arrival in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Trump, who is the Republican presidential nominee, said GOP lawmakers should be ready to shut down the government if the voter identification proposal is not in the spending bill.
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Tuesday.
“THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN – CLOSE IT DOWN!!!” he added.
In response to CNBC’s request for comment about Trump’s post, a spokesperson for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., pointed to a Tuesday interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Extreme MAGA Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are determined to shut the government down unless they jam Trump’s Project 2025 down the throats of the American people,” Jeffries said in that interview.
