House Republicans Clash Over Spending Days Ahead of Shutdown Deadline

WASHINGTON — At odds with one another on spending, House Republicans abruptly scrapped their legislative work on Thursday and left Washington with little progress toward funding the government and no plan to avert a shutdown next week.

Speaker Mike Johnson, just two weeks into the job, had yet to give any public indication about his plan to prevent a lapse in government spending — currently slated to happen next Friday at midnight if Congress fails to act. That effort would involve rallying deeply anti-spending Republicans around a stopgap funding bill that is likely to be a dead letter in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Instead of revealing a path forward to keep the government open, Johnson spent the week trying and failing to push through two individual spending bills that collapsed for lack of GOP support. It was yet another reflection of the rifts among House Republicans that have made their tiny majority ungovernable, leading to the ouster of their last speaker and so far confounding his successor, who is far more conservative and less experienced.

“We have a lot of people that want to pass things with Republicans only,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the chair of the Rules Committee and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. “That’s one thing when there’s 240 or 250 votes. When it’s 220 and you’ve got as many individual personalities — and to be fair, different interests and different districts — that’s a risky game to play.”

On Thursday, House GOP leaders abruptly canceled a vote on a spending bill to fund the Treasury Department and other financial agencies, the latest indication of the deep divisions among Republicans over funding federal programs that have pushed Congress repeatedly to the brink of economic chaos this year.

Across the Capitol, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, took initial procedural steps to allow the Senate to move forward with its own stopgap spending measure if necessary, with time running short to avoid a shutdown.

“I implore Speaker Johnson and our House Republican colleagues to learn from the fiasco of a month ago,” Schumer said.

Cole said that some hard-line conservatives told appropriators they would not support any kind of stopgap bill to avert a shutdown, meaning that Johnson ultimately might have no choice but to push a bill through with Democratic support.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/us/politics/house-republicans-shutdown-deadline.html">The New York Times</a>.