CNN
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House Speaker Mike Johnson formally unveiled plans on Saturday for a government funding stopgap through September 30 — a measure intended to stave off a potential March 14 shutdown and buy time for President Donald Trump and GOP leaders to steer key pieces of his agenda through Congress this summer.
The president himself has been highly supportive of the measure, even though it mostly freezes funding levels leftover from the Biden administration. And House GOP leaders believe that his backing will help them win robust support among House Republicans on the floor next week, even as many ultraconservatives typically loathe such stopgap measures. Johnson hopes to hold the vote Tuesday on the 99-page bill, according to people familiar with the plans.
“It is quite literally as clean a CR as you can draft,” a House GOP leadership aide said Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has strongly opposed the measure — preferring a long-term negotiated deal — and said Johnson and his GOP will need to pass it on their own. But a small number of House Democrats have privately discussed in recent days whether they should support the bill.
“If Republicans decide to take this approach, as Speaker Johnson indicated, it’s his expectation that Republicans are going it alone,” Jeffries told reporters Friday, ahead of the bill release.
Asked afterward if he believed Johnson could pull off the government funding vote next week, Jeffries was blunt: “No.”
If the short-term funding measure passes the House this week as Johnson expects, it will put immense pressure on Senate Democrats to go along with the same plan.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and his leadership team have, too, said they want negotiations to continue instead of pursuing a long-term stopgap. But it’s not clear how forcefully Schumer and his team will push their Senate Democrats to oppose the bill if it makes it to the Senate.
“No, I will not support that,” Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate Democrats’ top spending negotiator, told CNN last week when asked about the House GOP bill. Asked if enough Democrats would support the bill to allow it to pass the Senate, she answered: “I am not going to speculate.”
Johnson and Trump have described the bill as a so-called “clean” stopgap bill — noting that it doesn’t include language to enshrine certain Trump priorities, such as DOGE cuts. But Democrats argue that this kind of long-term stopgap bill lacks critical language that is contained in full-year negotiated bills that would make it easier for their party to put a check on Trump in court, if needed.
“I believe we’ll pass it along party lines, but I think every Democrat should vote for the CR,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. “A clean CR with a few minor anomalies is not something they should vote against.”
