Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) is at a critical crossroads in the charged debate over federal spending, confronting few options to prevent a government shutdown — and all of them with risks.
The funding fight is the last major legislative challenge facing Johnson before this year’s elections, but it’s been snarled not only by the internal tensions within his own feuding conference, but also his sometimes-competing goals of thwarting a shutdown in two weeks, winning control of the House in November and keeping the Speaker’s gavel next year.
Johnson’s initial strategy of passing a conservative stopgap spending bill through the House, as leverage in the coming negotiations with Senate Democrats, dissolved quickly last week when GOP leaders failed to rally enough Republican support to pass it.
Now, a week closer to an Oct. 1 shutdown, the Speaker can either forge ahead in search of the elusive support for that Republican bill, which paired a six-month continuing resolution (CR) with a Trump-backed bill requiring proof of citizenship to vote, titled the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, or he can shift gears and begin working on a shorter-term “clean” funding package, without the new election rules, that Democrats are demanding — bipartisan buy-in that will be necessary for any bill to become law.
The first route raises the risks of a government shutdown — and the likelihood that Republicans would be blamed for the impasse less than two months before elections in which the House is up for grabs.
The second option risks blowback from hard-line conservatives in Johnson’s GOP conference, as well as former President Trump, which could undermine the Speaker’s chances of keeping the gavel if the House does remain in Republican hands........