By Tuesday afternoon, just about everyone on Capitol Hill knew Speaker Mike Johnson’s government funding plan didn’t have the votes to make it out of the House. The question now is how bad will it fail.
As NOTUS overheard Rep. Jerry Carl putting it to Rep. Buddy Carter as they arrived at the GOP’s weekly conference meeting: “It’s fixin’ to be a shit show.”
Johnson already knows of at least seven Republicans who are publicly opposed to his plan, with a handful of other GOP lawmakers who are undecided or may get in on the act of opposing the bill.
Johnson’s plan was simple enough: pair a six-month continuing resolution to keep the government funded at current levels with a bill — the SAVE Act — requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. Five Democrats have already voted for that proof of citizenship legislation, and the idea is to put Democrats in another tough spot opposing the measure before the election.
But even if all five of those Democrats supported Johnson’s package — an unlikely development, given that Democratic leaders seem intent on making Republicans put up the votes for passage of the plan on their own — Johnson still likely doesn’t have the votes to advance his spending package to the Senate. The math, simply put, is not on Johnson’s side.
Instead, his decision to put a doomed piece of legislation on the House floor for a vote on Wednesday seems to be about illustrating the difficulties of his job to the GOP conference. He seems intent on showing them that there is no other option but to go with what Democrats are asking for — a clean, short-term extension to work out a larger spending package — if Republicans want to avoid a politically damaging government shutdown.
“Sometimes you have to do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may,” Johnson told The Hill on Tuesday.
During the GOP’s weekly conference meeting, Johnson insisted that the “right thing” was for Republicans to charge ahead and bring his plan to the House floor — the votes be damned. Multiple lawmakers leaving the meeting told reporters that Johnson didn’t address a backup plan should his proposal fail, and Rep. Darrell Issa said Johnson allies name-checked the legislation’s opponents at the meeting, suggesting the discussion got testy.
“The speaker just gave a compelling case,” Rep. Jack Bergman, a supporter of Johnson’s plan, told NOTUS.
But Bergman was clear that he didn’t think everyone was convinced. “I sit in the room where I can watch the heads of other people, so off to the side, where I can see body language,” he said. And from his observations, Bergman had a simple assessment: “We’re not done yet.”
Bergman is right that the list of dissidents is only growing as hard-line conservatives become increasingly convinced that Johnson is chasing a messaging win, not a spending battle.
“I don’t think it has the votes,” Rep. Nancy Mace, who is undecided, told reporters as she left the conference meeting. “We’ll see what happens.”
Tacking on the SAVE Act has helped bolster support for the plan. Some Republicans who despise the current spending levels, like Rep. Andrew Clyde, expressed firm support for the CR on Tuesday, emphasizing the importance of the voter registration requirement.
But it hasn’t taken long for hard-line members to become disillusioned with the gambit. On Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told NOTUS she was considering voting for the CR only because the SAVE Act was included. On Tuesday, it was a different story.
“If our speaker is not going to fight for it, why would I vote for it? What’s the point?” she asked. “He would have been better off working with the Democrats and passing a clean CR.”
Greene continued that it was “not righteous if you fail.”
“If you give up before you even start, what’s righteous about that? That’s called lying,” she said.
Despite Johnson’s public commitment to fight for the SAVE Act to be in the final government funding package, no one — most notably Johnson — seems willing to say what happens in the event that the CR passes the House but is sent back from the Senate without the SAVE Act.
Members who want a prolonged fight aren’t sure Johnson is up for it. And without a promise to fight for the citizen voting requirement — even if that means there’s a government shutdown — some advocates of the SAVE Act aren’t willing to act out the scene.
“Most people believe that there will be no intention to actually push for it, so they don’t want to play along with the theater,” Rep. Warren Davidson said.
Part of the problem for the reticent GOP holdouts is a fear that if Johnson’s gambit fails, it hands vulnerable Democrats a tidy opportunity to cast themselves as moderate on immigration with a messaging bill that’s certain to fail at the White House.
“What this allows is the Democrats to take our narrative again, just like Kamala is doing with President Trump,” Rep. Rich McCormick, who is leaning against voting for the bill, told NOTUS. “All the good things that he wants from him, she takes and says, ‘Oh, that’s my idea.’ No, it’s not. You’re trying to win votes.”
Johnson has insisted the bill will send a positive message for the GOP, forcing more Democrats to take a vote that Republicans can leverage to make them look weak on immigration, arguably the GOP’s top election issue.
But putting a doomed bill up for a vote doesn’t just put Democrats on the spot; it also puts the onus on his own party to unify, publicly illustrating that he can’t deliver red-meat policies if his own conference even gets in line. This way, if Johnson puts the SAVE Act on the floor, he won’t, technically, be the reason it fails. He can point the finger at the Republican dissidents.
As Johnson charges ahead with what Rep. Thomas Massie has deemed “failure theater,” the speaker might win points with the majority of the conference who insists, again and again, that Johnson stand up for GOP priorities.
“Most things in life that are worth fighting for carry a risk of loss,” conservative Rep. Clay Higgins told NOTUS. “But we’re in the arena, and I’m a joyful warrior, and I’m optimistic that that will pass the bill through the House.”
As Bergman acknowledged to NOTUS, Johnson’s plan stares down major hurdles within his conference and beyond. But the speaker confronting those problems is the nature of leadership, and — in Bergman’s telling — life, really.
“Life is full of challenges,” Bergman told NOTUS. “You may love your half-and-half in your coffee, and you look at it and you say, ‘Oh, it’s expired.’ It comes out in lumps.”
“If you expect life to be easy, guess what? You need to rethink how things work,” he said.