Just two days before a planned Christmas break, Speaker Mike Johnson is facing down the threat of a government shutdown and demands from an incoming president that he cannot easily deliver on.
Yesterday, Trump ally Elon Musk banded with conservatives in the House and outside influencers to effectively tank a bipartisan government funding deal that included disaster aid and billions in farm assistance.
The complaint? That Uncle Sam was spending like a drunken sailor and needed to tighten the purse strings quickly.
But then Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance dumped gasoline on the fire. In a lengthy post on X, they criticized Johnson’s continuing resolution deal as “a betrayal of our country,” and demanded that Johnson raise the debt ceiling or eliminate it entirely.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” said the joint Trump-Vance statement. “Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want.”
The request for a debt ceiling hike blindsided many on Capitol Hill. But it didn’t come out of nowhere, we’re told.
Privately, Trump pushed Johnson to quickly raise the debt ceiling since the election, hoping to clear the decks for his post-inauguration sprint. The speaker, POLITICO has learned, refused to take the request seriously — probably because he knows any debt ceiling increase would mean major concessions to Democrats, which could in turn mean kissing his speaker’s gavel goodbye.
Johnson’s not wrong about that: Even before Trump made his debt ceiling demand, some conservatives were so peeved with the CR that they were threatening to oppose Johnson’s bid for speaker early next year. Are those members really going to get behind a snap debt ceiling hike just because Trump said jump?
But from the perspective of Trump’s circle, if Johnson had heeded Trump’s advice from the start, the president-elect would have protected him from any conservative blowback, allowing him to emerge with his gavel intact. Now, Trump and his brain trust feel frustrated that Johnson gave away concessions to Democrats without giving Trump the debt ceiling hike he wanted.
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The Elon factor
Johnson probably wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for Musk, who spent all day Wednesday stoking rage on the right over Johnson’s deal.
There was little evidence Trump cared much about the CR before that, and POLITICO has learned that Trump’s team was aware of the contours of the deal and did not object. It was not a matter of debate during Saturday’s Army-Navy game discussion, which focused mostly on reconciliation. And we’re also told Republicans passed off the details of the deal to those close with Trump.
The most prominent theory of what happened yesterday is this, according to multiple Hill Republicans: Musk, as the anointed co-chair of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency panel, got out over his spending-slashing skis and backed Trump into a corner.
Senior Hill Republicans are peeved that Musk — whom they see as an ally in cutting government waste starting next year — began making demands that are impossible to placate with a Democratic president and Democratic Senate still in control. His tweeting against the bill — often with totally false accusations — further complicated what was already a difficult whip count.
Under this theory, Trump got caught flat-footed as Musk’s opposition spread like wildfire, igniting the right — and thus had to chime in with his own concerns.
What now
Johnson is in a bind, to say the least.
On the one hand, he’s struck a deal with Democrats that is all but dead. It seems unlikely he can scrounge up enough votes to get the bill through a two-thirds suspension vote, which would involve allowing Democrats to overwhelmingly carry the vote, which — again — is not great for his speakership prospects.
But he’s also out of time to potentially re-negotiate something new. Funding runs out Friday night at midnight. Traditionally, these sorts of negotiations take weeks. And, by the way, raising the debt ceiling will prompt conservatives to demand further spending cuts, only prolonging talks.
Among Hill Republicans, no one seems to know the way out. Johnson can’t just freely give Trump what he wants — a debt ceiling increase — without Democratic buy-in, given they control both the Senate and White House. And remember, past debt ceiling negotiations have gone along with long-term spending cap deals, where Democrats have keenly protected their own interests in non-defense discretionary spending. Would Trump (and Musk) be okay with Johnson doing that for Democrats?
At the same time, Hill Democrats have zero interest in helping bail Johnson out, even as some of them privately feel bad for him given that he’s tried to negotiate in good faith only to get railroaded by Musk, a tech billionaire-slash-political-novice who very clearly has zero idea how Capitol Hill works.
Schumer was on the floor huddling with his members amid the chaos last night telling them that this was the company line: “We have a deal with Republicans, and we’re sticking with it.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries tweeted something similar.
The problem for Johnson is that Musk and his Twitter cronies are threatening to essentially primary Republicans who back a typical end-of-year spending bill before Trump is even in office. And even as primary threats are likely to get old fast with Hill Republicans, moving forward, Johnson will have to placate not only Trump, but also Musk — the man some Republicans in Trump world half-jokingly call “President Musk” or “Vice President Musk,” who is now firing off tweets and breaking things a la Trump circa 2017.
It all adds up to this: The chances of a government shutdown are now dramatically greater, given the ticking clock. But as always, the holiday jet fumes will mean lawmakers won’t want to be here all that long. Don’t bet against a little Christmas miracle.