Congress faces a Dec. 20 deadline to fund the government and avert a shutdown, and Speaker Mike Johnson says House Republicans will probably push the fight into early 2025 rather than reach a full-year funding deal this year.
"We're running out of clock. Dec. 20 is the deadline. We're still hopeful that we might be able to get that done, but, if not, we'll have a temporary measure, I think, that would go into the first part of next year and allow us the necessary time to get this done," Johnson, R-La., said on "Fox News Sunday."
That would extend the deadline into early in President-elect Donald Trump's second term. By then, Republicans will have taken control of the Senate from Democrats while maintaining a narrow House majority, giving them more power over federal funding for the rest of the fiscal year, though government funding legislation is subject to the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, which top Republicans have promised to preserve.
"That would be, ultimately, a good move because the country would benefit from it — because then you'd have Republican control, and we'd have a little more say in what those spending bills are," Johnson said.
It's one more thing a narrow House Republican majority will have to work through early next year. While NBC News has projected the GOP will hold the House, five races are still uncalled — leaving, so far, a net change of zero seats compared to before the election, with some small wiggle room depending on the remaining races.
But that's before accounting for former Rep. Matt Gaetz's resignation and the coming resignations of Reps. Elise Stefanik and Mike Waltz after all three were selected for Trump administration posts. (The timing on those is not yet clear.) And remember, the threshold for passage of a House vote is always based on attendance, so an illness or family emergency could impact any vote on any given day, complicating the vote counting for both sides given how tight the margins are.
The remaining House Republicans are going to have to summon a different level of unity than they have managed recently to move the party's legislative agenda.
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