The momentary rise and abrupt fall of Speaker Mike Johnson’s continuing resolution

WASHINGTON — After lurching back to the House floor Wednesday, the House speaker’s six-month continuing resolution again failed to rally enough support to pass the chamber.

The bill went down 202-220, with 14 Republican holdouts, two Republicans voting present and three Democratic supporters. It was mostly clean for the Department of Energy, aside from an anomaly that would have granted the agency permission “to sustain specialized security activities” for its defense nuclear programs.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) unsuccessfully gambled that the bill’s combination of pushing a spending debate beyond the next president’s inauguration and requiring tough new voter ID laws would turn out Republican support.

Former President Donald Trump (R) on Wednesday again urged House Republicans to shut the government down if they do not get the voter ID laws included with any stopgap budget.

The House on Wednesday had seven more scheduled workdays, including Mondays and Fridays, when votes are rare, to pass some kind of emergency funding bill to prevent a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week said Democrats in the upper chamber would accept only a three-month stopgap that adhered to the spending levels Schumer and Johnson agreed to earlier this year.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, every Republican lawmaker whose district includes a big DOE nuclear-weapons site voted for the six-month bill, though two, Reps. Charles Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), said they would have preferred a three-month bill.

On Wednesday, a day after he told an industry gathering that he wanted a three-month continuing resolution, Fleischmann told the Monitor that while the “shortest possible time” for a continuing resolution is “optimum,” and that “in an ideal world” Congress would pass a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year, Johnson’s bill was “preferable to shutting the government down.”

Any clean continuing resolution would leave DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which manages active nuclear weapons programs, with less money than requested for fiscal year 2025. NNSA got just over $24 billion in 2024, whereas the White House requested $25 billion for 2025. The House’s unofficial budget for 2025 included $25.5 billion for NNSA, while the Senate’s passed version included $25.2 billion for NNSA.

Newhouse last week told the Monitor that Congress would “better off” to wrap up spending debates before the end of the year, but that he too would support Johnson’s plan if it was the only one offered.

After pulling the bill from the floor last week, Johnson on Wednesday morning announced that the measure, H.R. 9494 Continuing Appropriations and Other Matters Act, 2025, would come up for a vote, unchanged after a week of entrenched resistance, mostly from a group of moderate Republicans.

Among the Republicans still publicly against the bill Wednesday was Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who last week told the Monitor the legislation was “crap.”

Massie hadn’t changed his mind on Wednesday.

“It’s an insult to the American people,” Massie said on the House floor ahead of the Wednesday evening vote. “It’s an insult to their intelligence to bring this bill to the floor because it sets up a fake fight that we all know is fake.”

According to Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-N.M.) in her speech on the House floor, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, also called the funding plan, “terrible.” Rogers voted no on the bill.

Fernandez’s staff told the Monitor  that she would vote against the continuing resolution. Her district abuts the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

In a floor speech Wednesday, Massie said in his floor speech that the compromise had already been set in a backroom at the Capitol. “They already know what they’re going to do, it’s going to be a clean C.R. when we get to Sept. 30,” he said. 

Massie’s office did not reply to queries from the Monitor this week. 

Johnson after the vote said he and his colleagues would “go back to the playbook,” according to Forbes.

“We’ll draw up another play, and we’ll come up with a solution,” Johnson said to reporters Thursday, a day after the vote. “I’m already talking to colleagues about their many ideas. We have time to fix the situation and we’ll get right to it. I’m disappointed, I know this was the right thing to do.”