Lawmakers under pressure despite deal with five days to go until shutdown deadline

Originally Published: 15 JAN 24 07:00 ET Updated: 15 JAN 24 07:35 ET By Clare Foran, Lauren Fox, Haley Talbot, Morgan Rimmer and Melanie Zanona, CNN

    (CNN) -- Just five days remain until a key government funding deadline, and even after congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle announced a deal to avert a shutdown until March, the schedule leaves little room for error.

On Sunday night, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer released text for a continuing resolution to extend government funding into March, legislation that will need to pass both chambers of Congress before the end of this week in order to avoid a partial lapse in government funding.

Johnson said in a statement the short-term spending bill “is required to complete what House Republicans are working hard to achieve: an end to governance by omnibus, meaningful policy wins, and better stewardship of American tax dollars.”

The two-tiered continuing resolution deal, which would fund the government past both shutdown deadlines through March 1 and March 8, was reached just days before the first funding deadline of January 19.

Caught between hardliners and moderates and navigating an extremely narrow majority, Johnson is under intense pressure and has already faced fierce criticism from conservatives over a topline spending deal he struck with Schumer, which was announced earlier this month.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus criticized Johnson’s proposal shortly after it was released Sunday night.

“This is what surrender looks like,” the caucus posted on X.

Given the opposition from conservatives, congressional leaders will likely need bipartisan support in both chambers to quickly pass the legislation ahead of Friday’s deadline, a fact Schumer cited on Sunday.

“A majority of Democrats and Republicans don’t want to shut down, but there’s a group, a hard-right group — particularly in the House, some in the Senate — who want to bully their way into forcing a shutdown,” Schumer said during a news conference Sunday. “That cannot happen.”

The topline deal has set in motion a bipartisan effort to negotiate full-year spending bills, but there is still much more work to be done in that process, and the consensus on Capitol Hill is that both chambers must pass a short-term funding extension this week or else trigger a shutdown.

In addition to facing the funding deadline, House Republicans are also continuing to aggressively pursue their oversight agenda targeting the Biden administration.

The House has been planning to vote this week to hold President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden in contempt of Congress and the House Homeland Security Committee is slated to hold its second impeachment hearing into Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Democrats have denounced Republicans over both efforts, calling them politically motivated and saying Republicans should instead be focused on ensuring there is no shutdown.

In a rare event, lawmakers are confronting not one but two government shutdown deadlines early this year — on January 19 and February 2.

Congress passed stopgap legislation in November extending government funding until January 19 for priorities including military construction, veterans’ affairs, transportation, housing and the Energy Department. The rest of the government is funded until February 2.

Conservatives have pushed Johnson to walk away from the topline deal with Schumer, but the Louisiana Republican announced at the end of last week that he remains committed to the agreement, which would set spending at close to $1.66 trillion overall.

“Our topline agreement remains,” Johnson told reporters on Friday. “We are getting our next steps together, and we are working toward a robust appropriations process so stay tuned for all of that to develop.”

If Johnson had walked away from the deal, it would have created a massive breach of trust with the Senate and could have put Congress on a path to a shutdown. But his decision to stand by the agreement risks further angering conservatives, a dynamic that highlights the speaker’s precarious position.

Adding to the challenge facing Johnson is the fact that the speaker is still very new in the job following his election to the leadership post in October after former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was voted out in a conservative revolt.

“There is a reason you don’t vacate in the middle of a Congress. And Mike is a really good guy, really smart guy, really hardworking guy, really thoughtful guy, but he’s learning on the job,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota said.

Hardliners have said they want to cut spending back down to $1.59 trillion without a $69 billion side deal. They also want to inject border security into the spending talks, and are insisting that HR 2, a House GOP-passed border security bill, be attached to any continuing resolutions.

A number of conservatives have also called to shut down the government if their demands on border policy are not met, even though those demands stand no chance of passing in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Other House Republicans want to keep the topline number where it is but fight for policy riders like border security in the spending talks.

Separate from the government funding fight, a bipartisan group of senators has been in talks to try to strike a deal over border security that could clear the way for passage of aid for Ukraine and Israel.

A large number of House Republicans, however, have warned that a Senate compromise over border security stands virtually no chance of passing their chamber, making clear instead they will only accept a deal that mirrors the hardline immigration bill HR 2.

Looming over everything is the possibility that conservatives could push to remove Johnson the same way they ousted McCarthy — though as of now that does not seem to be a real threat.

Republican Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, the chairman of the hardline House Freedom Caucus, told CNN’s Manu Raju that he remains opposed to Johnson’s spending agreement with Schumer, but pressed on whether he has lost confidence in Johnson’s ability to lead the conference, Good argued that it is too early in the speaker’s tenure to pass judgment.

“It’s a ridiculous supposition that you would — that someone that’s been a speaker for two and a half months, or been the leader of our party for two and a half months, would be treated the same as someone who was in that position for years and is the reason why we needed new leadership,” he said.

However, some House GOP members are fed up with hardliners’ demands, and argue that their stubbornness could cost Republicans the House in 2024.

“I don’t think that what we’re doing right now is complementary to us making the case to the American public that we need to maintain this majority,” said GOP Rep. Steve Womack. “So I think we need to move past the moment, prove we can govern, get this stuff done.”

The Arkansas Republican argued that ousting McCarthy was “the worst mistake we could ever have made,” and said that the conference is not ready to pull that trigger again — even if some are unhappy with Johnson’s performance.

“There’s a reason why it had never been done before in the history of this country. You just don’t fire a speaker because you have a disagreement over, you know, a spending bill. And that’s unfortunate,” said Womack. “I don’t think there is an appetite right now for us to go back through that. That was a painful time, and we touched that stove once. It was not a good outcome.”

CNN’s Kristin Wilson and Avery Lotz contributed to this report.

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