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The House speaker has a margin of error of just one vote as the most difficult wrangling of his career begins — and Democrats aren’t eager to lend their support.
A short-lived partial government shutdown ended Tuesday with the House voting to approve a Senate-brokered compromise. The vast majority of the government will now be funded for the rest of the year — but not the Department of Homeland Security. The final vote highlighted both the narrow path that Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is walking, and how little help he can expect from the minority Democrats as the spotlight shifts to President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda.
With that kind of margin of error, most partisan measures are only a hair’s breadth away from failure at any given time.
The Senate-amended package on the House floor Tuesday in theory should have had bipartisan support. Appropriators from both chambers negotiated the bills weeks ago, including funding for the Pentagon and Department of Health and Human Services. But the DHS spending bill became a nonstarter for Democrats in the aftermath of federal officers killing Alex Pretti in Minnesota late last month.
The White House’s intervention on key House votes has been a defining feature of Johnson’s speakership given the historically slim majority Republicans hold. With the Monday swearing-in of Texas Democrat Rep. Christian Menefee, and two Republican-held seats currently vacant, the GOP will now have a one-vote margin for the next few months at least. As my colleague Steve Benen framed the matter, “If every member is present and one GOP member breaks ranks, the result would be a 217-215 vote. But if two GOP members break ranks, the result would a 216-216 vote — and in the House, a tie vote is a failed vote.”
With that kind of margin of error, most partisan measures are only a hair’s breadth away from failure at any given time. Johnson’s initial hope then was that the GOP would be able to skip the Rules Committee and bring the bill directly to the floor via a procedure known as a suspension of the rules. It’s a maneuver that has worked in the past to bypass the risk of a shutdown in the face of Republican members who typically balk at short-term funding bills.
But according to Politico, Johnson made the mistake of presuming Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would simply go along with his thinking, leaving members of the minority “caught unaware — with some downright livid — at Johnson’s confidence that he could pass the bill under that process:”
Such a move generally requires tacit agreement from minority party leaders to supply the votes. But Republicans at that point hadn’t asked their Democratic counterparts for a more formal private count of how many Democrats might support the measure, according to three people granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
Jeffries told Johnson just hours later on a private call that Democratic leadership would not commit to delivering the required votes for a fast-track vote, forcing Johnson to gather GOP votes to jump through a procedural hurdle first.
Johnson appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday to lament that House Democrats were “playing games” with the shutdown bill. But Jeffries and his fellow Democrats have time and again come to the rescue of Johnson when it was his own caucus that was flirting with disaster. The presumption that the same patterns would hold true in the current political climate was a grave miscalculation on the speaker’s part.
Tuesday’s votes are a foreshadowing of Johnson’s next two weeks.
As it is, many House Democrats are themselves frustrated that DHS is receiving any funding at all over the next two weeks. Jeffries apparently did little to whip his members to back the budget bill — but also didn’t stand in the way of those who were in favor. The only reason the partial shutdown-ending legislation made its way to Trump’s desk at all was a fortuitously equivalent exchange of votes, with 21 Republicans voting against and 21 Democrats voting in favor.
Jeffries was not among the Democratic “yea” votes, nor were his top deputies. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., was one of the few Democrats to cross party lines that doesn’t hold a swing seat — but as ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, she helped negotiate the terms of the bills up for a vote in the first place. And no Democrats voted for the rule allowing the spending bills to come to the floor at all.
Tuesday’s votes are a foreshadowing of Johnson’s next two weeks. While most of the negotiations will likely take place across the Capitol in the Senate, he still must shepherd the resulting bill through his own chamber. Whatever the final product is will likely be unable to muster support from Republicans alone and receive, at best, tepid welcome from many of Jeffries’ supporters. Johnson must then somehow ensure that a compromise can pass through a House that has grown allergic to the word. It’s a Herculean task — and one that he’d be mistaken to count on Jeffries’ support in achieving.
