Johnson’s final pitch on spending stopgap does little to appease conservative critics

Speaker Mike Johnson made his final pitch on his bipartisan short-term spending bill to skeptical House Republicans on Tuesday. It didn’t do much to appease his critics.

Johnson has embraced a “clean” plan to avert a looming government shutdown deadline on Oct. 1, punting the deadline to Dec. 20. It’s expected to pass the House on Wednesday, despite some GOP opposition, given widespread Democratic support.

But GOP fiscal hawks are concerned that kicking the spending fight into December means they’ll get jammed right before the holidays with a so-called omnibus — a massive funding bill that lumps all 12 individual pieces of spending legislation together, typically negotiated by congressional leaders with little input from rank-and-file members. Those types of funding bills are widely unpopular, among Republicans especially, but commonly used when leaders are running up against a tight deadline.

The Louisiana Republican sought to assuage those concerns in a private House GOP meeting Tuesday morning. He committed to not doing an omnibus, as well as any so-called minibus, which combines some but not all of the 12 spending bills.

“We have broken the Christmas omni and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” Johnson told reporters at a press conference following the members-only meeting. "We don't want any busses. We're not going to do any busses."

Additionally, Johnson used polling to try to convince a band of conservatives — who have called for Johnson to shut down the government unless Congress clears a bill that requires proof of citizenship to vote, known as the SAVE Act — that a shutdown this close to the election would be a terrible idea, according to three people in the room.

He argued that independent voters, both men and women, as well as so-called ticket-splitters — people who will vote for one party for president but another in down-ballot races — have a strong negative view about shutdowns. That could impact their standing with key swing voters just weeks before Election Day, he said. Johnson also noted that border patrol officers, U.S. troops, and other groups often heralded by the GOP would suffer if they failed to act.

The speaker blamed the Senate for failing to act on appropriation bills, but also pointed out that he had tried last week to move a conservative-favored spending bill, which the House failed to pass. More than a dozen Republicans ultimately voted against that plan, which combined with Democratic opposition was enough to tank the bill.

His pitch didn’t do much to move his critics. While no GOP member is publicly talking about retribution against Johnson in the upcoming congressional leadership elections, there are concerns that his right flank could be privately plotting some payback: tanking a package of unrelated bills as soon as Tuesday.

Conservatives are skeptical that he’ll stick to his word about avoiding an omnibus. And some say they expect that Johnson would move a year-end spending deal onto the floor as at least two separate bills, thereby technically avoiding an “omnibus.”

The GOP irritation about the new mid-December deadline isn’t universal, however. Some Republicans do want to clear the spending decks before the next Congress, allowing lawmakers and a new president to focus on other priorities in the new year. Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) made that case to reporters after the closed-door meeting.

“They’re going to have to have a budget by the end of February. They’re going to have to get their people in place. … So the idea that we would give them a funding fight and a potential government shutdown in the first couple of months seems to me to be the height of irresponsibility,” Cole said.

Republicans largely agreed that Tuesday morning’s conference meeting was tame, despite being the first full GOP member meeting since Johnson laid out his Plan B on spending. In fact, the main point of contention was a separate discussion about an effort to force a vote on a bipartisan bill, led by Reps. Garret Graves (R-La.) and Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.).

Their so-called discharge petition, which has enough signatures to force a floor vote, would go around leadership to force a House vote on their Social Security Fairness Act bill, which advocates say would eliminate two provisions that “unfairly reduce or eliminate earned Social Security benefits for approximately 2.8 million Americans who’ve devoted much of their careers to public service.”

That has sparked frustration from some corners of the conference, who believe Graves is only bucking the conference because he’s leaving the House after a nasty redistricting fight in his state left him out in the cold, with no good options to try to stay in Congress.

Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) argued against people signing on during the meeting, while Reps. Clay Higgins (R-La.) and Graves pushed back. Johnson, according to a person in the room, told Higgins that no one approached him for a floor vote.

That person, granted anonymity to detail private discussions, called it a bit of a “Cajun throwdown.”

Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.