Congress narrowly averts government shutdown — and rejects Trump’s debt ceiling commands

The House of Representatives approved a government spending bill with only a few hours left to spare before a crucial midnight deadline that would have shut down the government before Christmas. The Senate followed suit about 40 minutes past midnight.

The House voted 366-34. One member voted present. All 34 “no” votes were Republicans.

The Senate, controlled by Democrats, voted 85-11.

The vote sent the measure to president Joe Biden, who was expected to sign it into law.

A bill to fund the government through mid-March marked a third attempt within two days to avert a shutdown, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk commanded Congress to ditch the original bipartisan framework and left congressional Democrats and even some Republicans exhausted with the growing political influence of the world’s wealthiest person.

The funding battle glimpsed how Democrats are approaching the incoming Trump-Musk administration and how they will navigate Trump’s agenda with an extremely slim Republican majority.

Here, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries forced Republicans to fight among themselves. Republicans were openly calling for a shutdown, then whipped to accept a new deal under House Speaker Mike Johnson, while leaving out Trump’s central demand to abolish the debt ceiling.

Johnson told reporters Friday he was “in constant contact” with Trump and spoke with Musk an hour before the vote.

“He knew exactly what we were doing and why, and this is a good outcome for the country,” he said of his conversations with Trump.

A government shutdown would have stalled paychecks for US military service members, forced federal agencies to close, furloughed workers just before Christmas, and threatened critical services and benefits.

The standoff shows just how much Republicans in the House and the Senate, where they will take the majority next year, will have to cater to Trump and Musk’s will. But there were few signs that Johnson could face a credible challenger for the gavel in a few weeks.

“Speaker Johnson’s shown tremendous leadership this week through very difficult times,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who could challenge Johnson, told The Independent. “Look, both through a narrow majority that we have, but also just the difficulties of keeping government running when you have a lot of different factions on our side and you still have to deal with a Democrat Senate, a Democrat White House.”

The president-elect had also hoped to include an agreement that would scrap the debt ceiling in an effort to grease the wheels for major items on his agenda, including massive tax cuts that would explode the deficit and a mass deportation operation that could cost billions of dollars and deal an enormous blow to the economy.

“We have successfully stopped extreme MAGA Republicans from shutting down the government, crashing the economy, and hurting working-class Americans,” Jeffries told reporters after Friday’s vote.

House Democrats stopped the “billionaire boy’s club,” said Jeffries, calling the stop-gap measure a “victory for the American people.”

A relatively slim 118-page bill covers a bulk of government funding, disaster relief and payments to farmers — but the bill removed measures supporting pediatric cancer research, funding for community health centers, and prescription drug reform, among other measures.

The bill also removes restrictions on investments in China. Democratic congresswoman Rose DeLauro — the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee — warned congressional leadership that removing the provision calls into question Musk’s “extensive investments” in China while he’s working closely with the incoming administration.

Musk spent Friday making fun of her appearance to his millions of followers on X, comparing her to a “skeksis” from The Dark Crystal franchise, and inspiring a flood of harassing messages and AI-generated memes about the 81-year-old congresswoman.

“At the behest of the world’s richest man who no one voted for, the Congress has been thrown into pandemonium,” DeLauro said in remarks on the House floor. “It leads you to the question of, who is in charge? I thought that there was a Republican majority in this body. Not a ‘President Musk’ majority.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said a government shutdown heading into the holiday week “would mean service members and air traffic controllers go to work without pay, essential government services for hardworking Americans would be paused, and economic disruption would occur.”

“Following an order by President-elect Trump … Republicans walked away from a bipartisan deal and threatened to shut down the government at the 11th hour in order to pave the way to provide tax breaks for billionaires. This revised legislation does not do that,” she said.

Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told reporters she supported the latest measure “to bring home funding to my district for hurricane relief victims.”

“It was still better than the 1,500-page monstrosity that was initially thrusted onto the entire chamber,” she said.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis told The Independent that “whoever advised” Trump that a debt ceiling deal would even be possible “needs to better understand how this place works.” Republicans had “zero leverage” to get that provision passed in the Democratically-controlled Senate, he said.

“And I wish that President Trump had been advised … that it was never in the cards,” he said.

Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett was the sole Democrat to vote “present” during Friday’s vote.

“I think that we are walking into unprecedented times, so I don’t know what’s to come,” she told reporters. “I never anticipated that this will go down this way, and so we’ll just see, but hopefully we will continue to stand following tonight.”

Eric Garcia reported from Washington, D.C.

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