WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday that he would prefer for House Republicans to refuse to fund the federal government than for them to get behind a funding bill that does not contain a debt ceiling increase.
“Republican obstructionists have to be done away with,” Trump posted, referring to members of the House GOP who refuse to back a debt ceiling increase that Trump wants. He singled out Texas Rep. Chip Roy, and accused him of “getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory.”
“Our Country is far better off closing up for a period of time than it is agreeing to the things that the Democrats want to force upon us,” the president-elect wrote on Truth Social.
House Republican leaders were running out of time Thursday to avoid a partial government shutdown that begins late Friday night, after Trump and his allies sunk a compromise bill to fund the government through March.
Senior members of the party spent much of Thursday going in and out of Speaker Mike Johnson’s offices in the Capitol, where conversations were focused on finding a way to keep the federal government open while also satisfying Trump’s last-minute demand that any deal to fund the government also raise the debt ceiling.
Yet even if House Republicans could settle on funding language that would appease both Trump and the warring factions in the GOP caucus, any bill they pass would still need to be approved by the Democratic-controlled Senate before President Joe Biden signed it into law.
Meanwhile, outside of the leadership talks, members of the House and Senate were growing increasingly nervous that Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, would fail to find a way forward in time to avoid the potential furlough of tens of thousands of federal employees across the country, whose pay could be delayed less than a week before Christmas.
“A shutdown does not solve anything. It doesn’t save us money. It just creates unnecessary chaos,” Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York said on MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell Reports.
“In order to pass anything, it does need to have bipartisan support,” he said. “You’re going to need Democrats, at a minimum, in the Senate, but very likely in the House, to support a continuing resolution,” he said.
Thursday tension followed the very public collapse Wednesday of a massive, negotiated funding bill that would have needed Democratic votes to pass the narrowly divided House.
Trump’s formal opposition to the bill late Wednesday came only after billionaire GOP megadonor Elon Musk spent the day railing against the bill, gradually making it politically impossible for much of the House Republican conference to support it.
“Increasing the debt ceiling is not great but we’d rather do it on Biden’s watch,” Trump said in a statement Wednesday announcing his opposition to Johnson’s original bill.
“If Democrats won’t cooperate on the debt ceiling now, what makes anyone think they would do it in June during our administration? Let’s have this debate now. And we should pass a streamlined spending bill that doesn’t give Chuck Schumer and the Democrats everything they want,” said Trump.
The debt ceiling has become a recurring, bitter debate in Washington every few years, and one that Trump is eager to avoid during the start of his second term in office.
But his demands and Thursday’s impasse could prove to be too much for Johnson, who now faces a potential threat to his speakership, which is up for a vote early next year.