Senate Republicans fume over 'fiasco' in House

Senate Republicans were left fuming Thursday over what they called the dysfunctional “s--- show” and “fiasco” they witnessed in the House as two proposals to fund the government through Christmas failed this week.

With Washington on the brink of a government shutdown, lawmakers are no closer to having a stopgap funding measure that can pass both the House and Senate and get President Biden’s signature by the end of Friday.

“I get weary with the drama associated with this. This is so dysfunctional and so distracting from the things we should be doing,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who still expressed hope “we’ll pull the rabbit out of the hat” by reaching a last-minute deal to avoid a shutdown.

But as of Thursday evening, just more than 24 hours before the deadline, there didn’t seem any promising path.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), a close Trump ally, said the collapse of Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-La.), latest proposal to keep the government funded, which lawmakers were calling “plan B,” made the grinding halt all but inevitable.

“Shut it down. It’s what’s going to happen. They’re going to shut it down. I guess they’ll try to work it out but, you know, shutting it down isn’t going to make a lot of difference right now,” he said.

"You could shut it down to Jan. 5 and come back. Everyone’s going to get paid anyway,” he said of federal workers.

Tuberville declined to comment on whether President-elect Trump would still back Johnson serving another two years as Speaker.

Asked whether Trump still has confidence in Johnson after the failed continuing resolution, Tuberville replied: “We’ll see after this fiasco.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) signaled he wasn’t planning to support the legislation that Johnson attempted to pass through the House because he doesn’t want to vote to raise the debt limit unless it’s paired with significant spending cuts.

The proposal Johnson brought to the floor would have increased new spending by $110 billion and would have raised the debt ceiling by more than $4 trillion.

Paul, like many senators, said he had no idea when the House may finally muster enough votes to get the continuing resolution over to the Senate.

“It’s kind of a s--- show over there, so who knows when that’s going to happen,” he said.

Thursday evening’s failed vote in the House capped a day of frantic negotiations and uncertainty about how Congress would avoid a shutdown after Trump torpedoed the 1,547-page continuing resolution that Johnson and other congressional leaders posted on Tuesday evening.

The incoming president further complicated the situation by insisting that House Republicans pass a bill to raise the debt limit, so that Biden would get the blame for piling more onto the national debt.

Johnson then unveiled a slimmed-down 116-page bill that kept the timeline of funding government until March 14 and provided roughly $100 billion in disaster relief, along with $10 billion in farm aid.

But appeared dead-on-arrival as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) called the bill “laughable.”

Democratic lawmakers could be heard chanting “hell no” while they met behind closed doors in the basement of the Capitol.

The legislation wound up failing by a vote of 174-235-1.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Congress is now “dangerously close” to a government shutdown.

“I don’t know what the plan is now,” she told reporters.

She noted that Trump’s call to include language to raise the debt limit for two years “seems to have aggravated the Democrats considerably.”  

“We can’t have a government shutdown, and we’re getting dangerously close to that,” she said.

Collins said she could support a clean three-week continuing resolution just to get Congress past Christmas without a shutdown.

“My number one goal is to prevent a government shutdown, and we have to do a three-week extension, so be it,” she said.

But Republican senators representing states hit hard by Hurricanes Helene and Milton said they would oppose any funding bill that doesn’t include the full amount of disaster relief.

“I don’t think $10 billion or $20 billion and a promise we’ll do something more in March is an acceptable solution,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told reporters earlier in the day. “We know what the need is today, it was negotiated in package and it needs to be in a package to get my support to get out of here.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called disaster relief “essential to South Carolina,” emphasizing that the damage inflicted by the storms surpassed that of 1989's infamous Hurricane Hugo.

“I cannot tell you the level of destruction that’s hit South Carolina,” he said, noting that Trump has committed to include disaster relief in any deal to fund the government.

“Disaster relief is an absolute must to get my vote and my support,” Graham said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called for Johnson to return to the 1,547-page deal he signed off on earlier this week, even though Trump and many conservatives in the House GOP conference oppose it.

“It’s a good thing the bill failed in the House. And now it’s time to go back to the bipartisan agreement, we came to,” he said.