Johnson moves forward on spending Plan C: Breaking up the bills

Speaker Mike Johnson has moved on to a Plan C to avert a government shutdown: Breaking up each piece to pass them separately.

Under the House GOP’s latest plan, Republicans will try to pass three separate bills: stopgap funding legislation with a one-year farm bill extension, money for recent natural disasters and aid for farmers, according to two people with direct knowledge of negotiations. A shutdown deadline is now about 12 hours away — the plan would punt that deadline to March 14.

“We’re going to talk to the conference and I’ll give you the final decision when this is over," Johnson said as he walked into a private House GOP meeting Friday morning.

The new plan will test his ability to wrangle his conference. Members believe Johnson is taking the proposal through the Rules Committee, trying to pass it through regular order so it only requires a simple majority on the House floor. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who is on the panel, said that he will back the plan, meaning it should have enough support to get out of the committee.

But then things get trickier. Johnson would need near unity from his conference to bring it up for debate on the floor, known as voting for the rule. Democrats typically don’t vote for rules and are loath to help bail out Republicans after they backed away from a bipartisan funding agreement earlier this week.

If Johnson can manage to clear that hurdle, members could then vote for the individual bills that they support and vote against the ones they don’t — meaning Congress could avert a shutdown while other pieces of the previous GOP-backed bill could be dropped, at least for now. But Republicans do not expect House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to help pass their new plan with Democratic votes, according to two GOP members who spoke with Johnson Friday morning.

The fallback plan is that Johnson will try to pass the individual bills via suspension, which requires a two-thirds majority to clear the House. And other options are still being considered.

“It is being floated that [Donald] Trump cuts a deal with [Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and we swallow that deal over the weekend,” said another person familiar with the ongoing funding talks, granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Members across the conference, including farm district Republicans and members of the House Freedom Caucus, began actively floating the idea to break up the bills on Thursday, arguing that it was the best shot of anything passing before the government shutdown deadline. Johnson privately huddled with holdouts for hours after a stopgap spending plan endorsed by Donald Trump collapsed on the House floor Thursday evening. This plan does not appear to address the debt ceiling, a demand Trump made on Wednesday but has gotten severe pushback both from conservatives and Democrats.

If it does clear the House, this approach makes it much more complicated in the Senate. Absent an agreement, which requires the blessing of all 100 senators, it will take days for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to bring up each individual bill.

House Republicans do have the option to bring the bills up separately on the floor but them zip them back into one package through a so-called special rule, sending a single measure to the Senate. That could expedite consideration in the upper chamber.