The pressure campaign won.
A bloated Congressional funding bill that faced a massive Republican revolt backed by President-elect Donald Trump has died, House Minority Leader Steve Scalise acknowledged Wednesday night.
Scalise told reporters that a spending package that was supposed to fund the government through mid-March has become dysfunctional, leaving Congress busy crafting a new deal ahead of a looming government shutdown on Saturday. He assured me that he was there.
“There's still a lot of negotiation and conversation going on.” Scalise saidpointed out that there was no consensus on how to proceed.
A majority of House Republicans laughed out loud at the 1,547-page continuing resolution that Speaker Mike Johnson drafted in negotiations with Democrats. Democrats are likely to try to hold up the bill in the Senate if it doesn't pass.
The revolt was led by Elon Musk, one of President Trump's top aides and co-chair of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who on Wednesday launched a fierce attack on Republican lawmakers who supported the stopgap measure. went.
President Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance then addressed the Republican fight in a lengthy statement released from the Ohio senator's X account, calling them “tough” and “smart” Republicans. '' and called on the Democratic Party not to give in to their demands.
The two leaders also issued new directives that had not been previously discussed. The idea is to pass a bill to raise the debt ceiling before President Trump takes office so that it can be considered during President Biden's term.
Mr. Trump then took to Truth Social and directly threatened Republicans who would not vote to raise the debt ceiling in this primary.
A reporter asked Scalise whether any new stopgap measures under consideration would include raising the debt ceiling.
“There's no new agreement at this point. We're obviously looking at a number of options,” the Louisiana lawmaker said. I answered.
Mr Vance was also seen meeting with Mr Johnson on the hill late in the evening to discuss the way forward.
“What the president believes is that we should support a clean CR as long as it includes raising the debt ceiling,” the vice president-elect told reporters in the halls of Congress.
After the meeting, Vance said, “We had a productive conversation. I'm not going to say anything about it tonight, but I think we can resolve some issues here and we'll continue to work on it.”
