One principle has long underpinned funding negotiations on Capitol Hill: House Republicans can’t pass a spending bill without Democratic votes. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson finally quashed that assumption.
It took an all-out lobbying blitz that involved promises of future spending cuts, a scattering of presidential threats and 11th-hour policy concessions involving tariffs and visas for Afghan refugees. But in a 217-213 vote, the House passed a seven-month funding patch without needing a single Democrat. Republicans planned to immediately leave Washington and hand Senate Democrats a stark dilemma with the threat of a government shutdown looming early Saturday morning.
Besides jamming the Senate with a bill that cuts non-defense funding by about $13 billion and gives Trump more leeway to shift cash, the vote erodes Democrats’ leverage in spending negotiations for at least the remainder of the 119th Congress.
“The Democrats always got a pound of flesh,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), a House Freedom Caucus member, said in an interview. “It’s just a new day.”
In their most impressive political feat, GOP leaders got the backing of the Freedom Caucus — a group of hard-liners that rose to prominence by bucking Republican leaders in spending battles. Every lawmaker in the 31-member club of fiscal conservatives voted in favor of the funding bill, marking the first time many of them have ever supported a measure to keep federal cash flowing.
“I’m as stunned as anybody else,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a longtime, die-hard opponent of continuing resolutions, said about voting for the bill this time.
To hear them tell it, the Freedom Caucus members supported the bill because it cuts spending and because GOP leaders gave them a seat at the negotiating table.
“It’s much easier to be flexible within the parameters of our own core principles when we’ve been deeply involved in crafting the legislation,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), another Freedom Caucus member, said in an interview.
But it was impossible to discount Trump’s intense pressure campaign, which unfolded both privately and publicly.
Trump and White House officials made the strategic decision to get head rebel Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and other perennial leadership critics on board with the plan early. It happened shortly after a White House meeting last month where Trump personally signed off on Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s plan to abandon bipartisan funding talks and pursue a seven-month stopgap.
The effort came down to the wire — with several Republicans holding out until the very last moment. But after dozens of meetings with hard-liners and Trump’s strongest personal Hill whip effort yet, including a bevy of calls to holdouts in the final hours, every Republican but one fell in line.
As for the lone GOP no vote, Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, Trump made a public example of what happens to lawmakers who dare to cross him, calling for him to face a primary challenger. Massie was unchastened afterward: “You’re going to find out what a stinker it is when you get 10 or 15 Democrats to vote for it” in the Senate, he told reporters.
Walking to the House floor for the vote, Johnson described the president as having been “very engaged, very helpful” on getting the fractious conference behind the plan. Among those Trump called Tuesday was Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). Trump provided Burchett with assurances about deep spending cuts coming across the federal government, including, possibly, at the Pentagon.
The sudden embrace by Johnson’s right flank of a continuing resolution to fund the government represents a major paradigm shift on Capitol Hill — and reflects a serious moment of reckoning for Republicans who are both accustomed to demanding conservative purity and wary of crossing the president. It comes as the House GOP has virtually no margin to spare, given their tight majority and multiple vacancies.
“I just feel like there’s really no option here,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), another Freedom Caucus member who generally opposes continuing resolutions. “What do you do when you have no majority?”
Few Republicans are under any illusion that the party unity on spending is permanent. If the Senate passes the bill this week, it sets up more rounds of wrangling later this year — when fiscal hawks want to write serious cuts into law.
The Freedom Caucus, for instance, wants to force trillions of dollars in spending cuts to safety-net programs in the party-line package of Trump policy priorities Republicans hope to enact this year, while also codifying the elimination of jobs and programs undertaken by the president’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative in spending bills for the fiscal year that starts in October.
“I see this as getting a first down,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), formerly chair of the Freedom Caucus, said in a brief interview. “The touchdown is yet to be gotten.”
Still, the turnabout has been dramatic. Just 18 months ago, a major portion of the Freedom Caucus voted to reject a funding patch put up by then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy that included Republican border security policies and an almost 30 percent cut to non-defense spending — far more than the current stopgap. McCarthy was ejected from his leadership post by hard-line conservatives four days later.
In a theatrical reminder of the irony, McCarthy visited his former House colleagues Monday and was asked how it felt to see fiscal conservatives falling in behind a temporary funding patch.
“Mine had more cuts, so,” McCarthy said, trailing off, in a brief interview as he left the Capitol on Monday night.
Many Republicans argued that this stopgap is different from others that have failed on the House floor in recent years, driving Republican leaders to negotiate bipartisan alternatives with Democrats.
“This is not your grandfather’s continuing resolution,” House Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris (R-Md.) said Tuesday, standing beside Johnson at a news conference.
Other holdouts dragged out the suspense until the very end.
Despite a stark warning from Vice President JD Vance that Republicans would bear the blame of a shutdown, a host of House GOP lawmakers left a closed-door member meeting Tuesday morning claiming they were still undecided on the funding bill. Inside the meeting, Vance issued a stern directive: “We already lost one vote, we can’t lose another.”
Jockeying for phone calls with Trump and more meetings, some holdouts persisted.
But the speaker said in a brief interview leaving the meeting that he thought there were only “one or two” actual holdouts left ahead of the vote. By the time he headed to the floor for the final vote Tuesday, he said he didn’t think any further calls were needed.
Several GOP fiscal hawks said that they were planning to vote for the funding bill only because Trump pressed them to do so.
It wasn’t due to any allegiance to Johnson or whipping effort by his team, said Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), a Freedom Caucus member. Rather, he said, his vote was based on the president’s assurances alone.
“It’s his word,” Burlison said.
Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
