Given the kind of year it’s been, it’s perhaps only fitting that 2024 would end with a chaotic fight over the funding of the government: After twelve months of upheaval and dysfunction, why not a final frenzy of shutdown politics to cap things off?
As the nation careened toward a shutdown Friday, Republicans began their finger-pointing. Donald Trump, the president-elect who helped doom the bipartisan spending deal Speaker Mike Johnson had hoped to usher through his chamber earlier in the week, put the blame on the current administration, posting on social media that “if there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now.” He added: “This is a Biden problem to solve.” Vice President-elect JD Vance, after the failure Thursday evening of a Trump-backed funding measure, put the blame on House Democrats, telling reporters that they tanked the bill to deny Trump “negotiating leverage” in the first year of his term and to “fight for global censorship bullshit”: “They’ve asked for a shutdown,” Vance said of Democrats, “and I think that’s exactly what they’re gonna get.”
But make no mistake: Whether or not lawmakers strike a deal by their Friday night deadline, Republicans own the chaos that led us to this moment.
As of Tuesday evening, Johnson had a plan to keep the government funded through the first two months of Trump’s presidency—one that, with Democratic support, may have been able to get through the gauntlet of divided Washington. But on Wednesday, Elon Musk—the world’s richest man, one of Trump’s most influential advisers, and evidently a kind of shadow president—torpedoed the continuing resolution with a relentless, lie-filled posting marathon. House Republicans announced their opposition to Johnson’s bill, and by the end of the day, Trump and Vance had registered their disapproval—and began issuing their own demands, including for the debt ceiling to be raised until 2029, the end of their term, or abolished entirely. “It doesn’t mean anything, except psychologically,” Trump told NBC News of the debt limit.
Some of his members—38 of them, in fact—apparently don’t agree, and voted against the stopgap: “It’s embarrassing,” Texas Congressman Chip Roy said in a fiery floor speech, criticizing his party for supporting a bill that would increase debt. “It’s shameful.” That drew a reproval from Trump, who called for a primary challenge to the Freedom Caucus congressman. Roy is “getting in the way, as usual, of having yet another Great Republican Victory—All for the sake of some cheap publicity for himself,” Trump posted Thursday. “Republican obstructionists have to be done away with.”
Roy doesn’t seem particularly worried about his political prospects at this point. Johnson’s, on the other hand, seem more immediately precarious: If he wants to keep his job, he’ll need to be reelected January 3. The last time Republicans elected a Speaker, it took 15 ballots—and some significant concessions by Kevin McCarthy. Hardline members of the conference ousted McCarthy less than a year in with that motion to vacate, after the then California congressman defied his right-flank in a fight over government funding. Sound familiar?
Some Republicans have begun fantasizing about giving the gavel to Musk, who insists that the government should be shut down until Trump takes office: “We will be fine for 33 days,” he claimed this week. Trump, asked if he remained confident in Johnson, was noncommittal: “We’ll see,” he told NBC News.
But however all this shakes out, one thing that seems clear: This is a preview of the tumult that lays in store when Trump assumes the presidency a month from now. “This,” as outgoing Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it, “is the way it’s going to be next year.”
