“Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republican leaders were struggling Thursday to devise a fallback plan to keep the government open, after billionaire Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump rallied conservatives to sink their bipartisan funding deal,” NBC News reports.
“With less than 36 hours to go before a deadline that would shut down vast swaths of the federal government and furlough workers, they have no plan, or even a concept of a plan, for what’s next.”
Playbook: “If Johnson puts up a clean CR with a straightforward debt limit increase attached, would Democrats really vote against it after spending 14 years tsk-tsking Republicans for playing politics with a possible federal default?”
“Of course, there’s another party involved here, and most Republicans are typically lukewarm at best at the notion of hiking the debt limit, let alone eliminating it. A handful of hard-liners, in fact, are advocating for not doing anything at all and just allowing the federal government to shut down for a month until Trump is inaugurated.”
