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CNN
—
Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday succeeded in a high-stakes House vote to pass President Donald Trump’s plan to fund the government into the fall, overcoming far-right opposition as the GOP scrambles to avert a government shutdown Friday at midnight.
The 217-213 vote to approve Republicans’ stopgap bill now amplifies pressure on Senate Democrats to decide whether to back the measure — or trigger a spending showdown with Trump and risk a potential shutdown.
“The president has made this a priority and our members know that. Our members were elected to help President Trump enact his agenda,” House Majority Whip Tom Emmer said in a brief interview ahead of the vote. “It’s not like any CR that has ever come before. It’s cutting spending, it’s freezing spending, it’s adding defense money. It takes care of the border.”
The House plans to immediately leave Washington — an attempt to stick the Senate with a take-it-or-leave-it bill ahead of the March 14 deadline. But it’s not yet clear if Johnson’s show of force is enough to convince Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to stave off a shutdown. At least eight Senate Democrats would need to vote with the GOP to accept the bill, which includes none of the concessions the party has been demanding to protect Congress’ spending powers in the Trump era.
But for now, House Republicans cheered the passage of their bill as a major win for Trump, convincing even some of the GOP’s staunchest conservatives to back a bill that mostly funds the government at levels that former President Joe Biden signed into law, along with $13 billion in cuts for certain domestic programs. Top House Democrats, led by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, led their own fierce whip operation, and ultimately lost one of their own members, Maine Rep. Jared Golden, on the vote.
“I don’t think the speaker and leadership had a choice but to do this. The Freedom Caucus doesn’t like this, the appropriators don’t like this. But it’s what you have to do,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, a spending leader from Idaho who had been pushing for a bipartisan negotiation.
And Simpson was one of several veteran GOP lawmakers who remarked on the stunning turn of events that led even House Freedom Caucus members to back the spending bill.
“We’re all on the same team. Almost all of us,” Simpson quipped.
Johnson was still working to get his members in line in the hours before the vote. But his team succeeded with the help of a full-court press by Trump and his White House team. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegetth, budget chief Russ Vought and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles all repeatedly phoned members to support the bill.
In a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning, Vance warned Republicans that their party could be blamed if the government shut downs, in a last-ditch push to lock down the votes. The vice president told members that the party will “lose momentum” on Trump’s agenda if the short-term spending bill fails, specifically pointing to border security and political momentum, the source said.
“This is how the President has asked us to fight now so that they can do what they’re doing with DOGE, and there will be a point in time where we implement a recissions plan that basically formalizes those cuts,” Rep. Warren Davidson, an ultraconservative who is typically opposed to stopgap spending bills, told CNN.
Conservatives succeeded in getting billions of cuts in the bill, which largely stem from the removal of projects or one-time initiatives funded by lawmakers, known as earmarks. But it also included language that some of their members opposed, like language that would help House members avoid a politically painful up-or-down vote on ending President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
“It’s not a clean CR,” one GOP appropriator told CNN. A “clean” bill, that member said, would be one page.
CNN’s Manu Raju and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
