Mike Johnson is about to be hoist by his own petard, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries isn’t coming to the rescue this time.
During a press conference Thursday with House Democratic leaders, Jeffries was asked whether his party would consider voting for Johnson to retain the speakership amid a Republican “revolt,” if the speaker were to put something “amiable” in his continuing resolution.
“No,” Jeffries answered flatly.
The House minority leader spoke harshly about Republicans’ antics, which upended the hefty bipartisan spending bill that would have funded the government until March.
“That bipartisan agreement has now been detonated because House Republicans have been ordered to shut down the government, and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help,” Jeffries said.
CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju posted on X that sources in a closed-door meeting said that Jeffries and other top Democrats have been “conveying to their members that they are in no mood to bail out Speaker Johnson from the spending drama after Donald Trump’s late demands.”
Raju wrote that Johnson had yet to connect with Jeffries since the original spending bill collapsed, and that Johnson was seeking a way forward among GOP members, who don’t exactly seem to be in agreement.
Late Wednesday, almost 24 hours after the 1,547-page bill had been released and Republicans had been running around like chickens with their heads cut off, Trump finally responded to the bill, demanding that House Republicans find a way to raise the debt ceiling—or abolish it altogether, he said later.
Jeffries previously moved to save Johnson’s job when Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene attempted to have him ousted in April, dismissing her motion to remove the Louisiana Republican as “pro-Putin Republican obstruction.”
While House Democrats sought to minimize the chaos eight months ago, their will to fight for the embattled Johnson to retain his gavel appears to have greatly diminished. And this time, Greene’s floated replacing Johnson with Elon Musk.
By Thursday evening, the image of a new “clean” continuing resolution began to emerge. This bill would suspend the debt ceiling for 24 months, until January 2027, as Trump had requested. It would also give $110 billion in disaster aid and extend the farm bill, while cutting some other provisions, such as one promoting the sale of high-ethanol gasoline.