Senate Republicans are rallying behind the idea of a clean continuing resolution. It just can’t actually be clean — and it probably can’t address the debt limit.
As House Republicans rose up against Speaker Mike Johnson’s government funding plan, and Democrats suggested they weren’t open to a renegotiation, President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance complicated the matter further Wednesday by demanding that any agreement — even the clean CR that conservatives have been pushing for — would be “destructive” without terminating or extending “the Debt Ceiling guillotine.”
“Any Republican that would be so stupid as to do this should, and will, be Primaried,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday night.
Senate Republicans said they understood Trump’s frustration with the looming debt ceiling, but they suggested there was little power to renegotiate the deal in the next 48 hours, particularly without giving Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer additional concessions.
“There’s got to be something more to it than a demand that it get in,” North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis said of new debt limit extensions.
“If I were Schumer, just because somebody asked for something, if there wasn’t leverage or benefit to it, I don’t know why he would accept it,” he added.
With that in mind, Senate Republicans think it’d be difficult to pass an actually clean government funding extension — and many aren’t in favor of doing so.
“I’m in favor of what the House can pass, but we’ve got to get disaster relief in there,” incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune told NOTUS.
It was a message echoed by Tillis and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who said they would not support a CR that doesn’t include disaster aid, given the catastrophic flooding and landslides this fall in their areas.
“To anybody who thinks that disaster relief is pork, come to where I live, see what happened in my state, in North Carolina and Georgia, there’s a time for the government,” Graham said, referencing social media posts that referred to the original CR as pig meat. “This is an absolute moral imperative to get money into the system to help these people get back on their feet.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a state that has also experienced a number of natural disasters in recent years, said she had seen the effects of the hurricane firsthand.
“We need to get the disaster aid to those affected areas,” she said.
North Carolina Sen. Ted Budd also said he didn’t want a CR unless there was disaster aid included in the final deal.
“I want it right now,” Budd said, suggesting he would vote against a clean CR without that aid.
Even Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy said lawmakers couldn’t leave “those poor people in Appalachia and elsewhere” without some help from the government.
But more than anything, Senate Republicans suggested going back to the drawing board on a funding deal was just too difficult two days before a government funding deadline, particularly if lawmakers were going to now also haggle over the debt limit.
“I don’t know how we can do that at this time,” Sen. Mike Rounds told NOTUS. “But I understand there’s a desire that we’ve got to address that at some point.”
The desire to address the debt ceiling “at some point” would almost certainly be too late for what Trump wants to accomplish. He acknowledged in a statement Wednesday afternoon that the purpose of raising the debt limit now would be to “do it on Biden’s watch.”
Over the last 15 years or so, congressional Republicans have treated raising the debt limit as an opportunity to address government spending, though their ability to get spending concessions has basically disappeared.
Still, hurriedly extending the debt ceiling — or, more dramatically, eliminating it entirely — would be a missed opportunity to address spending. And the Republicans who have expressed the most discomfort with persistent government deficits suggested Wednesday night that it’d be a mistake to just kill the debt ceiling so that Trump isn’t technically responsible for adding more debt.
“I can understand Trump’s frustration there,” Sen. Ron Johnson said, “but the debt ceiling is there for a reason, to force us to look at what’s happening and instill some kind of fiscal discipline and control.”
“It’d be a shame to miss that opportunity, and it shouldn’t be part of a CR,” Johnson said.
When asked if he’d like to see the debt ceiling renegotiated this Congress, Sen. Rick Scott was evasive.
“I know that’s what the president would like,” Scott said.
But when pressed on the issue himself, Scott said if Congress was going to do anything on the debt limit, “let’s start a process to actually fix things.”
For Democrats, the last-minute demand to address the debt ceiling was simply about optics and creating some runway for the fiscal impact of Trump’s tariffs, which Sen. Tim Kaine called “a man-made disaster.”
“So he’s saying, ‘We’ve got to fight against spending!’ But, ‘Oh, by the way, we’ve got to increase the debt ceiling too.’ Give me a break,” Kaine said.
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Katherine Swartz and Ben T.N. Mause are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows. Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.