Republicans have given Democrats an opportunity to start repairing their relationship with voters following President-elect Donald Trump‘s win as they scramble to avoid a partial government shutdown Friday at midnight.
House Republican leaders have unsuccessfully been able to gather enough support from their conference for two separate continuing resolutions, with the second version of the legislation, backed by Trump, failing on the House floor Thursday evening.
House Speaker Mike Johnson‘s (R-LA) original bipartisan plan to fund the federal government until March 14 was killed less than 24 hours after it was released after Trump and his allies, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, publicly disparaged the agreement, causing a growing number of GOP opposition to the legislation.
But the Republican infighting has provided Democrats with their first post-election opportunity to contrast themselves with Republicans, whose leadership of the House since 2023 has been marred with controversy.
Before a second deal was reached on Thursday afternoon, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) underscored that Trump and Musk had “detonated” a bipartisan agreement, ordering Republicans “to shut down the government and hurt the very working-class Americans that many of them pretend to want to help.”
“The 118th Congress is going out just as it started,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA) told reporters during the same press conference. “It is the GOP, the majority in the House, leading with chaos. And who is left on the sidelines? The American people.”
Democrats, such as Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), repeated Jeffries and Clark’s talking points, apportioning blame to Trump and Musk, contending the president-elect’s “insane, impractical, unrealistic” and “very, very, very last minute” idea to address the federal debt ceiling after weeks of negotiations over government funding “seriously raises concerns about his mental capacity.”
“We had a bipartisan agreement to keep the government open and to help the American people, especially those suffering from natural disasters and farmers, and the last minute, President Elon Musk came in and ordered his puppet to kill the deal, and Donald Trump followed the orders,” Goldman told the Washington Examiner.
After House GOP leaders announced the revised version of the continuing resolution, which omitted certain provisions from the original bill that Republicans, including Trump, rejected, Democrats vocally sounded off against the slimmed-down measure.
Jeffries called the GOP-negotiated deal unserious shortly after it was announced, and chants of “hell no” could be heard from outside a Democratic caucus meeting to discuss the legislation.
Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) told the Washington Examiner that what Democrats want is to not have to “negotiate with a billionaire via tweet.”
“Because that’s what this is about. It is about the tax cut fight that is happening in March,” she said. “That’s what this is all about. This is about Elon Musk and his own investments and it’s completely corrupt and broken. We’re not going to be part of it.”
Democrats stuck to their word on the House as well Thursday evening, deploying the same strategy they used in response to when House Republicans took 15 rounds of voting to elect former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to be leader of their conference in January 2023 and again nine months later when former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz filed a motion to vacate the speakership after McCarthy’s own disputed government funding deal by refusing to bail Johnson out and almost unilaterally voting against the continuing resolution.
Only two Democrats, Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) and Kathy Castor (D-FL), voted to approve the bill. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) voted present.
Several Democrats reiterated throughout the day Thursday that Musk was in charge, not Trump, an obvious dig at Trump similar to Vice President Kamala Harris’s criticism of the president-elect’s rallies from their debate.
“We had to negotiate a bipartisan agreement, and it looks like Elon Musk has pulled the rug out from underneath Mike Johnson,” incoming House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said.
Musk and his new Department of Government Efficiency co-chairman, Vivek Ramaswamy, kicked off the campaign against the first version of the continuing resolution Wednesday morning on social media, including Musk’s own platform, X.
“Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” Musk posted.
Musk, the world’s richest man, spent $277 million before the 2024 election on Trump and other Republican candidates.
But more broadly, Democrats have endeavored to undermine Republicans as the party of chaos, despite their own reputation for being the party in “disarray.”
Democrats have not been “out in front” and, instead, have been “content to watch the Republicans look bad” as Trump is already portrayed as the incumbent president, according to Claremont McKenna College politics professor John Pitney.
For Northeastern University political science professor Costas Panagopoulos, Trump had given Democrats “a Christmas gift they can use to blast GOP dysfunction and to remind voters about the chaos likely to come over the next few years.”
“Picking this fight with Democrats is probably not the best way to go into the new year and the start of the new Trump term,” Panagopoulos told the Washington Examiner. “It’s not only the beginning of a new year and a new Trump administration, but also the start of the 2026 election cycle, and it’s not too early to start to sow the seeds for a Democratic victory in the midterms.”
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University of California, Pepperdine University, and the University of Southern California politics professor Dan Schnur added, “This is the first time in weeks that the Democrats have been able to talk about anything other than why Kamala Harris lost.”
“Changing the subject to anything else is a net win for them,” Schnur told the Washington Examiner. “Trump may or may not remember that he got most of the blame for government shutdowns during his first term. But he is probably calculating that he’ll be able to change the subject as soon as he takes office, if not before, and he is probably right.”
