New US House speaker tries to muster his Republicans to avert government shutdown
By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Fledgling U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson faces his first big legislative battle this week as his tries to marshal his fractious Republican majority into supporting an unconventional plan to avert a partial government shutdown beginning on Saturday.
Some House Republican hardliners were already pushing back at Johnson's proposal for a two-step stopgap bill that would not otherwise cut spending, a «clean» bill of the kind that led to the historic ouster of Johnson's predecessor, Kevin McCarthy.
This is the third fiscal showdown in Washington this year, following a months-long spring standoff over the nation's more-than-$31 trillion in debt, which brought the federal government to the brink of default.
The ongoing partisan gridlock, accentuated by fractures within the narrow 221-212 House Republican majority, led Moody's (NYSE:MCO) late on Friday to lower its credit rating outlook on the U.S. to «negative» from stable, as it noted that high interest rates would continue to drive borrowing costs higher. The nation's deficit hit $1.695 trillion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30.
Some congressional Democrats indicated they were open to Johnson's plan, which would need to pass the Democratic-majority Senate and be signed into law by President Joe Biden by midnight on Friday to avoid disrupting pay for up to 4 million federal workers, shuttering national parks and hobbling everything from financial oversight to scientific research.
«I am committed to returning Washington to regular order, but you can't fix a decades-old broken system in a matter of weeks,» Johnson, a Louisiana lawmaker who never before held a senior leadership position in Congress, said on social media
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