Six-month funding bill fails in House with under two weeks until shutdown

The House failed to pass a six-month stopgap spending bill on Wednesday, and now Congress only has 12 days to avert a government shutdown.

The bill would have kept funding the same until March 2025 and required proof of U.S. citizenship nationally when registering to vote, but the GOP could not get all of its members on board.

Fourteen Republicans voted against the measure for a vote of 220-202. Two Reps., Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), voted present.

The main sticking point for Republicans who voted no was a lack of spending cuts in the measure.

GOP chaos

With the possibility of a new government headed by Republicans in January, they also may not have wanted to be locked into current spending levels until March.

Members of the Freedom Caucus who had pushed for the citizenship requirement for voting still voted no on the measure even though that was included.

Freedom Caucus chairman Andy Harris (R-MD), in one of his first acts of leadership, encouraged caucus members to vote for the measure.

“We owe it to our constituents to pass legislation preventing illegal immigrants from voting in federal elections—an actual threat to our democracy,” Harris posted on X. “I urge my colleagues to protect the integrity of our elections and pass the CR/SAVE Act.”

The measure likely would not have made it through the Democrat-dominated Senate, even if Republicans did manage to pass it.

Who gets blamed?

A government shutdown right before an election could be blamed on either party and impact that party's results, though Republicans more often get the blame due to biased media coverage.

The House is already just about evenly divided, so it would not take much to push it to one side or the other.

While shutdowns have loomed in the past, more often than not there is a last-minute compromise and the shutdown is averted.

Former President Donald Trump had suggested before the vote that if the voting citizenship requirement didn't pass both houses of Congress, Republicans should force a shutdown.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) disagreed, however, and said that a shutdown would harm Republicans' election chances if it were obvious that they had caused it.