Transcript of Republicans who defied Trump explain vote against spending bill

Tonight, House Republicans have failed to pass legislation to keep the federal government running for the millions of Americans who depend on it.

This is Washington. This is how the the lawmaking is done. It's a long process. Sometimes it takes a while to reach consensus, but we're gonna do the right thing here tonight.

That was house speaker Mike Johnson who could not corral enough of his own party members behind what was actually their plan b legislation after Elon Musk and president-elect Trump sank a bipartisan plan a yesterday. Today, both men were behind the measure tonight, but, again, not enough of their fellow Republicans were as well. So plan a is dead. Plan b just died. And we just learned from GOP whip Steve Scalise that plan c, they had been looking at, looks doubtful as well.

The question tonight is, once again, what now? Sienes Manaraju, joins us at the capitol. So I wonder what you're hearing from from lawmakers, particularly since, Steve Scalise is now moving away from an option that was at least out there to try to get this passed on a simple majority.

Yeah. Look. I in fact, the speaker of the house just addressed reporters moments ago, and I asked him what is the next plan, and he really didn't have any specifics. He said they were gonna regroup. They're gonna trigger try to figure out what the next steps were, and he attacked Democrats even though there were Republicans also who voted against this plan on the house floor despite the push from Donald Trump.

Now 1 big reason why there were Republicans who voted and defied Donald Trump was his demand, Trump's demand to suspend the national debt limit for 2 years. Remember, this is something that congress has typically deal with every so often, but it is is expected to be dealt with next year. But Donald Trump recognized that this will be a complication next year for his agenda and now demanding in the 11th hour to inject this into this government funding fight, saying it must be addressed right now. But here's the problem. There are a lot of Republicans who fundamentally oppose raising the national debt limit, dealing with that without any spending cuts whatsoever.

So as a result, you saw a revolt on the right and you have and some of those members I caught up with Jim and they expressed why they're concerned with Donald Trump's demands. Mhmm.

This just stinks. That's why America doesn't trust government, and it's for good, goddamn reason.

And you said shut it down.

That's what it takes to bring us to the table.

Any extra supplemental ought to stand on its own merits and not be attached to it, and it ought to have pay fors, and the debt limit must not be increased without commensurate spending cuts and fiscal reform.

But when I ran for office, I said that I I would not vote to raise the debt ceiling. And so I haven't I've never voted to raise

the debt

ceiling. And, I mean, I I love Donald Trump, but he didn't vote me into office. My district did.

You wanna shut it down?

I'm not afraid of a shutdown.

And you're hearing some of those members saying they are not afraid to go to a government shutdown. So where does this go from here, Jim? It is really uncertain because the Democrats said they had a deal on the table that Donald Trump essentially forced to collapse. Then now what? No 1 really knows, which could mean a shutdown with the by midnight tomorrow night and a prolonged 1 at that.

Yeah. And those are Republicans saying they're not afraid of a a shutdown, which seems to be them owning that they're bringing about a shutdown even though you have JD Vance and others blaming us on Democrats. Manaraju, thanks so much. So joining me now is Republican congressman Don Bacon from Nebraska, and he's joining us from Capitol Hill. Congressman, thanks so much for taking the time tonight.

Good evening, Jim. So you and I, we speak frequently, and and you're someone who who negotiates with the members of the other party. You've voted for bipartisan deals on a number of issues, and there was a bipartisan deal yesterday killed by, it seems, Musk and Trump, and now Republicans find themselves, in this pickle. Was that the mistake there, killing what was a bipartisan agreement?

Yes, Jim. To answer your question, to the point, I think there's 2 or 3 things that we could take away from this. We had a reasonably good deal, and by the way, you're never gonna get a debt ceiling increased or a CR pass without Democrat support. So we have about 30 republicans that will not ever support that and would have been a tight majority. That means you gotta have some democrat support, which means you gotta have a bipartisan bill.

So that's the first point. 2nd point, the bill that we had yesterday had a lot of wins for Republicans, a lot of great things we've been trying to get for 2 years now, but to get that, we had to give away a couple to a couple of priorities that the Democrats wanted. And I thought it was a reasonably good compromise. The problem was 1 or 2 people in our conference, instead of just opposing it, I had to go out and demonize and and distort things provisions in the bill. So for example, our salary is a 174,000, but they put out we're gonna get 240,000.

That wasn't true. That we were going to prevent any kind of investigations on those who served on the j 6 committee. That is not in the bill. I could go on and on. So this stuff was put out by members of our own party, then you have these social media influencers with a 1,000,000 followers.

They pick up on it and they throw gasoline on the fire. That's what we had yesterday so and people run away from that. I'm sort of used to it. I've been a target of of a lot of the a lot of these same people. So Elon Musk took up some of the this false data and put that back out there.

And this is the my third point. If you're on the same side and you don't like what you're hearing, pick up the telephone and call your friend, your ally. Why tweet and and throw your ally under the bus? And I think this could have been easily resolved through a phone call, to speaker Johnson, worked worked their way through it. Today, I voted for this bill today, because it would prevent a shutdown and it was a skinny CR, but I think we're plan c is not gonna happen because we don't have a majority Republican votes for this.

Yep. So plan d is probably gonna be something that we had yesterday with maybe some smaller revisions to it, and we're gonna have to work with president Trump on the debt ceiling.

And does that mean you're gonna have to work with Democrats? In other words, do some horse trading with Democrats to get this across the finish line?

Jim, by definition, I believe when it you're talking to CR or a debt ceiling, either 1. There's enough Republicans who'll never vote for it, so you have to work across the aisle. This has been speaker Johnson's dilemma. He he knows he has to have some Democrat support to get these things passed, so that's why he was working across the aisle and he was and he's and I I trust him. He's only gonna agree to the Democrat priorities that he can tolerate and live with, and and I thought he did a a good job.

It got demonized, a lot of lies about it. And I I think in the end, people will see through. I believe president Trump today, after hearing the facts, actually thought this what we had yesterday was reasonably good bill. He just wants to get the debt ceiling, modified.

So I

think he I think we were able to pull president Trump over today to what we were trying to do.

Well, we'll see. I wanna talk about the debt debt limit because you know house Republicans have repeatedly lambasted Democrats for raising the debt limit. Now they want to suspend it for 2 years. Mhmm. And by the way, it's a Democrat suspicion.

And listen, some of this is public because Republicans have been quite public about extending the Trump, tax tax cuts. That that is because they wanna allow an expanded debt ceiling to what will tax cuts that will add to the deficit. We know that's the CBO estimate. So so why should voters believe, including your voters believe, that Republicans actually wanna cut spending if they wanna suspend the limit for 2 years and then pass a big tax cut.

No. I think there's, 2 things there. 1, I do believe in extending the tax cuts because I think it makes our economy competitive. Like, 21% tax rate for businesses is what the average is in the world. We don't wanna go back to 35% or somewhere higher.

So I do think we wanna do that, but I believe in the end we gotta do a debt commission because 72% of our spending is mandatory spending. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Only 28% is discretionary. If you subtracted the entire discretionary budget, all of it, we still have a $800,000,000,000 a year deficit. And so we got we gotta get together, Republicans and Democrats, figure out how we're gonna preserve Social Security and Medicare, but yet get ahead of the this exploding debt that's coming from the mandatory spending. It it can only be done in a bipartisan way.

If Republicans try to fix it, we'll get killed the next election. If Democrats try to do it by themselves, they'll get killed. We gotta do this together. And I think a commission's the only way to do it and we've done 1 before but the difference was we did not have in the previous 1 that whatever they come up with, you have to put it on the floor for an up or down vote. This commission, you gotta have it put on the floor for an up or down vote.

Let me ask you about 1 more measure here because, congressman Jared Moskowitz, according to sources from CNN, pointed, in a Democratic caucus meeting that provisions, restrictions rather, on US investments in China were removed from the original bipartisan version of the bill. We should note, Elon Musk, he's got a lot of investments in China. Removing those restrictions, would benefit him. Do you believe that in any way influenced the removal of that provision, which again came from the bipartisan bill?

Well, I surely hope not, and I have I only heard that about an hour ago for the first time, by the way, so I did hear this from 1 other Democrat. But I think in the end, just let's stay big picture here. We should be very careful about what business we do with China. We should restrict our exports. We should restrict our investments there.

They are an adversary. They're they got a 1000000 Uighurs and slave labor camps and and doing forced sterilization. What they're doing to Hong Kong is terrible. What they're doing at Tibet is terrible. And they're not a good faith trader with us.

I mean, they they stack the duck against our our our trade. And so I think we should play hardball with them and I think it's a mistake to take those provisions out.

Okay. We'll see if it ends up in in the final version. K. If there is 1, congressman Don Bacon, we appreciate you joining us, this Thursday evening.

Out front tonight, the breaking news. The US closer to a government shutdown at this hour. A house vote moments ago failing, and it comes after Elon Musk blew up a deal that was headed for passage. The world's richest man right now holding the country hostage. It's all him calling the shots, it seems.

The government shutdown could be, just over 24 hours away, and Capitol Hill is scrambling right now. After Trump's self proclaimed first buddy torpedoed the deal that had been months in the making, Democrats and Republicans had finally agreed to a deal. They were ready to go and go home for the holiday. But then Elon came in, heard about it, and tweeted 92 times about the bill since 4 AM yesterday morning. 92 times.

Tweet after tweet before Trump, ever mentioned the deal. Now a person who is not elected and who has never been elected has just blown up a bipartisan bill to fund the entire US government. Musk's newfound power is stunning Some on Capitol Hill today.

He's president and Trump is now vice president. That's clear.

All of a sudden, we have an outside influence who believes, I think, he is president, and that's president Musk.

Now that's 1 1 view. Another view is that summer brandy am a hero trying to officially give him the power that he hasn't been elected to have. Senator Rand Paul tweets, the speaker of the house need not be a member of congress. Nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk. Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene, ready to enter the scrum, responding to Paul, quote, I'd be open to supporting Elon Musk for speaker of the house.

Now just to give you a sense of how fast this is all unraveling for the current speaker, Mike Johnson, who spent months working on a spending deal and getting it over the finish line. Just 2 days ago, Marjorie Taylor Greene said this about Johnson when she was asked if she'd support him as speaker in the next congress. I'm not answering your ridiculous question. I've already said publicly that I'm screwed. Yeah.

Well, times change, a day passes, and guess what? Elon Musk should be speaker, says Xi. Well, Musk does not have time to be speaker, much less president. He is spending, in fact, an inordinate amount of time on x or Twitter as many refer to it. He currently sends dozens of tweets a day.

He does not even have time to actually even be CEO. According to 1 Tesla investor, Ross Gerber, quote, having your CEO not working at your company and working at the job of having to fire government employees. As I'm a shareholder, I'm paying someone to not work for my company. Now, look, of course, Musk is not actually firing government employees yet. He's just spending more than 20 hours a day tweeting about doing it and about various other things.

The New York Times found 1 week in September that almost a third of Musk's 171 posts were false misleading or missing vital context. And now his tweets have caused a deal that took months of negotiating between Democrats and Republicans to implode. And part of what's so bizarre about this last minute blow up is that both Musk and Trump spent the day with speaker Johnson this past weekend at the army navy game. Mean, they were all together. They were all hanging up.

None of this came up. No 1 had any, oh gosh. Hey. We're gonna just blow up the government next week. No.

They were all friends. Lovey dovey. They could've talked about it, but Musk waited till the final hours to come out with his tweet storm. And blowing up the deal gets a lot of attention. Now eventually, though, there will be a deal.

Some way, shape, or form, there will be a deal. Because the truth is, if Musk wanted to create a sound and fury that signifies something, he could focus on shutting down the waste, not the government. Just imagine if he was tweeting nonstop and talking nonstop about Medicare and Medicaid fraud. The Department of Health and Human Services estimated a combined total of over $100,000,000,000 of just improper payments in those programs last year alone. What if Musk used AI and his technology prowess to end that?

Manu Raju is on Capitol Hill. And, Manu, you know, we are in this unbelievable moment. Right? 36 hours ago, 48 hours ago, for sure, nobody saw anything like this on the horizon, yet here we are. What is the latest you're learning?

Yeah. There were Republicans who defied Donald Trump just moments ago on the house floor as of this part of is 11th hour plan. Donald Trump making this these demands yesterday, scuttling a bipartisan deal that led to the Republicans trying to put some other proposal across the finish line to make Donald Trump happy. Essentially, a heed to his demands changes to this proposal. This bill went down.

174 voted for this plan. 235 voted against it. That included 38 Republicans who voted against it. Just 2 Democrats voted for it. Now 1 of the big changes that Donald Trump threw in late in this process was to include a suspension of the national debt limit.

Remember, if the debt limit is brief, that would lead them to the first ever debt default in American history, but that would was gonna be punted until sometime next year. They wouldn't have to deal with it until next year. Donald Trump has, however, changed his mind. He wanted to deal with it now so he wouldn't have to worry about it when he's present. But Republican conservatives didn't like the plan, and speaker and the leader on the House Democrats also pushed back.

Senator Lee, are you gonna are you gonna support this plan? Are you gonna support this plan?

Musk Johnson proposal is laughable.

So you're no. Are you gonna whip your members against it? No. Are you gonna whip your members against it? What policy do you guys not like?

So the policy that president Musk is advancing is 1 that is about cutting Medicare and Social Security so that he can give tax breaks to billionaires.

And that last point refers to the fact that Democrats believe that by suspending the national debt limit as part of this plan, it would actually make it easier for Donald Trump next year to pass a lot of his agenda, including his sweeping tax cut plan that Donald Trump wants to move ahead with. Democrats believe that giving away on the issue of the debt limit would take away their leverage at a key point next year to battle Donald Trump while they're in the minority. So where does this all leave everything, Erin? It's unclear. We are headed into a government shutdown by by midnight tomorrow night if there is no agreement, and there is no path to an agreement at the moment because of Donald Trump's demands that it caused a rebellion on the right and that caused republic democrats to push back leading to major questions about what's next.

And if there's a shutdown, how long will it last?

Alright, Manu. Thank you very much. On Capitol Hill tonight. Then let's go now to the Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal. She is the chair of the progressive caucus.

And, congresswoman, I really appreciate your time. Thank you. A moment no 1 expected to be in here 48 hours ago because there was a deal. Now now it's it's gone. So I guess the question for you at this moment, now you had Musk come in, the thing blew up, the Republicans put out a bill, it failed.

Here we are. Are you open to negotiating again, or are you in a position where you're saying you're only gonna accept the bill that had already been agreed to before Musk got involved?

Well, Erin, you did such a good job of describing the process that we went through. It's a 4 corners process, which means all the parties have to agree. That was the deal that got negotiated that Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house, the Republican speaker of the house negotiated. Now what happened here was laughable. This bill that they just put up, they are in the majority.

Republicans control the house. They are in the majority, and they couldn't even get the majority of votes for this bill that they put up. So this is a long process to go through these negotiations. We already had a bill. We negotiated.

Mike Johnson agreed to it. And because, as you said, Elon Musk, a billionaire, tweeted about it, President Musk tweeted about it. These Republicans, tried to go around their own caucus, their all the work that's been done, and they are in charge of shutting down the government now. That is what's gonna happen tomorrow night at midnight if we don't come to a deal. So we don't have time.

We gotta go back to the negotiated deal. That is exactly what we've spent so much time negotiating. We didn't get everything we wanted. They didn't get everything they wanted. And let me remind you, it is still senate Democrats that have to agree to this as well.

The White House, a Democratic White House has to agree to it as well. Alright. So let's just pass the bill that we already negotiated.

Alright. Now the reality of it is though, of course, is I guess these things end up being a blame game. You had a deal and and and everybody knows that. Right? There was a deal and then Musk gets involved.

Now, that we're in this new world, he's tweeted, if Dems reject this and the government shuts down, they deserve to lose big time in the midterms. Obviously, that's political gamesmanship. There's also money that he can put to bear behind that. Are you concerned that Democrats could now get blamed for a shutdown? If Republicans keep putting out a bill and it keeps failing, does the blame go to you?

What I'm concerned about is that a billionaire who is not even elected is acting like a like a a a shadow president and doing the work that Republicans have to do here. They are in the majority, and so, no. I'm not concerned that we're gonna get blamed. This is clearly on the Republicans. We had a negotiated deal.

We could've all gone home tonight. But you know what is really the tragedy here, is all the civilian employees that are not gonna get paid tomorrow night, all the, you know, the FAA employees who are not gonna be able to work, so families are gonna have their flights delayed, all the small farmers who are desperately needing aid, all the cities that need disaster relief, these are all things that we negotiated. Why did they blow it up? I think this is really important, and Manu referred to it. They blew it up because Donald Trump also inserted a suspension of the debt ceiling.

Remember that the Republicans, under Donald Trump, with the Trump tax scam 1.0, increased the deficit by $2,300,000,000,000, and now they wanna be able to do that again with the vast majority of the benefits going to the wealthiest. That's why they're pushing for this debt, debt ceiling suspension. So every piece of this is wrong from the negotiation and walking away from the negotiated deal to taking out a bunch of things that were part of that deal to adding, an absolutely unacceptable thing into the deal.

So when it when it comes to Musk, Republican senator Rand Paul, I mentioned him a moment ago, but, you know, he put out there that, the speaker of the house need not be a member of the house. Right? When he's referring nothing would disrupt the swamp more than electing Elon Musk. And, obviously, he's technically right. The house speaker doesn't need need to be a member of congress.

If that's where we get, then then obviously there'll be a lot more conversations to be had.

And, of course, any deal in the house would need to also pass the senate where Democrats still hold the majority for a few more days. My Democratic source tonight is Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren. And, senator, it's great to have you here. Hakim Jeffries is the the Democratic leader in the house. He said earlier that not only was he a no on this new deal that failed tonight, he was a hell no.

Yeah.

What's are you a hell no? What's your view of this?

Look. Leader Jeffries is exactly right on this, and I find it just laughable that the Republicans are saying, well, actually, the Republicans couldn't come together and cut a deal, but the Democrats should've gotten out there and saved their sorry butts and actually pushed through a deal. That's just nuts. The Republicans can't come together because they can't stick to the deal they originally negotiated, and this is on them. And it really is the reminder who now runs the Republican Party, and it's Musk.

He's the 1 who started tweeting at 4:30 this morning about what a bad deal this was and how terrible it was. And Donald Trump trails along much much later and says, yeah. Terrible deal. And then Donald Trump is the 1 who says, you know, maybe we should get rid of the debt ceiling altogether. But is that what the Republicans proposed?

No. What the Republicans say is, let's just do a little period of time of getting rid of it long enough to be able to grease the skids, to be able to pass a big, big tax giveaway to billionaires.

So you don't think Democrats should step in to help Republicans here? But but on the debt ceiling steal. On the debt ceiling, which is, you know, the max that the the government can borrow, it's something that, you know, we almost saw how how catastrophic that could be not long ago when the they were defaulting on the nation's debt. You said that you agreed with Trump when he said that Congress should terminate the debt limit, not have to govern by hostage taking as you put it. But then when when Republicans put forward this idea of raising it for 2 more years, you said that that would be it would grease the wheels for his tax handouts for billionaires in a terrible deal.

What do you wanna see happen here?

I wanna see us get rid of the debt ceiling. I've wanted that for years. Because year after year after year after year, the Republicans have used the debt ceiling in order to hold our economy and our nation and our good name around the world hostage. And when Donald Trump says, just get rid of it. It is not good for our country.

Boy, I think he is exactly right on that. But that is not what Elon Musk and the Republicans went for in the house. What they said is, let's preserve the debt ceiling to be able to use it as a cudgel whenever we want. But let's just open up this narrow path while the Republicans are trying to pass a 4 and a half $1,000,000,000,000 giveaway in taxes that will mostly be stocked up by millionaires, billionaires, and giant corporations. Let's just open a path for them to be able to do that without ever having to worry about the debt ceiling.

Yeah. But there are some Democrat colleagues of yours who seem to say, we do kinda wanna hold on to to the debt ceiling because it may be the only point of leverage your party has in a few months from now.

The way I see it is we have watched over and over and over as the Republicans have held our economy hostage. And when Donald Trump says, let's just make a deal and get rid of it altogether, I hear him on that. When Elon Musk and the rest of the Republicans say, let's just create a little path so we can pass a 4 and a half $1,000,000,000,000 tax cut, that's a terrible deal, and nobody should go for that.

And so your view here is that Elon Musk is in charge, not Donald Trump?

I think that's pretty clear. Look at the timeline on how this unfolded, and look at what was ultimately proposed. It was not Donald Trump's proposal that went to the house. It was Elon Musk's proposal. Looks like to

me, you're getting on the dollar. Demand there for the debt ceiling, which is not something that Elon Musk they they had they opposed essentially the deal that Mike Johnson had negotiated with Democrats, but for different reasons. Elon Musk didn't like everything that was included in it. Trump wanted to add the debt ceiling.

You know, but But we actually are now getting our first taste. This is it. Live and in living color about what it means to have this, Doge, right, out here and what that's gonna mean. And that's where Elon Musk's fingerprints are all over this. Because, for example, what this bill says is, oh, let's get rid of funding for research on pediatric cancer.

Let's get rid of funding for research on early detection of cervical cancer and breast cancer. Let's get rid of funding for, research on children with Down syndrome and on sickle cell anemia. Let's get rid of those things so that we can make way for tax cuts for billionaires. That is Elon Musk's notion of efficiency.

Is this what you know, we we talk about what it looks like when Democrats are in the minority and Republicans are about to have total control of government. Mhmm. How does that look different now that Elon Musk's Musk is part of this and is something that is going to be in this in your view?

So I think the dynamic has now changed. We've never seen this before in American history where a billionaire who obviously contributed a lot to the campaign, a billionaire donor, is now calling the shots with the majority party and telling the majority party that they will do what he wants. And if they don't, implying he's gonna spend his money and encourage people to run

against the wall. Outright said that he would primary the I'm I'm They they would face political ruin if they

did not. Stop that. Mhmm.

Can I ask you, though, because, you know, we're we're talking about the leader of the Republican party? We're talking about Donald Trump, Elon Musk. We're hearing from Democratic leaders here. President Biden has been very quiet on this. Are you surprised that he has not weighed in more?

You know, right now, he's just watching the Republicans eat each other alive. And that's what that's the Republicans are in charge in the house. They have to initiate the spending bill that gets us this ongoing resolution to keep the government open. Those are just the laws. And right now, the Republicans can't get their act together to make that happen.

And you don't think it president Biden should weigh in?

Do you think he's gonna help the Republicans negotiate a deal? I I just I don't see where that comes from.

Well, just necessarily more on, like, what his party should do, how Democrats should handle this, their view of

these.

He has handled

the president. We are saying to the Republicans, we spent months negotiating a deal with you, and there are parts in it that we didn't like. There are parts in it you didn't like. That's the nature of legislation in this place. But we actually cut a deal that's gonna be the continuing resolution, keeps the government open until next March so you can get yourselves organized when you own the house, the senate, and the White House, and you can put the full budget on the table.

That sounds to me like a pretty damn good deal that was available to the Republicans. And yet, here it was going forward. We were all talking about, oh, the vote, will it be at 11 o'clock this morning or 2 o'clock this afternoon? We'll get this done. And the answer is Elon Musk gets on x at 4:30 in the morning, and the whole deal shatters.

Is it clear to you who senator Schumer should be calling and negotiating with this point? Is it speaker Mike Johnson? Is it Donald Trump? Is it Elon Musk?

Let me say this 1 more time. There is no 1 for leader Schumer to negotiate with. The Republicans can't get their own act together. And until they can, there's nothing for us to do. We have a deal.

There's a deal sitting on the table. You know what? The Republicans right now could go back over there and vote, send the deal that had been negotiated, which would pass because it would have bipartisan support, send it over to the senate. I predict it would pass the senate, and we would be done. Crisis averted.

But the Republicans would rather have a crisis, would rather blow this up because they're all doing whatever the great and powerful mister Musk wants them to do.

Do you think there's gonna be a government shutdown? Ask Elon Musk. Senator Elizabeth Warren, we'll see if he joins us out here on the balcony. Thank you for that.