The House on Tuesday headed toward passage of legislation to keep federal funding flowing into early next year, after Democrats said they would step in to rescue a plan opposed by many Republicans to avert a shutdown at the end of the week.
The Democratic support was expected to be enough to overcome the resistance of G.O.P. conservatives and push through the bill under an expedited procedure that required a supermajority. With funding for federal agencies set to expire at midnight on Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson was using the maneuver as a last resort, gambling that a substantial number of Democrats would rally to help him to pass a package that his own party refused to embrace.
The move by the newly elected speaker — who won his post only three weeks ago — came after hard-right lawmakers increasingly said they would not support the measure because it maintained government spending at current levels.
“I want to cut spending right now, and I would like to put policy riders” on the bill, Mr. Johnson said. “But when you have a three-vote majority — as we do right now — we don’t have the votes. So what we need to do is avoid the government shutdown.”
Under the procedure he chose, the legislation would need a two-thirds majority for passage.
Shortly before the vote, House Democratic leaders announced their caucus would support the measure. Many of them had questioned the proposal because it contains staggered deadlines for funding different parts of the federal government, one on Jan. 19 and another on Feb. 2. But they said Democrats would vote for it because it did not include any spending cuts or policy changes — both demands of hard-right Republicans — and because they saw no other way to prevent a shutdown.
“We have consistently made clear that a government shutdown would hurt the economy, our national security and everyday Americans during a very fragile time and must be avoided,” top Democrats wrote in a statement, led by Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House minority leader.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, told reporters that he wanted the Senate to vote on the bill “as soon as possible.”
Despite criticism of the Johnson plan by the White House when it was released last weekend, Mr. Schumer said he had consulted with the administration and “both of us agreed, the White House and myself, that if this can avoid a shutdown, it will be a good thing.”
Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, predicted that the measure would receive bipartisan agreement and defended it as a way to give Republicans more time to pass the dozen individual spending measures that lawmakers are supposed to enact each year to fund the government. He also argued that the bill’s omission of funding for Israel or Ukraine gave Republicans more leverage to debate those foreign aid packages without the threat of a shutdown looming over the party.
Passage of the plan is likely to rely on a similar coalition of Democrats and mainstream Republicans as that used by Mr. Johnson’s predecessor, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to avert a shutdown in September and to suspend the debt ceiling earlier in the year. Those steps cost Mr. McCarthy his job.
Mr. Johnson has inherited the same spending dilemmas that dogged Mr. McCarthy, a California Republican. Hard-right Republicans have insisted on loading up the individual government spending bills with deep cuts and conservative policy provisions that mainstream, politically vulnerable Republicans have refused to support.
At the same time, some conservatives have flatly refused to back any sort of stopgap spending measure, including one that Mr. McCarthy advanced in September that included drastic cuts to government programs — in many cases as much as 29 percent.
On Tuesday, some of those same hard-line conservatives who moved to oust Mr. McCarthy vented their anger at Mr. Johnson. The House Freedom Caucus, a group of approximately three dozen hard-right lawmakers, announced that it would oppose the measure.
“It contains no spending reductions, no border security and not a single meaningful win for the American people,” the group wrote in a statement. “Republicans must stop negotiating against ourselves over fears of what the Senate may do with the promise ‘roll over today and we’ll fight tomorrow.’”
But in a sign that there was little appetite to depose Mr. Johnson for relying on Democrats to pass the legislation, as they did to Mr. McCarthy, the lawmakers continued, “While we remain committed to working with Speaker Johnson, we need bold change.”
Representative Chip Roy of Texas, an influential conservative, said that some of his colleagues believed Mr. Johnson’s promise that he wouldn’t advance another stopgap bill to fund the government and was only doing so because he had only become speaker a few weeks ago.
“If you’re storming the beaches of Normandy and the commanding officer goes down and somebody else takes over you don’t say, ‘Oh, well you get a honeymoon period,’” Mr. Roy said. “You got to pick it up and go. And so for me, this was a strategic failure. We should not do this. You should not be passing $400 billion under suspension of the rules. And that’s what we’re going to be doing.”
He continued: “We’re trying to give the speaker a little grace, but today’s a mistake, right out of the gate.”
Reporting was contributed by Luke Broadwater, Kayla Guo, Annie Karni and Carl Hulse.
