House Speaker Johnson pulls government funding bill [Video]

House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled a planned vote Wednesday on a stopgap funding bill that could keep the government open for the next six months after more than a dozen of his fellow Republicans walked back their support for it.

“We’re going to work through the weekend on that,” said Johnson, R-La., less than five hours before the scheduled vote.

“No vote today because we’re in the consensus-building business here in Congress with small majorities,” he said.

The U.S. government is set to partially shut down at 12:01 a.m. on Oct. 1 if a funding deal is not passed by Congress. That is slightly more than a month before the November elections, which will determine which political party controls both chambers of Congress and the next president.

Johnson and other Republican congressional leaders expected as many as 15 defections from the GOP caucus on the funding measure if the vote happened Wednesday, NBC News reported. On Monday, only two Republicans …