Far-right House Republicans blocked consideration of the annual defense policy bill on Tuesday, solidifying a legislative blockade and forcing an early holiday recess as they agitated for action on a voting restriction bill President Trump has championed.
The rebellion paralyzed the House for a second consecutive week and dealt yet another blow to Speaker Mike Johnson, who has struggled to corral his fractious majority to act on legislation on the Pentagon, spending and other matters.
Ultimately, Republican leaders were forced to abandon the rest of the week’s legislative schedule and send lawmakers home for the Independence Day recess earlier than planned and without the achievements they hoped to notch.
It was the latest flare-up of a fight in the G.O.P. over Mr. Trump’s demand that Congress deliver him a sweeping measure to crack down on mail-in voting and impose strict new voter registration and identification requirements.
While most Republicans back the idea in general and the House has passed the bill, it lacks the necessary support to advance in the Senate, and many G.O.P. lawmakers in both chambers have said Congress should move on and focus on other issues.
But Mr. Trump has refused to do so, and a faction of conservative members of Congress has balked at conducting any other business until the voting measure moves, effectively freezing the House floor in an effort to pressure the Senate. Tuesday’s confrontation began after some of those lawmakers demanded that House Republican leaders attach the election bill to the defense policy measure.
Mr. Johnson instead tried to address the demand through a maneuver that would have combined the two measures after the Pentagon legislation had passed. After meeting with the speaker last week when the blockade began, Mr. Trump had posted on social media to urge recalcitrant Republicans not to shut down the House floor and thwart their party’s legislation.
But the speaker’s gambit and the president’s exhortation failed. On a vote of 224 to 198, the House rejected the measure that would have allowed the defense bill and other legislation, including a foreign aid spending measure, to be considered.
Several conservatives withheld their support, saying they had little confidence the Senate would ever take up the elections bill.
“The only way to ensure the Senate passes this is to make sure it’s in the bill text of the NDAA,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna, the Florida Republican who has led the rebellion, wrote in a social media post, referring to the National Defense Authorization Act by its abbreviation.
She had sought a vote on adding the election legislation to the defense bill, but Republican leaders would not allow it.
Other conservatives piled on in opposition, some of them citing what they said was a broken promise from Mr. Johnson to allow a vote on a strict border security bill before July 4.
“It’s central,” said Representative Andy Harris, Republican of Maryland and the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, referring to the border security measure that many hard-right lawmakers had insisted upon as a condition of backing the $70 billion immigration enforcement bill Republicans pushed through this month.
The cascade of Republican grievances conspired to yield 14 defections on the critical procedural vote on Tuesday, leaving party leaders well short of the support needed to move forward with the defense measure and bringing the House floor to a standstill.
It was yet another example of the chaos that has recently upended Republicans’ agenda just months before midterm elections in which they are fighting to preserve their fragile majorities.
Among the legislation buried in the wreckage of Tuesday’s collapse was a feel-good measure aimed at bolstering House Republicans’ pitch to voters: a resolution commemorating the anniversary of their marquee law cutting taxes and spending on social programs and boosting immigration enforcement. Even that could not make it to the floor as scheduled because of the blockade.
The disarray came a week after Mr. Trump abruptly called off a signing ceremony for a bipartisan housing bill that Republicans are eager to highlight on the campaign trail. The president said he would not sign the housing measure until the voting legislation was passed. The Senate then left for a two-week Fourth of July recess, and the House was forced to abandon its legislative business as conservatives refused to budge on anything else until the election bill moved.
After Tuesday’s vote, Mr. Johnson initially said Republican leaders would regroup and try to push ahead with the Pentagon measure before sending the House home for its own break, which had been scheduled to begin on Thursday.
“It makes no sense for us to stop our very important progress as House Republicans because some Senate Democrats are refusing to do their job,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that the stumble illustrated again the reality of working with such a small majority.
But he also appeared frustrated with the faction of defectors in his conference, saying that some of them “sometimes make irrational decisions.” And by late afternoon, he had abandoned his efforts and announced the House would depart.
Neither chamber was scheduled to be in session again until July 13.
Watching from the sidelines, top Democrats said the stalemate once again underscored Republican failure to govern.
“House Republicans are the gang that cannot legislate straight,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat and minority leader. “They are a complete and total mess. And this has been the case from Day 1 of the new Congress.”
Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, has publicly declared multiple times that Senate Republicans do not have the 60 votes that would be needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster against the bill, nor enough support for overhauling the filibuster and pushing it through over Democratic opposition.
Caught in the back-and-forth over the voting measure was the annual military legislation, which would provide more than $1 trillion for Pentagon programs and a pay raise for the troops. The normally bipartisan bill was already facing more turbulence than in previous years given Democratic opposition to the war with Iran and the Pentagon’s record-high budget request for next year.
“We cannot afford a $1.6 trillion defense budget; we just can’t,” Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said on Monday. “We need a national security policy that reflects what we can actually spend money on.”
Olivia Diaz contributed reporting.
