Top congressional leaders announced today that they have reached an agreement on a spending deal to fund the government until February 18th as lawmakers work to prevent a shutdown on Friday. House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) said in a statement that an agreement has been reached on a continuing resolution that would temporarily fund the government at the previous year’s levels until a larger bipartisan agreement can be reached on spending for the new year. The bill (TEXT) is now being considered in the House, and is expected to pass before being sent to the Senate. However, the swift passage for the bill is not completely guaranteed in the 50-50 Senate, where at least 60 votes will be needed to pass the bill. A handful of conservatives in the Senate are demanding a vote on defunding President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate or they will hold up the funding measure. Many Republicans disagree with that strategy, but if the conservatives use all the procedural tools at their disposal to delay things, it could result in a brief shutdown over the coming weekend. The group of Senate conservatives are demanding a simple-majority vote on their push to defund President Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businesses in exchange for agreeing to expedite a short-term government funding deal. The push led by Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) calls into question how far they and several of their like-minded colleagues may be willing to push the possibility of a shutdown to force the Biden administration into a concession on vaccine mandates.
The latest impasse on the saga of the long-stalled National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) revolves around Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida), who is now demanding that the Senate vote on his amendment on Uyghur forced labor in China. Democrats contend that including the amendment in the NDAA would doom the entire bill as it is irrelevant to the base defense bill. Some Republicans said they were rejecting the process set by Schumer, not the bill itself, and complained that they did not have enough time to debate the bill and have an open amendment process. With calendar time thinning and a government shutdown looming, it’s possible that the Senate abandons the NDAA process altogether. The chamber already delayed the start of its work on the annual defense policy bill, and congressional leaders might have to get creative in order to ensure that both the House and Senate can pass the same bill before the end of the year.
As the House waited to consider the continuing resolution, it worked on 15 bills under suspension of the Rules from the Natural Resources and Energy and Commerce Committees.
Adam S. Olsen, Washington, D.C.
