Congress is starkly divided over very different paths to preventing a federal government shutdown with the Senate charging ahead with a bipartisan package to temporarily fund the government, but the Republican led House is slogging through a longshot effort with no real chance of funding the government by Saturday’s midnight deadline.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) told members of the House Republican conference Wednesday morning that he will not bring the Senate’s bipartisan continuing resolution (Section-by-Section Summary) to the House floor for a vote, even after the Senate voted to advance it in a bipartisan fashion Tuesday night. Senate leaders unveiled the continuing resolution Tuesday afternoon to fund the government through November 17th. The legislation also includes roughly $6.15 billion in funding for Ukraine, $5.99 billion in disaster assistance and it would temporarily extend the expiring authority of the Federal Aviation Administration. The Senate advanced the legislation in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote,77-19, and Instead of moving the bipartisan Senate CR, McCarthy said he plans to bring yet another GOP-crafted stopgap bill to the floor on Friday, legislation that will be dead on arrival in the Senate but he believes will potentially open negotiations with Democrats in the upper chamber. McCarthy’s stopgap measure would keep the government open for 30 days, decrease spending to a top-line level of $1.471 trillion for that duration, and include border security provisions. McCarthy wants to pass the stopgap in conjunction with continuing to move spending bills which has been a key demand among conservatives. In trying to coalesce his fractious conference around a stopgap funding proposal of his own, the Speaker is now aiming to reframe the funding battle as a choice for President Joe Biden — and his hard-line opponents as siding with the president on border security issues.
The Senate plan is to pass their continuing resolution by Thursday or Friday and send it over to the House before government funding technically expires at 11:59 P.M. on Saturday. Senate leadership are betting that if they jam the House right before the deadline, a much weakened Speaker McCarthy will just relent and bring it to the House floor, where it would likely pass in a bipartisan vote. Still, to get the bill through the Senate, Democrats may need to make additional concessions. Several Republican senators have said they would like to see changes to the bill, even though they voted to get onto the legislative vehicle that will carry it forward. For example, Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida) wants to add $16.5 billion to the disaster relief fund, called the amount included in the stopgap “totally inadequate for Floridians.”
House Republicans voted to advance four conservative spending bills on Tuesday night that nonetheless doesn’t move Congress any closer at all to preventing a government shutdown. The rule passed 216-212, with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Georgia), as the sole Republican to vote against it. The relatively routine vote to bring the bills to the House floor for debate gave Speaker McCarthy a small win after days of Republican infighting between moderates and a contingent of hardline House conservatives over how to fund the government. But the move will likely do little to change the dynamics underlying the fight over government spending, with just days to go before government funding expires. Even if the House were to pass all four bills to fund the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, State and Agriculture for another year, they contain spending cuts that make them dead on arrival in the Senate.
For today, as the Senate continues work on the legislative vehicle for the continuing resolution, the House convened at 9:00 A.M. and is continuing work on two of the four spending bills, H.R. 4365 – Making appropriations for the Department of Defense for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024 and H.R. 4367 – Making appropriations for the Department of Homeland Security for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024.
