Wednesday is the new deadline for Congress to fund government, and details of their package could be announced as early as Monday. But that Wednesday deadline might end up being pushed back again with another short-term spending bill of a few days, as the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill is still fraught with contentious policy riders.
The House could vote Wednesday at the earliest if the catch-all spending bill, known as an omnibus, is made public on Monday in order to meet a rule that all legislation be made public for three calendar days before a vote.
But the House won’t have its first votes of the week until Tuesday night — an indication that the omnibus might not be released until as late as possible.
The Senate will likely have less than 24 hours to pass either the omnibus bill or yet another stopgap measure to avoid a government shutdown Wednesday night.
It's that 24 hours in the Senate that has some in leadership worried, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who warns that if the Senate has "to go through the regular procedures it could take up to eight days, so obviously it's going to take a little cooperation unless people want to spend Christmas here." It's easy in the Senate to gum up the works, and a few of the Republican presidential candidates are the likeliest—but not only—members of the body who like to derail things. For example, Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) is contemplating whether he'll refuse to allow the Senate to bypass the regular procedural hoops to force it to include his block on funding for refugee resettlement. Right now he's not ruling it out, saying "I haven't thought that through."
Complicating matters is a parallel tax extenders package that contains billions of renewals in tax credits. Democrats are insisting on both extending the child tax credit and indexing it to inflation so that it increases over time, which Republicans are balking at. They're trying to make six corporate tax credits—worth nearly $700 billion—permanent. The omnibus spending package and the tax extenders have been linked in the negotiations, but don't have to be passed together. While the tax credits expire at the end of the year, they can be renewed retroactively in January. Government funding, however, has to pass.