There's still no end in sight to the omnibus spending bill negotiations that stand between Congress (and a functioning government) and a pleasant Christmas. In fact, if anything, the situation has gotten even more fraught as more ugly poison pill policy riders come up and as the House Freedom Caucus has decided to start throwing its weight around. That means that there won't be a deal by Friday's deadline, but instead another short-term funding bill. How long that stop-gap will be seems the main question on the timing of this thing.
In all likelihood, the House will vote Friday on a short-term government funding measure to avoid a shutdown, giving Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi more time to negotiate. […]
With Democrats and Republicans miles apart on an overall agreement, internal GOP rifts are beginning to surface. Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are determined to wrap up a yearlong spending bill now, but the conservative House Freedom Caucus has floated the possibility of pushing the spending fight into next year. The caucus says the holiday-season time crunch is hurting the GOP's leverage in negotiations with Democrats.
The federal government officially runs out of spending authority on Dec. 11, and the impasse has not eased. Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus have latched onto Syria as their top concern. They want to include language that would increase security screening for Iraqi and Syrian refugees. House conservatives are pushing to include that language in the spending bill, but the White House is opposed to it, despite widespread support on Capitol Hill.
House Republicans also want to add language that would tighten controls on visa-free travel in the U.S. That proposal was adopted by the House by an overwhelming bipartisan vote on Tuesday, but the GOP will likely push for it to be included in the spending bill.
Calling the December 11 deadline "arbitrary," Ryan says the "negotiations are ongoing" and "[w]e need to get it right. I don’t want us to go home until we get this done," raising the specter of Christmas Eve votes. The Freedom Caucus, however, has another plan. They want a six-week spending bill that allows them to push the fight into January, perhaps because they want a shutdown but they don't want the backlash that would come from a shutdown two weeks before Christmas. "I think that every time we get jammed up against a holiday schedule with people wanting to be back in their districts and back with their families," says Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ), "we seem to end up getting things that we dislike intensely. When we don't have that kind of pressure, there’s a little bit more of an ability to fight, and stand up on principle rather than be jammed against schedules that are important to people." Since the actual act of governing is something the maniacs "dislike intensely," consider the rest of his argument window dressing.
There's no more honeymoon for Ryan as speaker, not with the Freedom Caucus. That's despite his various overtures to them to gain their support when he was deciding to take the position. So Ryan is in the same spot Boehner always was with them. If he capitulates to their demands, disaster in the form of something like a government shutdown is pretty much guaranteed. If he ignores them and actually negotiates a deal with Democrats, and then passes that deal with Democratic support, he'll become enemy number one. The good news is this spells the end of Paul Ryan's political career. The bad news is the attendant chaos the rest of the country has to experience.