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Ongoing spending negotiations between Congress and the White House will be playing out this week with public impeachment hearings as the backdrop. Those hearings will be beamed onto television sets across the nation starting Wednesday. Four broadcasters, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS, will have live coverage, as will cable networks including Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, and CSPAN. This means White House staff won't be able to keep boob-tube addict Donald Trump from seeing it, short of dosing him with elephant tranquilizers.
This also makes it a rather fraught week for lawmakers and White House staff negotiating to avoid a government shutdown after the current stop-gap funding measure expires at midnight on Nov. 21. As it stands, Sen. Richard Shelby told Fox News reporter Chad Pergram Monday that he's tentatively meeting with key lawmakers on Tuesday, and that they're looking at a another stop-gap bill to pass next week that would expire sometime between Dec. 20 and 22.
The House has scheduled a just-in-time vote for next week, just before the Nov. 21 deadline, possibly leaving it to the last minute to preclude Senate or White House mischief and not giving them time to cook something up, or perhaps to not distract from the impeachment focus of this week.
The reality is that Trump has two opportunities between now and the end of the year to do his worst: shut down the government over impeachment. That could happen next week, or in a repeat of last year, hours before Christmas. No one knows right now, but everyone is aware of the possibility. A source involved in the budget negotiations tells Fox's Pergram that impeachment and Trump's reaction to it is a "known unknown" right now.
