It's Monday and the House and Senate will trickle in to Washington with late afternoon sessions planned, a leisurely pace considering government funding runs out by the end of the day Thursday and none of the looming issues surrounding it have been resolved. Immigration? Trump is still tweeting ransom notes. Republicans are still fighting with one another and Democrats are out by Wednesday for their congressional retreat. The only thing Republican leadership has seemingly been able to settle on is that there will be another short-term funding bill punting until the third week of March, but even that is in question.
[E]ven though leaders dismissed concerns that the government could close down again when current funding runs dry on Thursday, it’s still unclear whether frustrated defense hawks will go along with the plan to pass a funding bill without a boost for the military.
"We've got to get a deal on [budget] caps," said Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.). "We have too many people, too many Republicans who are adamant that we got to come up with a defense number that takes into consideration the requirements that we need to meet for national security."
The Freedom Caucus and the defense hawks are still plotting to withhold their support, which makes getting Democratic votes more important. Leadership is talking about adding in two years of community health center funding to get those votes, but the sticking point for Democrats remains immigration, and more specifically, protection for the Dreamers under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. House Democrats are insisting on an immigration bill and a DACA solution before they agree to a budget caps deal. At this point, the likeliest outcome seems to be a temporary, one-year extension of DACA paired with some money for border security.
Trump keeps insisting "We wanna make a deal" on DACA, as he said last week during a tour of a Customs and Border Protection training center, but refuses to budge on the radical, racist changes to immigration law he's included in his ransom demands. In the middle is House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is clearly not up to the task of figuring this all out and who is every day worsening his relationship with Democrats as he enmeshes himself deeper and deeper into the Trump/Russia obstruction and coverup.
There will probably be a vote late Tuesday or early Wednesday on a short-term funding bill and it will probably pass this time. Maybe. The only thing that seems certain right now is that we're going to be stumbling from one crisis to another, with month-to-month funding bills, hostage-taking, and uncertainty the new norm.