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Congressional leadership is working hard to figure out a way to keep Donald Trump from shutting down the government, a ploy he is most definitely considering to protest impeachment. At the highest levels—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—they're even talking passing actual spending bills before the end of the year, according to The Wall Street Journal. Meetings at the staff level have also been happening on House and Senate appropriations committees and White House staff to that end.
Before that, however, they have to get past the next deadline for money running out. That's November 21, when the continuing resolution the government is now operating under expires. All parties are proceeding as if Trump doesn't exist and are most focused on how to get past November 21, considering whether they can make the ambitious goal Pelosi and McConnell are talking about for completion of the appropriations bills before Christmas—a goal that is exceedingly unrealistic considering the amount of work and the lack of time.
So at the committee level, they're hashing out whether the next continuing resolution ends at the end of the year—McConnell's preference—or goes into next year. Even his own Appropriations chair is pushing back against McConnell. "It would be a wonderful thing to do," Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said of that deadline. "Could it be done? It could be done. The question is: Will it be?" In a word, no. Not as long as Republicans in the Senate continue to insist that money already agreed to with Democrats that's supposed to be allocated to both military and nonmilitary spending be redirected to Trump's border wall.
These spending bills require 60 vote margins in the Senate, as well as the ability to pass in the House. That's not happening. "We will not stand idly by as President Trump continues to use military families as his personal piggy bank for a failed campaign promise," Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said last week. Democrats already rejected a defense spending bill in the Senate over the issue, though it was able to pass a "minibus" funding the Departments of Interior, Agriculture and Justice, along with a few other agencies and departments. The House has passed 10 out of 12 spending bills, but nothing has yet been reconciled between House and Senate.
McConnell, as always, has two forces working against him: keeping Trump happy and keeping his own conference happy by not letting Trump shut down the government. That didn't work last year when the nation's Christmas present was a partial shutdown, the longest in U.S. history. Trump seems to be the only one who's forgotten what a political disaster that was for him.