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The Congress and the White House are ready to head into an incredibly fraught final two weeks of the congressional year, perhaps even more challenging than last year’s, which culminated in the most damaging and longest government shutdown in the nation's history. The elements for a similar fight are all there this year, with the added backdrop of impeachment and a wounded Donald Trump. His demand is the same as ever: his border wall.
"Reports surfaced Wednesday that Trump would refuse to sign funding bills if there wasn't some agreement on the wall," The Hill reports. "Eric Ueland, the White House director of legislative affairs, declined to say whether Trump would sign a fiscal 2020 package if it didn’t include a new measure for DHS." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell isn't helping. "We’re stalled," McConnell said Wednesday. "We're stalled because the agreement that we all reached in the summer has not been honored by the other side."
The House has actually passed 10 of 12 spending bills adhering to the agreement made over the summer. The House still intends to complete them all before the current stopgap bill expires at midnight on Dec. 20. "My position is we need to pass all of the bills prior to us leaving here," said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. "I don't want to contemplate having bills pushed over because if we can't get agreement, then that's going to be a partial shutdown."
So there we are. The likeliest outcome, says one appropriator, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, is a combination of completed appropriations and the funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security and related agencies—including potential wall funding—left over, possibly funded by another short-term bill. "I think for the vast majority of federal responsibilities we will meet those in a normal way, but for some of the bills I’m not sure if they can resolve the remaining issues," she said. Or not. It could also be a shutdown of those agencies just like last year’s, because Trump is pissed and raging about his life.