Since Congress took a whole week off for Thanksgiving, despite the fact that they urgently need to MAGA-proof everything before the House reverts to Republicans, the weeks between now and Christmas are going to be a nightmare. It’s a lot: funding the government to keep it open; lifting the debt ceiling to prevent global economic catastrophe; pandemic funding to deal with the triple threat of flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV); funds to help Ukraine survive the winter. That’s just the stuff that absolutely has to happen, not to mention the things that would be really, really good for Democrats going into 2024: finally getting the DREAM Act done; election and voting reforms; and restoring monthly child tax credit payments.
The Senate is preparing to check one off the “it’d be nice to have” list, marriage equality. Before they left for Thanksgiving, they advanced the Respect for Marriage Act, legislation establishing federal protections for same-sex and biracial marriages, with 12 Republican votes. They will take the bill up again late Monday, headed toward final passage. It will have to go back to the House, which passed the original version this summer with 47 Republican votes, and be on President Biden’s desk before the end of the week.
That’s the easy one. Before Congress recessed, bipartisan talks between House and Senate appropriators on an omnibus government funding bill broke down, complicating everything. The most urgent job Congress has now is to fund the government by Dec. 16, when the current stop-gap funding bill, or continuing resolution, expires. They can put some of the stuff they need to do—Ukraine and pandemic money—into that, just to get it done. But knowing that they’ll have the House in 2023 has led Republicans to start obstructing, thinking they’ll have more leverage to get what they want.
The plan has been for an omnibus that wraps together all the funding bills for fiscal year 2023, two months of which have already passed. The pre-Thanksgiving stalemate could result in another short stop-gap bill to Dec. 23, really putting the pressure on lawmakers who want to have a holiday. A partial government shutdown isn’t entirely out of the picture, either. What Republicans are trying to do is to put the stop-gap deadline into next year, when they’ll be able to strip it of all the stuff they don’t like. Prospects for getting this done are, as of now, murky.
Here’s the other stalemate, the National Defense Authorization Act, tied to the government spending bill. Here’s a nugget: “If the National Defense Authorization Act is not approved before the end of the year, it would be the first time in 61 years Congress has failed to pass the NDAA before January 1.”
McCarthy has made fighting the “woke” Pentagon one of his promises to secure votes from the alt-right electeds in his leadership bid. “I’ve watched what the Democrats have done in many of these, especially in the NDAA and the wokeism that they want to bring in there,” McCarthy told reporters earlier this month. He didn’t elaborate on what he imagines wokeism is, but it could be anything from vaccine mandates to weeding out fascists to emphasizing diversity.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote to leadership Monday, urging them to get on the stick with the funding bill. “Failure to do so will result in significant harm to our people and our programs and would cause harm to our national security and our competitiveness,” he wrote, adding, “We can’t outcompete China with our hands tied behind our back three, four, five or six months of every fiscal year.”
Welcome to a Republican-led House.
Right now, Majority Leader Schumer seems to be feeling just a little less than urgent on all this stuff. Asked Monday morning about priorities during the lame duck, he answered in part that “we hope to get the [marriage bill] done this week,” and, “We’re working on [Electoral Count Act reform] and we want to get it done.” Presumably he’s got a longer list than that. It should include making sure, even if they don’t get the electoral reform done, they get in funding for elections operations ahead of 2024.
Other efforts include a last-ditch push from Democrats to get agreement from Republicans on immigration, including border security and protections for Dreamers. That seems the unlikeliest of all efforts, because Republicans won’t cede the issue of border security to Democrats before the next election. It’s too important a cudgel to allow any kind of fix.
Then there’s the one other thing besides government funding that has to be dealt with, lifting the debt ceiling. Thus far Schumer is insisting he’ll need Republican help to do it, ruling out the idea of a budget reconciliation bill for it, which could be done with just Democratic votes. (Blame Democrat Joe Manchin for the insistence on bipartisanship on this one.) There’s tremendous pressure from everywhere but Republicans to make sure that the House MAGAs lose the potential hostage of the global economy by making sure the U.S. can pay all its debts until well after the next election.
One person who had to deal with Republican brinksmanship on the debt ceiling is Peter Orszag, the former director of the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office. “Any Democrats averse to taking such a painful vote now should consider how much leverage their party will lose once Republicans control the House—and how much higher the risk of default will be then,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “It’s generally not a good idea to enter a negotiation with a ticking timebomb and a counter-party willing to let it go off.”
That bomb would go off next June unless Democrats defuse it now. Which they really should do, whatever it takes.
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