Here’s a preview of things to come from the U.S. House of Representatives under Republican control: “More than five dozen House Republicans opposed a package of bills doing something as simple as renaming post offices after a series of former congressional colleagues.” You can probably guess who were the ringleaders there. The goal, if there was one, was eating up floor time and gumming up the works.
That’s definitely one of the factors behind the ongoing work by Senate Republicans with Democrats in both chambers to get an omnibus funding bill, one that includes all of the 12 individual bills for government agencies, done by Dec. 16, when current funding expires. Every responsible lawmaker wants to make sure keeping the government open isn’t in the hands of those people. Normally, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and team would be pushing for another continuing resolution that would push funding decisions into the new year, when they would have more power to force their funding—and cutting—priorities. The chaos in the caucus over the speakership, though, seems to be driving them to work this out.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the lead Republican on Senate Appropriations, suggested as much. “I think there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle that see this is the right thing to do, to get it done.” He and McConnell are leading the negotiations for the Republicans while Kevin McCarthy in the House has bowed out, with his spokesman saying he’s a “hard no” on funding the government.
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They’ve reached one agreement, the easiest one to make very damned year: giving the Pentagon even more than it asked for in its funding request, according to people familiar with the negotiations. They’ll boost the National Defense Authorization Act $45 billion above what the Defense Department has requested, stretching to as high as $858 billion. Agreement there could help grease the skids for lawmakers to agree on the larger spending bill, but it’s likely still going to happen without much help from House Republicans who are fighting against what they call “wokeism” in national security issues.
That fight is spilling into the omnibus funding bill. McCarthy and a bunch of Republican senators, led by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, have been trying to force an end to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate for service members. They failed so far to get that in the NDAA, so they’re going to try to get it into the omnibus, further gumming up the works on that. The problem for McCarthy, though, is that he’s refusing to be involved in the negotiations—he is kind of preoccupied in navigating the hostile path to become speaker—so that push might fizzle with no one else pushing the cause.
The actual House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, has a potent threat for Republicans if they keep up the shenanigans: a year-long continuing resolution that keeps government funding at its current levels for the remainder of the fiscal year. It’s what Republicans forced for nearly the first two years of President Joe Biden’s term, making him operate under the last Trump budget. This is what Pelosi is threatening now: Republicans having to swallow his and the Democrats’ current budget for another year.
If there’s no agreement, she told reporters Thursday, “we have no choice but to keep government open with a yearlong [continuing resolution]. We’ve made that very clear in the White House meeting the other day and in our conversations with our colleagues on the subject.”
It’s a potent threat—enough Senate Republicans would likely go along with that to get it passed. They don’t want to be lumped in with or dictated to by the House maniacs. Buying another year of funding with a stop-gap bill would likely be preferable. By the time that expires and the next funding bill has to be considered in the fall of 2023, they’ll be on the reelection campaign trail already, and possibly not as eager to blow stuff up.
All of this, unfortunately, is being negotiated apart from a debt ceiling plan. So far, it looks like Democrats have settled for doing nothing about it until they have to, likely in June 2023, when Republicans are determined to force cuts to Social Security or blow up the economy. That’s another bomb it would be smart to defuse now.
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