There isn’t an imminent government shutdown threat facing Congress when they return from their Thanksgiving break this week, a welcome respite considering everything else crammed into the next month of legislating. Oh, and there’s that mid-January government funding deadline they need to work toward as well. It’s a good thing that the shutdown threat is off the table for the moment, because everything else on the table right now is as fraught and momentous as we’ve seen in recent memory.
On the list: funding for Ukraine and Israel, and with it a complicated immigration fight; reconciling the House and Senate versions of the defense authorization bill; expelling a member of the House for the first time in more than two decades; breaking the hold on hundreds of military officer promotions; and breaking the deadlock the Freedom Caucus has created on the remaining funding bills in the House.
Both chambers are starting the week off with a bang. In the House, they’ll be dealing with the potential expulsion of fabulist New York Republican Rep. George Santos, something that has only happened twice since the Civil War. Last week, the chairman of that House Ethics Panel, Rep. Michael Guest of Mississippi, filed an expulsion resolution that is likely to hit the floor sometime this week. It is also likely to further rend the House GOP. Before the Thanksgiving break, nearly 60 Republicans told Politico that they were ready to expel Santos. Assuming all the Democrats vote to kick him out, it would take about 80 Republicans to reach the two-thirds majority necessary.
That puts Republican leadership in a quandary. They have a miniscule majority and need that vote. If they allow members to vote their conscience and expel him, they risk that marginal seat going to a Democrat in a special election in the new year, further shrinking their majority. If they try to protect him, they’re saddled with him—and his pending criminal prosecutions—in an election year. That would not be a good look for them.
Over on the Senate side, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer informed his colleagues Sunday that legislation providing assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan could be on the floor “as soon as the week of December 4th.” That’s been tied up by Republicans insisting on partisan immigration policy changes, which Schumer said “has injected a decades old, hyper-partisan issue into overwhelmingly bipartisan priorities.”
“Democrats stand ready to work on common-sense solutions to address immigration, but purely partisan hard-right demands, like those in H.R. 2, jeopardize the entire national security supplemental package,” Schumer wrote. A bipartisan group of senators continued talks on the bill over the long weekend, and now have been given notice from Schumer that they need to figure it out this week.
Schumer laid out another key agenda item: breaking Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s hold on hundreds of military officer promotions before the end of the year. Schumer wrote he will bring the resolution approved in committee earlier this month that would allow the Senate to bypass Tuberville’s hold. That’s a warning to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues that they need to figure out how to break Tuberville in the next few weeks or face voting on this rules change.
Both chambers need to come together before the end of December to work out differences between the House and Senate versions of the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The House poisoned their version of the bill with culture war amendments on everything from abortion to health care for transgender servicemembers to diversity programs. All that will have to be stripped out to pass in the Democratic Senate.
The abortion poison pill fights continue in the House, where five of the 12 appropriations bills have been bogged down by Freedom Caucus tantrums. Now the “moderates” who don’t want to have to keep voting on their extremist amendments have started joining in to keep these bills from advancing. Avoiding a shutdown come January depends on inexperienced new Speaker Mike Johnson figuring out how to navigate between these factions.
All of this is supposed to happen in just 12 legislative days currently scheduled. That schedule is certainly going to have to change. But at least they aren’t going to give the nation a government shutdown fight for Christmas this year.
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