Congress avoided a government shutdown before heading home for Thanksgiving but partisan divisions on topline spending numbers, Republican in-fighting in the House and limited time to finish full-year spending bills means that another shutdown scenario is just around the corner.
House Speaker Mike Johnson’s two-step stopgap bill set Jan. 19 as the first target to get four spending bills onto President Biden’s desk. Those bills include spending legislation that funds the Department of Veterans Affairs, energy and water, transportation and agriculture.
House Democrats won’t vote for those GOP-authored bills, and Mr. Johnson has struggled to bridge deep fissures within his conference over spending.
Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, has vowed to never again do a “clean” short-term bill that doesn’t cut spending or include policy measures. But the fast-approaching deadlines require his thin GOP majority to quickly unite on full-year spending legislation.
Mr. Johnson is projecting confidence they’ll get the job done and “change the way” Congress funds the government.
“I am bound to my colleagues, we’re not going to be in this situation ever again, which means early in February, we’re going to begin on the next fiscal year, and you’ll see the process work much differently,” Mr. Johnson said recently on the “Cats and Cosby” radio show.
One of the biggest obstacles is partisan differences over the top-line spending number for the 12 government funding bills. That debate must be settled over five working weeks before the first deadline in January.
House Republicans want to spend less than the $1.59 trillion cap set in the debt limit deal struck by former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden. They also contend that Senate Democrats — who have promised to spend right at the cap — are breaking the deal with extra “emergency spending” such as the $105 billion war aid Mr. Biden requested for Isreal, Ukraine and Taiwan.
Rep. Tom Cole, a member of the Appropriations Committee, said the spending bills can’t be finished until there is agreement on the top-line number.
“They need to sit down and work that out because you can’t move appropriations bills unless you have agreed upon an agreed upon top line,” he said.
The transportation and agriculture bills are among several spending bills tanked by GOP in-fighting. These bills also include conservative policy riders or deep cuts that render them dead on arrival in the Democrat-run Senate.
The transportation bill was blocked by a contingent of Republicans opposed to steep cuts to Amtrak. Mr. Cole said progress has been made on the bill, but it was not ready for a floor vote yet.
Meanwhile, the debt ceiling deal included an automatic 1% across-the-board cut if full-year government spending is not finalized by January, even if stopgap funding is approved.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, Florida Republican, said that the 1% cut would be particularly “devastating” to defense spending, which was spared from cuts imposed by the debt deal.
“We’ll see if they want to pass the bills or not, because these are the most conservative appropriation bills in the history of this institution, probably in this country,” Mr. Diaz-Balart said. “We’ll see if we get the votes to pass. They’re so conservative, we’re not gonna get any Democrats on them. And the question is, do we lose Republicans on them?”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.