With the House stuck (again) on a government funding plan and a possible government shutdown approaching on Oct. 1, lawmakers spent Wednesday working through possible Plan Bs as the clock ticks away.
What the House GOP is thinking: House Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders are still hoping to vote next week on a continuing resolution that would run through March 28 and include legislation requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. But even if Republican leaders manage to sway a significant number of GOP holdouts and pass the measure — in what would amount to a badly needed win on spending — Senate Democrats will reject it and President Joe Biden won’t sign it.
House Republican appropriators are now quietly discussing the merits of a shorter CR, running into December, with the voting legislation, known as the SAVE Act, still attached. Doing so, the thinking goes, might pick up more votes — possibly even from the five Democrats who supported the SAVE Act earlier this summer (who might open themselves to campaign-trail attacks if they vote “nay”).
“Is that a viable option with a few anomalies? I don’t know,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), a senior appropriator. “I sure would like to try that, because there were some Democrats that were for SAVE — five or so — that didn’t like the length of the CR. So if you back the CR up into December, keep SAVE with it, where does that shake out?”
House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who favors trying to wrap up fiscal 2025 appropriations by December, stressed Wednesday afternoon that the next steps are solely up to Johnson: “We’re obviously prepared to negotiate at any point, but it depends on what the speaker wants to do next.”
What House Democrats are thinking: Democrats say they’re happy to watch House Republicans flail for now. Eventually, they believe, Johnson will have to bless bipartisan negotiations among top House and Senate appropriators — which would likely result in a mid-December CR that would not include the SAVE Act or other divisive policy add-ons.
Negotiators would still need to hash out a number of extra funding boosts (aka “anomalies”) for parts of the government that can’t run on autopilot through the end of the year.
“For the good of the American people, Congress must move on from House Republicans’ partisan continuing resolution proposals and begin negotiating a funding bill that can earn the support of both Democrats and Republicans in the House and the Senate,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democratic appropriator in the House, said Wednesday.
What the Senate is thinking: Senate appropriators are working on their own fallback plan to fund the government through Dec. 13, according to a source familiar with the discussions, although the drafting of that measure isn’t complete.
While both Senate Appropriations Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Vice Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) agree on the merits of a shorter stopgap, with the goal of closing out fiscal 2024 funding talks by the end of the year, what’s less clear is how quickly the Senate could act unilaterally to take up a House bill, amend it and send it back across the Capitol for passage.
“Regardless, we’re going to have a new administration,” Collins said. “And I would think it would be preferable to give them a clean slate so that its officials can concentrate on the next year’s budget, rather than having to deal with complex issues for a fiscal year that began October 1.”
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.