Other work stalls over impeachment.
Congress faces long to-do list and not much time
Washington — Congress is heading toward a multicar collision that could leave a lot of collateral damage if lawmakers aren’t careful.
So much of the current political oxygen is being sucked up by the House’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s actions related to his effort to pressure Ukraine into investigating his domestic political rivals. But the list of must-do items between now and year’s end is long and expansive, touching on every aspect of the federal government and beyond.
Chances for a government shutdown before Thanksgiving once seemed impossible but, with no progress reported on any of the 12 spending bills, the risk grows each week of a showdown that would be far more sweeping than the 35-day partial shutdown earlier this year. But many other laws are expiring or lapsing, from some foreign surveillance laws to the potential reinstatement of a very unpopular tax on medical devices.
The rational minds in Washington — yes, there still are quite a few — see each of these issues as separate and distinct from the House’s potential impeachment of Trump. But the president has increasingly demonstrated the past few weeks that he regularly sees issues as one large negotiation, linking together seemingly disconnected threads into one massive ball of legislative wax.
White House meeting fireworks
His blowup with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Wednesday at a White House meeting about the unfolding crisis in northern Syria clearly had undertones of her push to impeach Trump in the House later this year. His rally in Dallas on Thursday night turned into a greatest hits parade of issues he has long pushed (border wall funding) and grievances against his political enemies (Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee).
By Friday, at a photo opportunity supposedly promoting the first all-female spacewalk, Trump took a reporter’s question about his acting chief of staff’s conflicting answers about Ukraine security aid and turned it into a montage of ongoing crises. Trump discussed his talks with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, about a pause on attacking Kurds in northern Syria, railed against the Schiff-led investigation and claimed to have “taken control” of oil in the Middle East.
All that leaves congressional leaders fearful that any of these must-pass bills could turn into a hostage situation if Trump sees it as possible leverage against impeachment.
“We are proceeding on our legislative agenda, what we told the people we would do. We have done a lot to date on making sure that we’ve addressed wages, we did the minimum wage bill,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Thursday.
Must-pass items
Here’s a list of must-pass items, as maintained by political intelligence firm Cowen Washington Research Group: The National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Pentagon policy and has been approved every year since 1946;
the 12 bills that fund all federal agencies, which expired Oct. 1 but have been given a temporary extension until Nov. 21;
a collection of tax breaks, ranging from the health-care industry to paid family leave, will expire on Dec. 31;
a World Trade Organization appellate body will cease to exist.
And this doesn’t even include ongoing efforts to approve a new North American trade pact that is the president’s highest priority and for which Pelosi has been expressing optimism of late, although both sides agree that waiting too far into next year will likely torpedo its chances of passing during an election year.
The most obvious obstacle created by impeachment is time. The House schedule already has two week-long breaks between now and Christmas, leaving less than 30 planned days to be in session, and quite a few of those planned days are actually half days to allow for travel to or from Washington.