House GOP works to avert shutdown
Some Dems waver on need for link to DACA protections
WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders have a plan to keep the government open for six more weeks while Washington grapples with a potential follow-up budget pact and, perhaps, immigration legislation.
GOP leaders announced they would seek to pass the stopgap spending bill by marrying it with a full-year, $659 billion Pentagon spending bill that’s a top priority of the party’s defense hawks.
The measure would keep the government running through March 23 and reauthorize funding for community health centers that enjoy widespread bipartisan support.
Pairing the Pentagon’s budget with only temporary money for the rest of the government wouldn’t go anywhere in the Senate, vowed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who said it “would be barreling head first into a dead-end.”
On the other hand, the Senate might respond with a long-awaited spending pact to give whopping increases to both the Pentagon and domestic programs. Talks in the Senate on such a framework appeared to intensify in hopes of an agreement this week, aides and lawmakers said, and the House GOP strategy appeared designed in part to invite the Senate to complete budget negotiations and use the temporary spending bill to advance such a budget agreement.
Under Washington’s arcane ways, a broad-brush agreement to increase legally binding spending “caps” — which would otherwise keep the budgets for Pentagon and domestic agencies essentially frozen — would be approved, then followed by a far more detailed catchall spending bill that would take weeks to negotiate.
“We are making real headway in our negotiations over spending caps and other important issues,” said Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Republicans had been scrambling to pass the stopgap measure through the House because they can’t count on support from Democrats — who feel stymied by inaction on legislation to protect young immigrants from deportation.
The situation in both the House and Senate was murky, though Senate Democrats have no appetite for sparking another government shutdown.
One especially tricky question is whether House Democrats would approve of a spending agreement if there isn’t much progress in addressing the issue of immigrants left vulnerable with the looming expiration of former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. That’s a top priority for many House Democrats, especially lawmakers from the influential Hispanic Caucus.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has linked progress on the budget with action to address the program, but other Democrats are beginning to agitate for delinking the two, lest the opportunity for a budget pact be lost.