Parties jockey in spending battles
Shutdown looms; fissures between chambers deepen
WASHINGTON — Congress is poised this week to dive into an epic fight over spending, as the Senate for the first time in years puts appropriations bills on the floor for debate and Speaker Kevin McCarthy tries to find his way out of a complex funding tangle that could ultimately threaten his leadership post.
With less than three weeks remaining before government funding runs out on Sept. 30, Congress has not cleared any of its 12 annual appropriations bills, though there has been more progress than in the recent past. Given the rapidly approaching deadline, leaders of the House and Senate agree that a temporary stopgap funding measure will be needed to avert a government shutdown beginning Oct. 1. But that usually routine legislation is facing major obstacles in the Republican-led House, making its path to President Biden’s desk unusually fraught.
Members of the House’s farright Freedom Caucus are pledging to oppose even a temporary measure if it does not cut funding substantially or include new border controls and restrictions on prosecuting former president Trump. At the same time, senators of both parties want the stopgap bill to include billions of dollars in new assistance to Ukraine, a demand that House Republicans are resisting. House Democrats want nothing to do with any of the Republican bills, which have also been loaded with conservative social policy riders that have little chance of enactment.
“Honestly, it’s a pretty big mess,” Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, recently told an audience in his home state.
The major obstacle for McCarthy is that a significant segment of the hard-right members in his ranks are insisting on conditions on the temporary funding measure that could never clear the Democratic-led Senate even as they call for deeper spending cuts in the full-year spending measures that many of their fellow House Republicans will not support. That internal divide and differences over abortion policy and other issues forced McCarthy to pull funding measures from the floor just before the August recess.
With only four GOP votes to spare, McCarthy can afford few defections if he hopes to pass spending bills with only Republican support, and the archconservatives are digging in while dismissing the political and economic repercussions of a government shutdown. They have also rejected McCarthy’s argument that a shutdown would stall Republican investigations and a potential impeachment of Biden.
An added complication for McCarthy is that a stopgap measure would keep the government funded at a level set in December 2022, when Democrats still controlled both the House and the Senate. Only a handful of House Republicans voted for the money in that huge catchall spending measure, and most of them have since left Congress.
“We are talking about continuing-resolution levels that almost all of us just voted against,” said Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican, predicting that many Republicans would balk at backing a stopgap measure if the funding remained steady. “I honestly think McCarthy will need to get it done with Democratic votes, and there will be other consequences for that.”