Washington is a town that loves its holiday season traditions. The White House has its annual Christmas party, where attendees line up for their status-affirming photographs with the president. The National Zoo is illuminated for the enjoyment of families and adults alike with spiked hot cocoa. And over on Capitol Hill, the legislative branch’s members scramble to make sure Congress keeps the lights on through the new year.
Unless Congress passes a funding bill before 12:01 a.m. Friday, the federal government will run out of money, prompting a decidedly unmerry shutdown. Outside a few Grinches, nobody in Washington wants to see that happen at Christmas. And yet it’s only the threat of ruining the holidays that ever seems to prompt any sort of urgency from lawmakers.
Unless Congress passes a funding bill before 12:01 a.m. Friday, the federal government will run out of money, prompting a decidedly unmerry shutdown.
On one hand, Republicans have little reason to pass the kind of massive omnibus bills we’ve seen in Decembers past to fully fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. The GOP leadership knows that Republicans will control the White House and the Senate next month. With just a little patience and a continuing resolution locking in current spending levels until March, they’ll be able to entirely box out Democrats on spending decisions. But on the other hand, the core dynamics at play in the Capitol are the same we’ve seen for the last two years, meaning getting through the holidays is still easier said than done.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., knows his team will be blamed for any shutdown versus the White House and the Democrat-controlled Senate. He has only a handful of Republican votes to spare because a sizable number are opposed to any short-term spending bills at all. That means Johnson will need help from across the aisle to get the two-thirds majority required to circumvent his own members and bring a bill to the floor — but this time, House Democrats have a wish list of their own.
At the core of the current Hill negotiations is Johnson’s desire to boost economic aid to farmers in the bill. A proposed deal to swap that funding for some conservation spending under the Inflation Reduction Act fell apart over the weekend, leaving Democrats with the upper hand in proposing new ways to get their caucus to “yes.” According to Punchbowl News, several potential Democratic asks are floating around the Capitol:
– The federal government would pay 100% of the cost of rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. This could run to $2 billion or more.
– A trade deal that would allow duty-free access for Haitian apparel and textile imports.
– Reauthorization of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which permits duty-free imports for hundreds of products from sub-Saharan African countries.
– Funding to build museums on the National Mall to honor women and Hispanics.
– The Second Chance Act, which aims to help the reentry of convicted criminals back into communities.
Whatever price the Democrats exact, it’s true that Republicans could simply turn around and delete that funding from the full-year appropriations that will be cobbled together next year. But that assumes that the GOP will all be on the same page come March, a prospect that doesn’t have much history to back it up. Already there’s bickering between Republicans in the House and the Senate over whether to divide President-elect Donald Trump’s major legislative policies into separate bills or cram it all into one giant package.
The constant end-of-year fiscal crunch is truly ridiculous given the number of programs that get hung on the Christmas tree at the last minute with little time for debate.
Even once that’s decided, the haggling over exactly what’s going to be funded and what will be cut is set to be a brutal bit of sparring among House Republicans. Johnson and his leadership team have struggled to pass even simple messaging bills on a party-line basis, and their margins are looking to be just as small in the new Congress. The main internal opposition has come from the GOP’s “chaos caucus,” whose members have also been the biggest critics of the year-end spending rush we’ve seen in past years.
Annoyance with congressional procrastination is one of the only areas in which I agree with the far-right members of the Republican caucus. The constant end-of-year fiscal crunch is truly ridiculous given the number of programs that get hung on the Christmas tree at the last minute with little time for debate. Still, I’d normally worry that Congress’ punting on most of those major spending decisions until the GOP holds a trifecta would herald a policy disaster.
But congressional Republicans are doing themselves few favors in this process. The first three months of Trump’s term will see the Senate rushing to confirm his nominees and the House figuring out total spending, as they want to renew the Trump 2017 tax cuts. That’s a lot for a party that took months to align itself in 2017 with a bigger majority and with even less chance of Democrats coming through to save the day. Instead, the odds seem high that the GOP is essentially delivering itself a white elephant gift this holiday season that it won’t be able to re-gift.