WASHINGTON — Congress is on track to approve legislation this week that would give lawmakers until mid-December to negotiate an agreement on annual government funding bills that were set to take effect by the end of that month.
The fleeting spending bill, also known as a continuing resolution, has received broad bipartisan support needed to pass votes in the House and Senate this week, but senators will need to reach an agreement to vote on the legislation before an Oct. 1 deadline for federal spending to end.
This The bill is 49 pages long, The bill, released Sunday after weeks of stalemate as House Republicans acted alone, offers no guarantee that Congress will actually finish work on year-long legislation in the 12 weeks remaining in the current session of Congress, because lawmakers can pass as many stopgap spending bills as they want.
Continuing resolutions essentially extend current spending levels and policies for a specified period of time. They are intended to provide the House and Senate with additional time to conference final versions of the twelve full-year spending bills.
November 5th Elections and the Chroma Duck
The election results will likely determine whether the Republican-led House of Representatives and Democratic-led Senate will move to reach an agreement on year-long bills during the lame duck session that begins after Election Day, or whether they will postpone the matter until next year, when the balance of power could shift significantly.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, appears to be leaning toward finishing up the full-year budget bills in December. During a news conference Tuesday, he said lawmakers would make funding decisions during the lame duck session.
Johnson has signaled that he will try to move all the final spending conferences to the floor one by one, rather than combining all 12 into one omnibus bill or packing several bills together into something called a minibus. Such immense bills regularly face opposition from conservative Republicans.
“We’ve broken the Christmas omni and I have no intention of going back to that awful tradition,” Johnson said. “We don’t want any buses, we won’t do any buses.”
A stopgap spending bill that Congress is expected to approve this week is expected to set a deadline for transferring the government funds for Dec. 20, four days before Christmas.
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have problems
Johnson also blamed Senate Democrats for Congress’s failure to complete its work on legislation to fund the government for the full year, arguing that the House of Representatives had done all its work.
The Senate Appropriations Committee approved 11 of a dozen budget bills by bipartisan votes, but failed to reach consensus on a homeland security spending bill.
Neither bill has reached a vote in the Senate, in part because the chamber’s process of amending spending bills can take many weeks.
The House Appropriations Committee has released more than a dozen bills on a party-line vote, without the Democratic support that would be necessary for the bills to become law amid divided government.
House Republican leaders passed five bills, including those on defense, homeland security, interior and environment, military construction in Virginia and the state’s overseas operations.
House GOP leaders have tried but failed to advance legislation on the legislative branch, which provides funding to Congress and its affiliated agencies. House rules allow the chamber to debate and vote on legislation in a matter of hours, far quicker than the days or weeks it often takes the Senate.
Neither Senate nor House leaders have made any effort to hold conference on the full-year spending bills, which is necessary to achieve the bipartisan, bicameral versions that must pass if Congress wants to avoid passing another stopgap spending bill in December.
The process typically takes at least six weeks, and with both chambers set to leave town later this week for a six-week recess, there likely won’t be enough time to conference all the bills before the mid-December deadline that will be set in a continuing resolution.
“Stay away from poisons”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, criticized Johnson for Attempt to pass a half-year bill on fleeting spending by the House of Representatives earlier this month, calling it a waste of time.
That bill, which failed to gain enough support, included a Republican Party bill that would have required proof of citizenship to register to vote.
“If both sides continue to work together, if we stay away from the poison and the partisan spectacle, then the American people can be confident that there will be no government shutdown,” Schumer said. “But we still have more work to do.”
The Biden administration signaled its support for the stopgap spending bill Tuesday, releasing Statement of Administrative Policy calling “for swift passage of this bill in both houses of Congress to avoid a costly, unnecessary government shutdown and provide sufficient time to pass budget legislation for the full fiscal year 2025 later in the year.”
