The Republican Congress is hurtling towards another self-imposed deadline, even after the House and Senate were unable to reach an agreement to avert impending health care premium spikes for millions of Americans due to begin January 1.
At the end of next month there lies another government funding drop-off when an agreement brokered in November to end the longest government shutdown in history will expire. While Congress isn’t likely to face another battle of quite that magnitude, the path forward for Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is still tricky.
That’s because Congress still needs to come up with another spending bill to keep agencies open and basic services ongoing, a relatively simple prospect which it has proven repeatedly unable to manage. On both sides of the aisle lawmakers have withheld their votes for such resolutions this past year, either in the hopes of extracting political concessions or due to reservations about changes to funding levels for various agencies and programs.
The result: Paychecks for tens of thousands of federal workers and necessary parts of the welfare safety net become political footballs with even-increasing frequency.
January’s shutdown battle is not likely to meet the rancor of the fall, when a battle over expiring federal subsidies for health care plans on the Affordable Care Act’s public exchanges was waged by Democrats over October and November.
With those subsidies due to end next week, Congress left town after the twin Republican majorities failed to offer legislation that could pass the Senate — despite Democrats participating in bipartisan negotiations and calling for their colleagues to offer a way forward. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that his caucus won’t put up the same resistance it mounted, then dropped (prompting rage from voters and House Democrats) last year.
“As of Jan. 1, that is a different time than before because the ACA [subsidies] expired,” Schumer told Punchbowl News in an interview last week. “On the other hand, we’d like to get an appropriations bill done. That’s a Jan. 30 deadline…We’re trying to work with the Republicans to get it done.”
Whether those negotiations will amount to more than the talks over Obamacare subsidies remains to be seen. In the House, Mike Johnson’s speakership appears shakier than ever, with members in open revolt and resignations cropping up on a semi-regular basis.
Johnson has two paths to pass legislation ahead of January 30. He can rely solely on Republican votes, or pass legislation with bipartisan support. Both options come with pitfalls.
A prominent member of his caucus and recurring thorn in his side, Marjorie Taylor Greene, will leave the chamber on January 5, further thinning his numbers into the low single digits ahead of the shutdown deadline and making it all the more likely that Johnson could be forced to rely on Democratic votes to pass a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government. A member of his leadership team, Rep. Elise Stefanik, just announced she won’t run for re-election while simultaneously dropping out of the New York gubernatorial race ahead of what is increasingly projected to be a wave year for Democrats.
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader of the chamber, presides over a caucus that remains dissatisfied with their colleagues’ perceived capitulation in the Senate. He has indicated that Democratic votes will be largely, if not entirely, tied to an extension of the health care plan payments.
Republican leaders in the House now fret that like the conversation over Obamacare subsidies, their colleagues in the Senate waited too long to reach out to Democrats on a funding bill. Many in both chambers want a longer term resolution to be passed, averting another battle in a few months, but that prospect becomes more difficult with each passing day.
“We wasted a lot of time because the Senate’s not negotiating yet,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, told Politico last week. “When they’re ready to negotiate, we can move fast.”
Senators in both parties say that talks were still centered around full-year funding packages as members headed home for the holidays last week.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Cole’s Democratic counterpart on the powerful House panel that heads up funding bill negotiations in the lower chamber, faulted Republicans in both chambers.
She pointed to Johnson and Cole’s support for funding bills last year that had no hopes of passage with Democratic support due to the speaker’s attempts in the bills to cater to the House Freedom Caucus’s demands for lower spending levels. Johnson finally passed a clean CR, absent those policy wins for the far right, in November only to see Democrats stage their own revolt in the Senate.
Cole told Politico that House GOP leadership is aiming to keep funding toplines for federal agencies at or below levels that were approved for the last fiscal year. It’s a signal that Johnson will try to appeal to Republican fiscal hawks rather than Democrats, though that risks legislation passing that is unpalatable in the Senate, as well as a rebellion within his caucus. But Cole also said that he wants funding bill talks to be “bipartisan”, meaning that conservatives could leave unsatisfied, too. Leadership remains under the pressure of passing legislation that can survive the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster threshold, which will require participation from seven Senate Democrats.
“We’re not trying to jam anybody,” he said to Punchbowl News. “There’s a lot of raw feelings after the shutdown. We’re trying to restore the trust inside the committee.”
One faction that could end up playing an important role in the coming weeks is that of the GOP’s moderates and frontline members, who staged their own defiant show against Johnson last week by embracing a discharge petition with Democrats to force a vote on extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies.
Those same members, who are already facing the greatest political risks of the Republican caucus, could try and force Johnson to muscle conservatives out of the discussions. But that could mean the end of Johnson’s speakership if those same conservatives refuse to get on board.
One GOP senator supportive of extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies predicted movement on that issue early in January, which many agree would significantly change the dynamic around meeting a January 30 deadline for a CR or the passage of long-term funding packages.
“We’re seeing some great actions in the House...I’m pleased with that. I think that will help prompt a response here in the Senate after the first of the new year, and I’m looking forward to that.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski told reporters last week, according to The Hill.
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