But the House’s approach, to combine short-term funding to keep the government open with long-term funding for the military, was long ago rejected by most Senate Democrats, who want to pair an increase in military spending with a similar increase in domestic spending. The measure would need 60 votes to pass the Senate, where Republicans hold only 51 seats.
Still, the inclusion of the military funding is expected to secure the votes of reluctant Republicans in the House, including members of the conservative Freedom Caucus, allowing party leaders to push the measure through their chamber even if the vast majority of Democrats oppose it.
“It’s a good play call,” said Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, who just last week had suggested his caucus was not likely to support another temporary spending measure.
On Monday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, warned Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin against such an approach, saying it amounted to “barreling headfirst into a dead end.”
“If he lets the Freedom Caucus be the tail that wags the dog, there’s no way we’ll reach an agreement that can pass the Senate,” Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor.
Lacking the votes to approve the temporary spending measure paired with long-term military funding, the Senate could strip out the military portion and send the measure back to the House.
“I think everyone understands that this will probably end up being a Ping-Pong situation, and we’ll see where the ball lands,” said Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida.
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But Mr. Meadows was eager for a fight over the military funding. “That’s going to be up to Democrats to decide whether they want to continue to keep our military men and women hostage,” he said.
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To bring an end to last month’s brief shutdown, lawmakers approved a temporary spending bill that keeps the government open through the end of Thursday. Now another stopgap measure is needed. Adding to the tight timeline facing lawmakers, House Democrats are scheduled to hold a retreat in Maryland beginning Wednesday.
“Here we are again,” Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said on the Senate floor on Monday, before complaining about the use of one stopgap bill after another. “Governing is not a merry-go-round,” he said.
The stopgap bills have been needed because congressional leaders have yet to reach a deal to raise the caps on military and domestic spending, an impasse that has kept them from negotiating a long-term spending bill. There were signs of hope on Monday that an agreement could be within reach.
Once a deal on those spending levels has been reached, lawmakers can put together a long-term funding bill that would stretch for the rest of the fiscal year. In the near future, lawmakers also need to raise the debt limit.
Another big question mark is the issue of immigration, which has helped make a deal on the spending caps elusive and played a central role in last month’s shutdown. Lawmakers are looking to take action following Mr. Trump’s decision last year to end an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that shields from deportation young immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children.
On Monday, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who has been absent from the Senate while he battles brain cancer, teamed up with Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, to offer a narrow immigration bill that would protect the young undocumented immigrants, known as Dreamers, from deportation, while also seeking to strengthen border security.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has promised an open debate on immigration legislation in the Senate if lawmakers do not reach a deal on that subject by Thursday. Mr. Coons told reporters that his bill could serve as the underlying measure to form the foundation of that debate, calling it a “strong starting point.”
But the McCain-Coons bill, intended as the Senate counterpart to a bipartisan bill in the House, is slimmer than the framework proposed by Mr. Trump. Notably, it does not include the $25 billion Mr. Trump requested for border security, including for a wall along the southern border with Mexico.
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In addition, the measure does not address the diversity visa lottery, which fosters immigration from countries that are underrepresented and which Mr. Trump wants to abolish, or family-based migration, which would be severely limited under the White House proposal.
On Monday, the White House rejected the McCain-Coons plan, just as it turned away a different bipartisan proposal put forth last month by a group of senators led by Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.
Mr. Trump, without mentioning Mr. McCain or Mr. Coons by name, wrote on Twitter on Monday that any DACA deal that does not include a border wall was “a total waste of time.”
The federal spending bill, which Congress passed to end the three-day government shutdown two weeks ago, runs out again this Thursday, and Congress hasn’t made any progress toward reaching a permanent funding deal or tackling the immigration issue — the problems that brought them to a shutdown in the first place.
Congress has to pass a spending bill by midnight on Thursday, February 8, or the government will shut down again.
In January, Democrats and some Republicans voted against funding the government in what became a three-day standoff over federal spending, stemming from a failure to address the now-sunsetting Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. With the end of the shutdown, lawmakers anticipated a renewed vigor behind the immigration and spending debates.
Instead, negotiations have atrophied in the past two weeks as lawmakers have spent the majority of weekdays out of Washington, either in their home districts or on annual party retreats. Republicans went to Greenbrier resort in West Virginia last week, and Democrats are scheduled to be in Cambridge, Maryland, for three days starting February 7, in direct conflict with the spending deadline.
It’s left Congress in essentially in the same position it was in the days leading up to the last government shutdown: Lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement on long-term budget caps, the upper spending limits for the military and domestic programs, meaning they will have to vote on another short-term spending bill to keep the government open. Although, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday they are “closer to an agreement than we have ever been” on budget caps.
Meanwhile, DACA negotiations have completely stalled, stuck between the moderate-but-passable proposals that the White House won’t support and conservative Trump-endorsed proposals that won’t see the light of day in the Senate. At some point, lawmakers will also have to address the debt ceiling, which the Treasury Department says it will hit by early March — earlier than expected, the New York Times reported, because of the debt taken on by the GOP tax bill passed late last year.
Democrats seem to have lost their appetite for another shutdown, but that doesn’t erase the number of contentious and high-stakes policy fights looming over Congress this month. This is the latest chapter of the messy shutdown showdown of 2018.
The House has plans to pass a spending bill that has virtually no chance of becoming law
Now, only two days before the shutdown deadline, House Republican leaders have informed their ranks of a short-term government spending bill that will keep the government open until March 23. The proposal would also fully boost defense funding for the whole year and extend funding for community health centers, which expired last fall; the centers provide health services to 26.5 million people.
The proposal, which would give lawmakers additional time to strike a more permanent 2018 spending agreement, is expected to pass the House with mostly Republican votes. Its viability in the Senate however is much less certain, where Democratic votes are needed to keep the government open.
Democrats are unlikely to support a short-term spending bill that only boosts defense funding and not domestic programs, like funding for education, scientific research, health services, environmental protection, and so on. It’s largely expected that the Senate will strip the House’s spending bill of the defense funding and plan on voting on a full-year defense spending bill separately. Then they would have to send their revised spending bill back to the House, likely earning ire from conservatives and defense hawks, who have been calling for military funding.
Whichever bill passes will be the fifth short-term spending bill Congress has installed since the start of the fiscal year last September, a trend that has increasingly angered lawmakers who are eager to permanently fund domestic programs and defense spending.
The government has been running on a short-term spending bill since September, and that won’t change anytime soon
To reach a more permanent spending solution for 2018, Republicans and Democrats first need to agree on new budget caps.
This fight goes back to 2011 when an Obama-era impasse over the debt ceiling brought the American economy to near calamity, which ultimately resulted in the 2013 sequester, setting into law across-the-board budget cuts and establishing budget caps that would amount to $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next 10 years.
Congress has repeatedly voted to raise the budget caps and give sequester relief. Since the sequester, there have been two bipartisan deals to raise the caps by billions of dollars. The first in 2013 was forged between Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray; a second was agreed on in 2015. But those adjustments, which extended through fiscal year 2017, have now expired.
In 2018, the sequester budget caps max out defense spending at $549 billion and non-defense discretionary funding at $516 billion, far less than what both Republicans and Democrats would like to spend. Last year, Trump’s budget called for $603 billion in defense funding, and both the Senate and House separately proposed even higher figures.
Republicans need Democratic votes to raise the budget caps on military spending and domestic programs to meet the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. So far, the parties still haven’t agreed on new budget caps. Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) told reporters that Democrats and Republicans were still far apart on spending caps negotiations. There has been some progress since. Without budget caps, any massive spending bill risks triggering another sequester — across-the-board cuts to domestic and military spending.
Democrats have established a guiding principle in spending cap negotiations: If Republicans want more funding for defense, then Democrats want a one-for-one increase in non-defense funding.
Reaching a budget cap deal is a high priority for defense hawks in Congress, who say short-term spending deals hobble the military, preventing them from being able to adequately plan resources. Republicans in the House are trying to move forward a defense spending bill without addressing domestic spending, which is a “nonstarter” for most Democrats.
Meanwhile, the standoff has stalled appropriators — the lawmakers in charge of the nation’s purse strings — who need these topline numbers to begin putting together a trillion-dollar spending bill that would fund the government through next September, a process that could take a month.
Congress still doesn’t appear any closer to an actual deal on immigration
When Democrats and Republicans voted to reopen the government, the idea was they would spend the following weeks cobbling together a deal on immigration and more permanent government spending in the weeks ahead.
But the actual legislative calendar shrank that window for negotiation, and negotiations have since increasingly splintered.
Two weeks ago, Trump’s administration briefed Republican congressional aides with an immigration proposal that called for a path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants who came to the country as children, $25 billion to fund a southern border wall, substantial curtailing of family immigration, and the elimination of the diversity visa lottery program, which would gut the legal immigration system.
The proposal was largely interpreted as a White House alternative to the one bipartisan proposal by Durbin and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on immigration that Trump has already shot down.
Both Republican leaders in the House and Senate supported the clarity offered by the White House proposal but made no commitments to the actual policy. By the following week, House Republicans were still discussing the partisan immigration proposal by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), which is unlikely to garner any Democratic support. And already some Republicans in the Senate have expressed concern with the proposal’s serious cuts to legal immigration.
Meanwhile, several other groups have also continued negotiations on completely separate tracks:
The shutdown also brought together a larger group of bipartisan negotiators — roughly 30 senators who’ve named themselves the “Common Sense Coalition,” who are intent on moving immigration talks forward but have yet to come forward with a proposal.
The team of Democratic and Republican leadership deputies that have been dubbed the “No. 2s,” consisting of Durbin again, as well as Minority Whip Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Majority Whip Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), have also been negotiating.
There are two more Democratic-friendly bipartisan proposals in the House and Senate, proposed by Reps. Will Hurd (R-TX) and Pete Aguilar (D-CA) and Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Chris Coons (D-DE), both of which propose slimmed-down DACA and border security fixes; both are still in early stages.
In short, the state of immigration negotiations in Congress remains decentralized and disjointed.
For weeks, conservative hardliners have commandeered immigration negotiations. To win enough House Republican votes for the short-term spending bill two weeks ago, House Speaker Paul Ryan promised the Freedom Caucus, the lower chamber’s group of ultraconservatives, that Republican leadership would whip votes for a conservative Goodlatte immigration bill. Conservatives continue to say there is a path to compromise, but they have shown no willingness to work with Democrats thus far.
Last week, Durbin said lawmakers weren’t any closer to reaching an immigration deal than they were a week ago, and some senators have been telling reporters that they could see Congress punting on the immigration debate for another year. How they would do that is unclear.
Meanwhile, to end the last government shutdown, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised an open debate on immigration on the Senate floor, as long as Democrats voted to keep the government open this week.
Whether McConnell will make good on that promise remains to be seen.
WASHINGTON — The next short-term government funding bill is set to run out Thursday and Congress is poised to pass a fifth stop-gap funding bill to keep the lights on.
The latest deadline looms as a deal on DACA, which in part forced the last government shutdown, has yet to emerge that will get the support of the White House.
The run up to this congressional-imposed deadline is expected to lack the drama of the last funding date three weeks ago because neither party wants to repeat the three-day government shutdown, but nothing is yet certain as negotiations are still ongoing.
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The House is expected to vote on their version Tuesday. It would extend government funding until March 23 but fund the Defense Department for the remainder of the fiscal year, which would appease the conservative Freedom Caucus and defense hawks.
It would also fund community health centers for two years, which is something the Democrats have been demanding. It's unclear, however, if the Senate would support the House measure.
But House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi was critical, calling Republicans "incompetent."
“Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House but they have to rely on five stop-gap spending bills in a row to keep government running? Republicans must stop governing from manufactured crisis to crisis, and work with Democrats to pass the many urgent, long overdue priorities of the American people," Pelosi said in a statement.
It's the continuation of a pattern of short spurts of government funding to give stalemated congressional leaders more time to work out a variety of issues, including top-line spending levels for the current fiscal year and how any increases in government spending will be paid for, if they will at all.
Thursday is also a critical marker in the debate on DACA. It's the date Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., agreed to give negotiators to come up with an agreement to address Dreamers, the immigrants who illegally came to the U.S. as children. If no agreement is reached by Thursday, then McConnell agreed to bring up the issue for the Senate to add to with amendments.
A group of bipartisan congressional leaders, tasked by President Donald Trump, have been working toward a solution on DACA but appear no closer to agreement.
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of that group, said he's not optimistic that a deal will be reached on DACA before Friday.
But he added on CNN’s "State of the Union" on Sunday, "I don’t see a government shutdown coming."
Senate Republican leaders left a meeting with McConnell Monday night saying that if no deal is reached and if the government stays open, then McConnell will bring DACA to the floor next week. But what the bill will look like has not yet been decided and it's likely to become an issue of contention as well.
Democrats and some others are hoping for a more pared-down bill that the Senate can build upon while conservatives and the White House want a more robust bill that would be more difficult to alter.
Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and John McCain, R-Ariz., introduced a bipartisan bill Monday that addresses DACA and border security, which they'd like to be the starter or "base" bill in the Senate.
Coons said in a conference call with reporters that the legislation is admittedly narrow but that it's a good middle ground and starting point.
He reiterated that Democrats don't support many components in the president's proposal, including an end to family-based immigration and changes to birthright citizenship. And Coons said he doesn’t back an idea being floated of giving DACA recipients a one-year extension.
"My concern is that now Senators are saying the fallback position should be almost literally doing nothing like a one-year DACA bill and a one-year border bill. This stands between those two poles," Coons said. "So this is a bill that I think should be our base bill. I don't think we should do anything less than what's in McCain-Coons, and it's my hope that in the next few days of negotiating we will do something more."
The McCain-Coons proposal is similar to a bipartisan bill in the House by Reps. Will Hurd, R-Texas, and Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., that would provide legal status for Dreamers and increase security on the border.
The White House already dismissed the proposal, however, calling it a "nonstarter."
"It's worse than Graham-Durbin, and it takes effort to make a bill worse than Graham-Durbin," a senior administration official told NBC News.
White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short said "a lot" would have to be added to the McCain-Coons legislation for it to be the Senate’s starting point.
"I think we'd advocate our framework to be the base bill," Short told reporters after a meeting in McConnell's office with White House Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Graham-Durbin is a proposal that attempts to address the four pillars Trump set forth. It provides a path to citizenship for about 1.8 million people eligible for DACA, allocates $2.8 billion for border security and the president's wall, ends the diversity visa lottery, and prohibits the parents of Dreamers from receiving citizenship but does give them protected legal status.
Trump tweeted Monday that any proposal that doesn’t include a wall is "a total waste of time."
Any deal on DACA that does not include STRONG border security and the desperately needed WALL is a total waste of time. March 5th is rapidly approaching and the Dems seem not to care about DACA. Make a deal! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2018
Trump told Congress to come up with a legislative solution for Dreamers by March 5 or their protected status will expire. A court, however, has given some reprieve but also added confusion for DACA recipients, ruling that Trump couldn't end DACA.
A bipartisan group of senators, self-named the Commonsense Caucus, of which Coons is a member, continues to meet as well to hammer out consensus on immigration.
Happy February to all! The president* is tweeting third-grade insults at a member of Congress, and he’s currently at war with every federal law-enforcement agency except ICE and the Border Patrol, both of which are running amuck out in the country. Also, hey, the government might run out of money again and shut down by the end of the week. And, as CNN informs us, it all depends on the good faith of Mitch McConnell.
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The first deadline is Thursday, when government funding runs out. The second is to reach a long-stalled deal on immigration before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell opens a promised freewheeling floor debate to try to settle the contentious issue. Congressional leaders from both parties have said they don't foresee a second shutdown, but as of Sunday evening, it's not clear if congressional leaders have the votes to pass such a measure through both the Senate and the House.
Of course, anyone who puts any trust in anything McConnell says is a sap. He’s already framing the issue as: a) a second political disaster for Senate Democrats, and b) an attempt by said Senate Democrats to throw Meemaw into the creek in favor of “Illegals.” From The Hill:
“I don’t think we’ll see a threat [of a] government shutdown again over this subject. One of my favorite old Kentucky country sayings is 'there’s no education in the second kick of a mule,' and so I think there will be a new level of seriousness here trying to resolve these issues,” McConnell told reporters at a Republican retreat at The Greenbrier resort. He said the threat of a government shutdown to gain leverage in immigration talks “has clearly been eliminated.” Senate Democrats said much the same after a three-day government shutdown last month.
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(Mitch McConnell—net worth, an estimated $26.5 million—was talking in “old Kentucky country sayings” to a group of his fellow millionaire legislators at luxury resort in an impoverished and opioid-riddled state. This required a brief pause for nausea before we continue.) From The Hill:
McConnell on Thursday clarified the immigration pledge he made to Senate colleagues after Democrats agreed to reopen the government. “If the immigration issue was not resolved in the global discussions … then I’m perfectly happy provided the government is still open on Feb. 8 to go to the subject and to treat it in a fair way,” McConnell said of the prospect of a Senate immigration debate. “We’ll see who can get to 60 votes.”
Not to skip ahead to the ending or anything, but there is no halfway humane “compromise” available to the Senate that has a chance in the House of Representatives, any more than there is one that the president* will sign unless it contains money for his stupid, useless wall. McConnell knows this as well as he knows where all his money is stashed. But, as the Russian investigation heats up, and the shadowplay in the wake of the release of The Memo continues to entertain The Base, and the sense of unreality is beginning to feel extraordinarily normal. The country is in the hands of drunken puppet-masters.
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