Right now, there’s no deal in sight to fund the federal government.
House leaders are bracing for a long week, a potential weekend session and more negotiations next week as Republicans and Democrats have failed to come to an agreement on how to fund federal agencies until October 2016.
Story Continued BelowIn all likelihood, the House will vote Friday on a short-term government funding measure to avoid a shutdown, giving Speaker Paul Ryan and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi more time to negotiate.
Still at issue are policy riders covering environmental issues, Western land concerns and how to address Syrian refugees seeking to come to the United States. One deal discussed included Democrats agreeing to lift a U.S. oil-export ban in exchange for Republicans dropping many of their environmental policy demands.
But the two sides are far from any final agreement, and Ryan’s top aides say they will keep talking until they find one. That will likely mean enacting short-term funding bills to keep the lights on at agencies for as long as negotiations drag on. But it’s getting late in the year, and lawmakers are getting anxious to get out of town for the holiday recess.
Pelosi (D-Calif.) will skip a congressional trip to Paris that was scheduled to begin Thursday because of the ongoing funding talks, a Democratic aide said. That trip is being led by Republican Rep. Ed Whitfield.
With Democrats and Republicans miles apart on an overall agreement, internal GOP rifts are beginning to surface. Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) are determined to wrap up a yearlong spending bill now, but the conservative House Freedom Caucus has floated the possibility of pushing the spending fight into next year. The caucus says the holiday-season time crunch is hurting the GOP’s leverage in negotiations with Democrats.
The federal government officially runs out of spending authority on Dec. 11, and the impasse has not eased. Conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus have latched onto Syria as their top concern. They want to include language that would increase security screening for Iraqi and Syrian refugees. House conservatives are pushing to include that language in the spending bill, but the White House is opposed to it, despite widespread support on Capitol Hill.
House Republicans also want to add language that would tighten controls on visa-free travel in the U.S. That proposal was adopted by the House by an overwhelming bipartisan vote on Tuesday, but the GOP will likely push for it to be included in the spending bill.
“We know that we’re going to get it right, instead of getting it done fast,” Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday. “We are not going to waive the three-day rule [for considering legislation]. We’re going to make sure that members of Congress, and therefore the public, have the time to read what is agreed to. But we’re not going to let the arbitrary Dec. 11 deadline stop us from getting this right. We’re going to get the best agreement we can possibly get, and those negotiations are ongoing.”
Ryan and McCarthy said they would attempt to pass a short-term spending bill, keeping the government open for a “handful of days.” GOP leaders plan to reassess where negotiations stand by the end of Tuesday and plot a course forward.
“We don’t expect to do this for a long term,” Ryan said. “We need to get it right. I don’t want us to go home until we get this done.”
But the Freedom Caucus believes otherwise.
Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) said he would like Congress to approve a six-week, stopgap spending bill to give more time to try to force Democrats to accept the language to tighten restrictions on refugees. Salmon said many members of the Freedom Caucus would vote for the omnibus if it included this language, but senior Republican leadership aides doubt that is true.
“A lot of us aren’t completely understanding why in the world, given the fact that we had a veto-proof majority on the vote on the individual bill [regarding refugees], why in the world we wouldn’t include it in the [larger spending] bill,» Salmon said. «It doesn’t make any sense at all.»
Salmon added, “I think that every time we get jammed up against a holiday schedule with people wanting to be back in their districts and back with their families, we seem to end up getting things that we dislike intensely. When we don’t have that kind of pressure, there’s a little bit more of an ability to fight, and stand up on principle rather than be jammed against schedules that are important to people.”
House Democrats have their own set of policy concerns. Republicans want an extension of health benefits for 9/11 responders to be paid for with other budget offsets, which Democrats are resisting.
A high-profile tax extenders package is hung up amid partisan bickering over the cost and scope of provisions related to middle-class families, which Democrats want to expand. Republican tax-writers, however, want to ensure that there is not fraud or abuse in these programs and are insisting on more «program integrity» checks.
Democrats say they’re waiting for Ryan to move.
«It’s up to them. We were moving along, but now it’s totally up to them,» said Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the top Democratic appropriator.
