The House on Tuesday voted to take up a partisan six-month stopgap spending bill featuring controversial voting restriction legislation as soon as Wednesday, adopting the rule for floor debate on the continuing resolution and several unrelated bills on a narrow party-line vote.
The rule vote was 209-206, with two Republicans opposed: Montana’s Matt Rosendale and Arizona’s Andy Biggs. No Democrats supported it.
Despite growing GOP opposition to the stopgap bill and no clear path to passage, Speaker Mike Johnson earlier in the day vowed to put the CR on the floor Wednesday both in private comments at a Tuesday morning conference meeting and later publicly to reporters.
“I told the conference this morning and I’ll say it here again: I am resolved on this and I don’t know what more I can say to show that conviction,” Johnson said at a post-meeting press conference.
House Democrats are expected to remain united against the bill, due to the inclusion of the legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote and the six-month time period they feel is far too long.
Without Democratic help, Johnson, R-La., can only afford to lose four Republicans and still pass the bill, barring absences across the aisle. But more Republicans than that have already come out against the legislation, both anti-spending conservatives and defense-focused Republicans, putting the speaker and his team into a whip-count deficit that will be tough to crawl out of.
Others were still weighing their positions, with several saying they were undecided after the morning conference meeting.
Among those were Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. — no friend of Johnson’s — who has said tougher border restrictions and spending cuts also should be part of the bill on top of the proof-of-citizenship requirement for voting. Greene appeared fairly negative on the current package in her post-meeting comments.
“The worst thing that Republicans in the House can do is create a fake fight that the base knows they’re lying about and frustrate our voters going into the” elections, Greene said. “Just be honest. …Don’t make people like me pretend like we’re fighting for something because I’m not gonna have any part of it.”
House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole, R-Okla., said his party is not currently working on any changes to the bill to win more votes. Cole said he is not sure if Johnson would ultimately end up bringing the bill to the floor.
“We haven’t heard that many complaints about individual things inside the bill that would make a difference to how somebody votes,” he said. “There are some people who have never voted for any kind of CR at all, but do very much want the [voting bill], so they are sort of going back and forth. So you’ve just got to let it fall.”
Plan B unclear
With the current version of the bill appearing destined for defeat — or being pulled prior to the vote — it’s not yet clear what House Republicans’ next move will be.
Johnson and some other Republicans want a six-month spending bill as they believe Republicans will have a better hand in the next Congress with a stronger congressional majority and former president Donald Trump back in the White House.
“We know that December, if we were writing something, it would be more than a Christmas tree, it would be lots of gifts and everything else beneath it,” Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., said. “So we’re going to stand fast.”
But the six-month plan has alienated GOP defense hawks, including Armed Services Chairman Mike D. Rogers, R-Ala., because it would mean relatively flat funding for the Pentagon and restrictions on what it could buy.
Cole said while he backs the speaker’s plan, he does not believe Congress should kick the can that far down the road.
“I personally think it’s not a good thing to give a new president, and we’re going to have a new president, an immediate fiscal crisis,” Cole said. “But again, that’s probably going to be up to the winner of the election.”
Dec. 13 alternative
Democrats in both chambers agree that the sixth-month bill is too long, and top Senate Republican appropriator Susan Collins, R-Maine, said she also wants a shorter bill.
Senate appropriators are working on a bill that would run through Dec. 13, and are waiting to see what the House does, according to sources familiar with the discussions.
Appropriations subcommittee staff have sent the “anomalies” they want included to full committee staff, and authorizing committees have until Wednesday to provide what authorization extensions they would like to be attached.
Speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer rattled off a list of items are not addressed in the House bill, which he attacked as “unserious” and “uncooked” and stood no chance of becoming law.
The White House requested the missing pieces as part of requests to lawmakers submitted just before Labor Day weekend. Among the sticking points that seem likely to be addressed in the Senate version:
Immigration and border enforcement. The House bill would not extend the E-Verify program, a web-based system that allows employers to verify the eligibility of workers to work legally in the U.S. He also said the bill “disbands a critical law enforcement effort to stop drug smuggling, drug cartels, money laundering.”
That’s likely a reference to expiring Homeland Security Department authority to operate joint task forces combining efforts from various DHS agencies like Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee reported out a bill in late July to reauthorize the task force authority for two years.
Expiring health care provisions. Schumer criticized the bill for omitting an extension of a federal telehealth program that allows for virtual doctor visits. “We know how important telehealth is, particularly for rural Americans,” he said. “It’s made health care much better, cheaper and more effective in rural areas, but they don’t fund it.”
He said the bill would also endanger funding for community health centers, a key resource for lower-income residents who lack private insurance but don’t qualify for Medicare or Medicaid, and special diabetes programs.
Farm bill “dairy cliff”. Schumer attacked the bill for not including an extension of the farm bill, risking the year-end expiration of dairy industry subsidies important to Schumer’s Upstate New York constituents, among others. “For this to happen would decimate farmers across the country, and I know in my own state farmers have told me some of them would go out of business,” Schumer said.
What’s more, the dairy program would revert to outdated law requiring the government to buy up large quantities of milk at much higher prices, driving up demand. “The cost of milk could potentially double if we went over that dairy cliff,” Schumer said. “It would create seismic disruptions in our supply chains and cause market panic.”
Senate timing
The Senate’s version is not likely to be finished being drafted this week as the two sides are still discussing what supplemental funding would be included.
The House bill would tack on $10 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster relief fund, which both chambers support, but omits about $18 billion in additional disaster-related requests for other agencies.
And the House GOP didn’t include $12 billion sought by the Biden administration to alleviate a veterans health care budget crunch that could hit as soon as this fall due to higher-than-anticipated enrollment and claims stemming from the 2022 law expanding services for veterans exposed to toxic substances overseas.
While the exact makeup and timeframe of the stopgap bill remains to be set, the end result of a bipartisan deal to avoid a partial government shutdown at the end of the month remains likely.
“We’ve seen this play out time and time again,” Schumer said. “The answer is very simple — the House should stop wasting time on a CR proposal that cannot become law.”
Nina Heller contributed to this report.
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