House, Senate Race on Separate Tracks to Avoid Looming Government Shutdown

The House and Senate are operating in their own lanes on spending, lacking any strategy or urgency to reconcile disparate appropriations bills with three weeks until government funding runs out.

Congress is barreling toward another temporary funding measure to avert a shutdown ahead of the Nov. 17 deadline, given the three-week long House paralysis during its speaker crisis and continued delays in both chambers passing the regular 12 annual spending bills.

Complicating matters is the entrance of a new power player, nascent Speaker Mike Johnson, a conservative Louisiana Republican who Senate leaders and the White House are just beginning to get to know. Johnson wants any government funding extension to include conservative priorities, which — while he has yet to give specifics — are likely to include spending cuts and border security measures based on demands other Republicans have made.

"We're working through this with the ideas and trying to ensure that if another stopgap measure is required that we do it with certain conditions," Johnson said in an interview Thursday with Fox News' Sean Hannity. "And I think there will be conditions that the American people can live with, and the consensus that we can build around here in the House."

Democrats have already shunned the idea of conditions for keeping the government open.

"We have never given in to any Republican extreme ransom demand in the context of a potential government shutdown. We never will," House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said at a press conference Thursday. "It's a futile effort. And it's just designed to hurt the American people and extract pain."

Johnson's predecessor, deposed Speaker Kevin McCarthy, lost his leadership job Oct. 3, days after bringing a condition-free extension of current funding levels to the floor, relying on Democratic votes to pass it over the objections of ultraconservatives.

House Republicans then wasted half of that seven-week funding extension fighting over McCarthy's removal and his replacement before settling on Johnson. But the Senate also dawdled during that time, bogged down in procedural and policy fights over the upper chamber's own spending bills.

The need for a second stopgap measure is a bleak situation for lawmakers who had started the year with great ambitions of returning some semblance of "regular order" to the appropriations process.

"You don't need me to give you the playbook. This has been done every year," Senate appropriator Joe Manchin, D-W.V.a., said, sounding frustrated, when asked about another stopgap funding measure. "Nothing changes. They might talk about it, but it doesn't look like it."

The Senate was off to a good start after passing all 12 of its bills out of committee in July. But the chamber struggled for more than a month to get its three-bill "minibus" spending package across the floor as various blockades arose. A breakthrough was reached this week when senators from both parties agreed to votes on a lengthy list of amendments, teeing up final passage for next week.

That will help the Senate begin to catch up to the House, which passed its fifth freestanding spending bill on Thursday. But the House is behind its initially planned schedule to pass all appropriations bills by the end of October because of McCarthy's stunning ouster and the even messier weeks that followed to replace him.

Johnson has released a new schedule that would get 12 bills through the House by the Nov. 17 government funding deadline, if all goes according to plan.

But that won't help avert a government shutdown since the House bills are loaded up with partisan GOP priorities that can't get through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

When the Senate finishes its first three spending bills, they will be the only ones passed in either chamber that both parties support, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer noted in floor remarks Thursday. "And I think that’s key to remember as we move forward," the New York Democrat said.

Under regular order the House and Senate would pass separate bills and form a conference committee to work out their differences. But there's been little movement toward conferencing since the Senate has yet to pass any bills and the only one in its three-bill package that matches up with what the House has passed is a measure that funds veterans and military construction programs.

"Until the Senate gets some bills passed, it's hard," House appropriator Tom Cole, R-Okla., said. "It mystifies me why people are worried about us when they haven't passed a single bill in three years ... not just this year, three years."

Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said there has been "some discussion" of beginning conference negotiations.

"But you know, the way this place works, you can talk about a plan but does it ever come together?" he said. "Not usually."

House appropriator Steve Womack, R-Ark., said subcommittee chairs and ranking members who handle the 12 bills could begin negotiating with their counterparts across the Capitol if congressional leaders approve.

"We just need to be turned loose to go do that," he said.

One obstacle to that is negotiations on individual bills typically do not start until congressional leaders have agreed to overall spending levels for defense and domestic programs. Spending caps were set in the debt limit law this summer, but the House wrote its bills to come in lower than those levels and the Senate used emergency spending to go above the caps in its bills.

"At the end of the day, let's just go back to the debt ceiling deal," Cole suggested.

But for the time being the House and Senate are more focused on passing their own bills than working out their differences.

The Senate is expected to pass its three-bill package next week, which in addition to the veterans' funding measure includes the agriculture and transportation spending bills.

House Republicans will take up their transportation measure next week too, as well as bills funding the legislative branch, Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. A vote on the GOP's agriculture spending bill failed in September amid party divisions over spending cuts and a provision restricting home delivery of abortion pill prescriptions.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, an appropriator and the chamber's No. 2 Democratic leader, told The Messenger he expects the Senate to take up more appropriations bills after it passes its first package but no decisions have been made on which ones.

"There is discussion right now about that, but we got to make sure leadership is on board," Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., another appropriator, said Thursday.

Kennedy said some Republicans still want to take up appropriations bills individually — one of the objections that slowed down consideration of the first package — but that further "minibus" packages tying a few together remain more likely. "I just don't think it's realistic because of time," he said of passing the bills separately.

Working through amendment requests was another obstacle on the first package that could slow down consideration of further Senate appropriations bills.

The House may run into its own struggles as Republicans try to pass partisan spending bills without Democratic support with a narrow four-vote margin to do so.

Some ultraconservatives have spent months pushing for deeper spending cuts than are currently in the bills the House Appropriations Committee prepared and are not giving up on that quest yet.

"There could very well be some additional cuts, especially because you have an opportunity for those bills to be amended on the floor," House appropriator and Freedom Caucus member Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., told The Messenger on Thursday. "I don't know that that conversation has happened yet with the new speaker."

As both chambers are trying to pass their annual spending bills they'll also have to contend with a $106 billion emergency spending request from the White House for aid to U.S. allies like Ukraine, Israel and and Taiwan and domestic border security and management funding.

The Senate is working in a bipartisan way to package those funding priorities together. Johnson has said the House will move a standalone Israel aid package while it seeks further information from the White House on its strategy in Ukraine. His plan, which includes offsetting the Israel aid with spending cuts, is drawing rebukes from Democrats.

Congressional leaders will also soon have to begin negotiating the next stopgap funding extension, known as a continuing resolution or CR.

Johnson, seeking to avoid the Christmas holiday deadline of past years, has floated Jan. 15 or April 15 as possible CR end dates. Lawmakers in both chambers and parties generally prefer an earlier expiration to keep the pressure on lawmakers to get their work done.

"We cannot govern with a CR until April," House Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said, meaning a temporary funding solution until next spring is unacceptable to her.

Cole said the shorter the CR, the better, since lawmakers are likely to wait until the last minute to cut deals anyway.

"If you have a deadline, people wait for the deadline," he said. "We're all like college students and cram the night before the test."