September 13, 2023
11 days.
You heard me correctly, 11 working days. That’s how much time the House and the Senate have to figure out a deal to avoid a government shutdown at the end of this month.
And it’s already a massive fight and it’s not looking good.
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This is a deep dive on what’s going on and will get you all caught up if you’ve been tuning these politicians out for the summer. Trust me there’s drama!!!!!
Ok – I’m going to tell you about the absolute cluster that’s happening on capitol hill right now in a second. But first – you have to understand congress has one job. Coming up with a plan to fund the government – that is their main function. They decide how much money each department and agency gets for their annual budget and then decide which priorities will be funding and which will not. This responsibility isn’t a surprise. The house and the senate each have to come up with their plans, pass what are called appropriation bills and then both chambers have to compromise if those appropriation bills are different between the house version and the senate version. The deadline to pass these bills comes at the exact same time every. Single. Year. Again – not a surprise. But every single year congress waits till the last minute to get anything done and all of us are left worrying about the government shutting down. A shutdown – that by the way – would only hurt all of us – congress isn’t impacted at all they still get paid. Essential federal workers and our military members must go to work with no pay. Other federal employees get furloughed. Essential services like air traffic control, border patrol and social security and Medicare benefits continue but could be slowed down. Non-essential government agencies shut down. So you get the scenario we’re dealing with.
Now – the senate has been working quietly on their appropriation bills for a while now. In fact, they have been coming up with bipartisan compromises on all of the spending appropriation bills. And they may take up votes on several of those bills this week.
But the house – is a totally different story. The far-right wing of the republican party have been openly telling basically anyone who will listen that they are *not* afraid to shut the government down unless they get what they want. Deeper spending cuts overall, but more spending on the southern border, defunding any so-called “woke” policies at the pentagon, policy changes to the Department of Justice, stopping any funding to Ukraine and opening an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Now as we know just yesterday the house speaker did exactly that. Opened an impeachment inquiry. Could that have been a strategic move to appease the demands of some of his far-right members to get them to back off their threats of a government shutdown? Could be.
It’s important to understand – all this government funding stuff was already hashed out in a two-year budget agreement that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made with President Biden back in May that included Republican priority spending cuts. In fact I told you all about that deal in this video when the House Speaker and the President were going back and forth about the debt ceiling. Remember that crisis? Well the House and the Senate voted to pass that deal and now – it seems because some of these far right House republicans didn’t get what they wanted back then, they are pushing for it now and threatening a shutdown if they don’t get what they want.
Here’s the reality. There is absolutely no way – unless there’s a miracle, that both the House and the Senate will pass all their appropriation bills and conference a government spending plan in 11 working days. So the working plan from House Speaker has been to get his conference and the House to pass what’s called a continuing resolution. That’s a piece of legislation that keeps the government open using the current spending levels for a certain length of time. Reportedly this CR if it was passed would run out in November. If that can pass that gives the house and the Senate a few more months to hash out these differences without shutting down the government.
But the far-right house republicans don’t like that idea either. They don’t want a continuing resolution oh — and they’re threatening to remove Kevin McCarthy as house speaker if they don’t get their way.
Now keep in mind, the senate has to agree to whatever the house passes and the President has to sign off and right now – none of these priorities of those house republicans are going to fly in the senate. And the fact is senate republicans are also saying they don’t like some of these divisive conservative measures and they won’t vote for them either.
So what is going to happen? Well, the senate is likely going to be successful in passing their appropriation bills in the next week or so. But the house speaker has his work cut out for him and this is going to be a very interesting few days.
