Congress is at their regularly scheduled government funding impasse, and as usual it is going to get ugly.
The four-vote Republican majority in the House of Representatives passed six out of twelve bills to fund the spending that Congress must pass every year. The other six came out of the Appropriations Committee but do not yet have enough votes to pass the House and so have not been brought up.
The Senate has not considered any of the funding bills and as usual is focused upon either passing one giant Continuing Resolution (CR) which keeps spending levels at current levels.
The current fight in the House is over a proposed CR that meets spending caps and has a policy rider which would close a giant loophole in the federal law that prohibits non-citizens from voting. The federal government fiscal year runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, so agreement must be reached to fund the 27 percent of the spending actively controlled by Congress or else a ‘government shutdown’ occurs.
One of the areas of disagreement amongst House Republicans is whether the CR should extend government spending until December, or if it should expire in March or even continue for the entire 2025 Fiscal Year (forcing a legally mandated one percent cut in spending with the defense side getting disproportionately whacked.)
The Speaker’s bill, which Americans for Limited Government has endorsed, calls for a six-month CR with the SAVE Act attached dealing with illegal voting by non-citizens.
The reason is crystal clear. If President Trump is re-elected and a GOP Congress follows, they will have an immediate chance to rewrite the spending priorities using the power of the purse. The alternatives are having the historically disastrous Christmas omnibus which ends up looking like a Christmas tree adorned with spending projects for all the good little Congressional Critters. The other alternative effectively locks in the Biden-Harris spending priorities for the first nine months of Trump’s term should he win, negating the former President’s ability to hit the ground running during a term where he becomes a political lame duck by the middle of 2026.
The other possibility is that the House Republicans cannot gather the necessary votes to pass anything, and either the government “shuts down” or GOP members who desperately do not want a shut down as it hurts them politically five weeks before the election coalesce with Democrats to enshrine the minority party’s priorities which can also pass the Senate and get signed by President Biden.
The Democrats are licking their chops at the opportunity to take over the most important function of the House of Representatives, the power of the purse. In doing so, they will strip away many protections and policy directives contained in the funding bills. They will also be able to reconfigure the spending to fully reflect their priorities.
Right now, there are not the votes in the House GOP to pass a six-month CR. Some Republicans have never voted for a CR before and want to keep that record intact. Others want to trigger sequester and have an automatic 1 percent cut take place mid-2025. And defense hawks do not want Pentagon spending hogtied to a CR of any length as it makes letting contracts very difficult.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is trying to solve this political Rubik’s Cube knowing that if he loses four Republicans for any proposal, chaos could erupt on the floor with a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans ceasing the initiative, and ending all discussion about illegal alien voting and most probably fiscal restraint from the legislation.
As much as I like a good ol’ government shutdown fight, let’s be clear, while four House GOP members can stop a Republican-only CR from passing, what they cannot do is stop their Republican colleagues from making a deal with the Democrats to avoid a government shutdown. They also cannot prevent the Senate from taking one of the spending bills that were sent to them months ago and replacing that language with a CR, all the while berating the Speaker for not keeping the shutdown intact.
Job one for House Republicans right now should be to maintain and expand their majority, and close behind, job two is to not do anything which harms Donald Trump’s chances at re-election.
Both shutting down the government and turning the funding process over to the Democrats does self-inflicted harm to both the House GOP and the candidacy of Donald Trump.
No one wants to cut government spending and re-shift priorities more than Americans for Limited Government. Doing anything other than passing a six-month CR, and hoping that a GOP controlled House and Senate, alongside President Trump can finally unite around spending priorities which will accelerate the process of cutting spending to bring the budget closer to balance.
Everyone in D.C. knows how this ends up ultimately playing out, the only question is whether chances of a bigger House majority and a Trump win in November will be damaged getting to it.
Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.
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