The Senate Budget: A Hope and a Hopeless Scenario for the Next-Generation Remains Confidentially Informed
Government funding is set to expire Friday night at midnight. Both chambers have time to hammer out details of a larger budget deal with the continuing resolution.
We are optimistic that if we maintain the good faith that we have seen thus far, we will get there. I remain hopeful because despite disagreements about the ultimate package, there’s little disagreement that an omnibus is by far the best solution for funding the government,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor. He touted how the bill will likely include additional Ukraine aid and the bipartisan Electoral Count Act.
The legislation passed by a large margin. It includes $12 billion in aid for Ukraine, $2.5 billion to aid New Mexico in its recovery from a wildfire, $1 billion in funding a low-income home heating program, and $20 million in emergency to address the water crisis in Jackson, Miss.
The bill also allows for the reauthorization of FDA user fees for another five years, which Schumer said in a statement is “vital if we want to avoid any slowdown in the review of new lifesaving drugs.”
One Republican doubted that Schumer could get the 60 votes he would need to force a final vote on the government funding bill later this week.
The continuing resolution easily overcame a procedural vote on Tuesday and was set to get final passage after Manchin agreed to remove his language.
Dem Demographics in the House: Kevin McCarthy’s “Hell No” on a Full-Year Defense Spending Package after Tuesday’s Election
Both chambers are eager to leave Washington and return home, particularly lawmakers who want to make their final pitches to constituents ahead of November’s midterm elections.
Democrats are determined to get a government funding bill passed in the final days of their party’s House majority and are also gearing up for the battles that will unfold at the beginning of next year.
Lawmakers are trying to finish the National Defense Authorization Act before the year ends, a must-pass defense policy bill. The Senate is expected to vote on the new law this week, with bipartisan support.
While the House is able to pass legislation by a simple majority, Democrats in the Senate face an uphill climb given their narrow majority. Democrats lack the votes to overturn the 60-vote threshold needed to end the cloture in the Senate because they don’t have enough support within their party. Therefore, major priorities for liberal voters – like the passage of legislation protecting access to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade – are expected to remain out of reach for the party for the foreseeable future.
Democrats, who currently control both chambers, are returning with a new reality in the wake of Tuesday’s election they did not expect: Key races that will determine the balance of power in the House have not been called, and CNN has not yet projected who would control the House. While Republicans still appear likely to win enough seats to control the chamber, it would likely be with a narrower margin than originally anticipated.
The Democrats will control the Senate once the news session of Congress starts in January, as was projected by CNN on Saturday. But with a runoff election set for Georgia’s US Senate seat set for December 6, the final make-up of the chamber won’t be known until at least then.
At a news conference Sunday, the leader of the Senate promised that there would be a lot of work but refused to say what the agenda would be.
But on Tuesday, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy told House Republicans during a closed-door meeting he’s a “hell no” on a full-year government spending package, according to sources in the room. The statement by McCarthy was a sign that it will be hard to keep the government running if negotiations don’t get a deal done before the end of the year. The comments from McCarthy may even add more urgency to the effort to reach a deal before the new Congress convenes.
Democrats counter by saying those measures were necessary to help the country recover from the devastating impact of the pandemic as well as to tackle other critical priorities. And Democrats say that money to respond to Covid, health care and climate should not mean there should be less money next year for government operations and non-defense, domestic spending.
The defense bill needs to be passed by Congress. The bill’s consideration could lead to debate and the push for amendments on a variety of subjects, including whether or not to punish Saudi Arabia for cutting oil production.
A Senate vote on codifying same-sex marriage is also on tap. In mid-September, the chamber punted on a vote until after the November midterm elections as negotiators asked for more time to lock down support – a move that could make it more likely the bill will ultimately pass the chamber.
Votes are likely on bipartisan legislation that would make it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, a response to former President Donald Trump’s efforts to block the 2020 election results, which led to the siege of the Capitol. It is supported by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. The bill needs to be passed by the Senate and the House before it could be put to a vote.
It is not yet clear when the debt limit will be reached and it appears that Congress will not act to raise it during the current session because of other bills competing for floor time. But political battle lines are already being drawn and maneuvering is underway in Washington over the contentious and high-stakes issue. Democrats do not believe a damaging default should be caused over paying bills already accrued. Republicans insist that they will only approve a debt limit hike if Democrats agree to cut spending.
“The debt ceiling, of course, is something that we have to deal with. Schumer said they would look at it over the next few weeks. “I have to talk to the leadership first. The House is not known where it will be.
“If people want to make a debt ceiling (for a longer period of time), just like anything else, there comes a point in time where, OK, we’ll provide you more money, but you got to change your current behavior,” he said in an interview with Punchbowl News.
“In Washington, we have a bunch of things on our plate, including getting the defense bill done with Ukraine right before us and the strides that (Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky) is making against Vladimir Putin,” she said. We have the end-of-the-year budget bill to finish, as we know the Electoral Count Act, which is led by Susan Collins and Joe Manchin. All of that is immediately when we get back.”
The government funding standoff gripping Washington ahead of Friday’s shutdown deadline is one of the first indicators of the coming shift in power dynamics that will return the capital to a governing cold war between congressional Republicans and a Democratic White House.
The funding deal Congress is supposed to pass to prevent a government shutdown on Friday was complicated by disagreements between the parties over how much should be spent on domestic priorities. The two sides were roughly $26 billion apart, according to Shelby.
It is an early look at the paralysis that could happen if there is a stalemate between Democrats and Republicans in the government, because neither side has the power to fully fulfill their election promises.
Some of these clashes, like disputes over funding social programs and the need to raise the government’s borrowing limit next year, threaten to shut the government or badly damage the US economy. This heralds a return of the government shutdown threats that were a regular holiday season tradition during the Obama administration after Republicans gained congressional majorities. Over the holiday season, the Trump administration caused the federal government to shut down for 35 days because of a dispute over the president’s demand for border wall funding.
In a sign of rising political pressure over the spending clash, a group of Republican senators wrote to GOP leader Mitch McConnell last week, laying out their strategy and urging him to block a big spending bill and to agree to a short-term funding package to keep the government open for a few weeks.
Their stance helps explain why McConnell last week gave a grim prognosis for a deal with Democrats on a big funding bill, commenting, “We don’t have agreements to do virtually anything. … We don’t have an overall agreement on how much we are going to spend, and we have less than a month to do it.
His comments, while offering a glimpse of how he plans to preside over a confrontation with the White House, also offered insight into how the GOP House could make McConnell’s life more complicated next year as he tries to manage his party in the Senate.
But a senior Biden administration official warned last week that even a funding deal that lasted a year would have “disastrous” consequences for key programs.
Congressional Republicans Are Getting Closer to the White House: A Scenario for the Decay of the 2020 U.S. Senate Budget
According to the Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Republicans intend to jam the Democrats at the end of the year in order to push through a plan to slash spending on social programs.
According toSanders, Republicans see it as a chance to hold us hostage and get demands that would not be made under normal circumstances.
“Look, they have not been shy about making it clear they want to cut Social Security, they want to cut Medicare, they want to cut Medicaid,” Sanders told Dana Bash.
Biden sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin up to Capitol Hill last week to brief senators on the war in Ukraine. But in a sign of the consuming nature of the spending showdown, Republicans emerged from the meeting complaining that the two secretaries spent time lobbying for an omnibus spending bill over a continuing resolution.
It was a waste of time. Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy told reporters that it was a waste of time. He said that Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had asked Blinken and Austin to explain why the new spending bill was so necessary. “I knew as soon as Chuck said that. … this is just a political exercise,” Kennedy said.
Last week, Sen. John Thune told reporters that he was looking forward to hearing your Christmas carols and singing with you.
The White House isn’t talking about a possible bipartisan funding package for the Pentagon, but how quickly can it slip through the cracks?
The Biden administration and members of Congress continued negotiations over the weekend with the goal of hammering out a spending package ahead of the deadline.
There isn’t any weekends for people who work on appropriations this time of the year according to an administration official closely involved in the talks.
Over the weekend, both Democrats and Republicans were sharing with one another their “bottom lines” on various fronts, and the White House remained publicly optimistic that an agreement could be reached on an omnibus: “There is absolutely still a path and time for a deal.”
The CR is likely to be passed before the Friday deadline because of the impasse over a broader funding deal.
The key question will be how long such an extension would last. It could be as short as one week, a timeframe that would keep the pressure dialed up for lawmakers to reach a broader deal, while still allowing more time for negotiations. Or it could extend the shutdown deadline into the next Congress, which will convene on January 3, and when Republicans take control of the House.
A change in majority in the House could make it harder to reach a broader funding deal. If a bipartisan funding deal can’t be reached, Congress could pass a full year CR, but leaders in both parties would like to avoid that scenario because it would keep spending flat for the Pentagon and domestic priorities.
McConnell spoke on the Senate floor Thursday. “Our commander-in-chief and his party have spent huge sums on domestic priorities outside the normal appropriations process without a penny for the Defense Department. McConnell said they won’t allow them to hijack the government funding process and take our troops hostage for more liberal spending.
The legislation was meant to get the nation out of the recession and get the economy going again, and I think they are doing that, according to the senator. They were not meant to fund the basic functions of the American government in fiscal year 2023.”
The omnibus bill the Democrats will introduce Monday is not expected to have the Republican votes in the Senate to pass, but would be a marker of their priorities in the funding fight.
The framework has been finalized for the full-year government funding package that was announced Tuesday evening by top congressional negotiators.
The announcement did not say what the agreement involved, but it is a major breakthrough as lawmakers attempt to fund the government before the end of the year.
Senate Majority Whip Chuck Schumer warns that the Government will stop funding the government until it is resolved by the end of the fiscal year
Republicans are critical of recent domestic spending by Democrats and argue that measures Democrats have passed while they have controlled both chambers of Congress, like the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill and a sweeping health care and climate bill, are wasteful and have worsened inflation.
The Senate’s majority whip warned that there would be a government funding fight next year. It would invite more negotiation obstruction according to the Illinois Democrat. “This fiscal year began October 1. Let’s get this job done this year, do it before Christmas.”
He said he believes that people want to fund the government until there is a full-year deal in place.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on Tuesday that he is hopeful that there will be a deal, if talks continue as they are.
Schumer said that the Senate would need to pass a one-week stopgap measure by the end of the week to stave off a government shutdown on Friday. He said he hopes no senator “stands in the way” of quickly passing the funding patch. The consent of all 100 senators is needed to speed up the process.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/13/politics/government-funding-shutdown-latest/index.html
Reply to Sen. Wyden: Boosting the Child Tax Credit, Research and Development, and a Possible Extension of the Border Policy
A group of Democratic lawmakers are pushing to make sure that part of the enhanced child tax credit is restored.
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said on Tuesday that he plans to “fight with every ounce of my strength” over the issue.
The most important interest of companies today is for trained and educated workers. You make investments like the Child Tax Credit and you give the employers the chance to get more of what they want. So the two of them – the Child Tax Credit, the Research and Development Credit – I support both, very, very strongly,” he said.
But asked about the possibility of a tax package in an omnibus deal, Thune said on Tuesday, “There’s a lot of expiring tax policy that needs to be extended, which enjoys bipartisan support, but as is usually the case there’s a ransom to be paid when it comes to tax policy and the price may be too high. I don’t see it at the moment.
Senators are pessimistic about making progress on the year-long government funding bill Wednesday night, with talks appearing to have stalled for the evening.
“This bill is hanging by a thread,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware said. “We are having enormously difficulty between a few Republicans on exactly what is the path.”
Emerging from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office, Sen. John Thune said, “I don’t think at this point there’s a clear path forward.” The South Dakota Republican signaled there would be no votes Wednesday.
The Senate was at an impasse over an amendment from Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee that would extend the border policy that allows migrants to be turned back at the border. The Biden administration earlier this week told the Supreme Court it should reject an emergency bid by a group of GOP-led states to keep the controversial border restriction in effect while legal challenges play out.
However, Democrats are concerned that Lee’s amendment may pass, as some centrists and others in their party have expressed support for an extension of the policy. After the Senate clears the bill, it must be passed by the Democratic-led House.