The House and Senate finished work for the week Thursday afternoon, no doubt traipsing off to finalize plans for the six-week stretch of August recess. They should plan to rest up during those weeks because September is going to be fraught in light of what leaders in each chamber decided to do this week. The Senate’s top appropriators added $13.7 billion of government funding above the limits President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy agreed to in the deal they made to resolve the last debt ceiling crisis. House leaders, who’ve been whittling down that number to appease hard-liners, slashed it even further.
The top two Senate appropriators, Democrat Patty Murray and Republican Susan Collins, announced in a committee meeting Thursday that they had agreed to “add $13.7 billion in additional emergency appropriations, including $8 billion for defense, and $5.7 billion for non-defense spread across 4 subcommittees.” Those four are Homeland Security; Labor, Health and Human Services and Education; State and Foreign Operations; and Commerce, Justice, and Science. “Members on both sides of the aisle—on and off committee—have voiced serious, bipartisan concerns about the cuts in the debt ceiling deal to vital non-defense programs and the caps it imposes on defense spending,” Murray said in announcing the increases.
The only opposition in the committee came from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who groused about debt. “Unfortunately, it looks like yet another gimmick is being pursued, this time outside of the purview of the debt ceiling agreement, right here in our own committee,” he said. “It’s just plain wrong. It takes us off the promising path that we have started on to get our fiscal house back in order.” He offered and then withdrew an amendment to block the additional funding.
Manchin stands out as the only true ally the House Freedom Caucus has in the Senate. Most Senate Republicans and plenty of Democrats were opposed to the agreement Biden and McCarthy made because of the too-low (in their minds) defense funding level, and they recognize that to get buy-in to boost the military they also have to increase funding on the nondefense side.
While the Senate was increasing available funding, House Republican leaders were extorted into appeasing hard-liners by making even deeper cuts than those negotiated in the debt ceiling agreement. They met Wednesday with Freedom Caucus Chair Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and said they’d try to trim $115 billion from their top line, which leadership had already slashed down from the level agreed to in the debt ceiling deal to try to get the extremists on board.
McCarthy is going to try to move two appropriations bills on the floor next week to fund the Agriculture and Veterans Affairs departments. The extremists are already threatening these two bills, which should be straightforward and noncontroversial. Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida, a Freedom Caucus asshole, told Politico that his message to leadership on these bills is “fuck around and find out.” Not that he has a problem with either of these bills, “per se,” but he doesn’t want them getting any ideas about the other “seven or eight bills that have to be worked through, and I don’t think we’re there yet.”
The extremists are plotting their poison pills for these two bills, injecting the fight over the Pentagon’s abortion leave policy into the Veterans Affairs appropriations bill because it also includes military construction. They will also likely try to slash food stamps in the Agriculture bill. That’s going to force the rest of the Republicans into casting unpopular votes again.
There was some talk before the July 4 recess of House leadership about trying to ready a stopgap bill that would push the funding deadline back and take a government shutdown off the table. That discussion appears to have died down, and as of now it doesn’t look like the hard-liners would go along with that anyway.
There are just a few days of legislative work scheduled in the House next week, which will be taken up by the two appropriations bills—if the extremists allow them to go to the floor. Then there are only 12 work days scheduled in the House during September, and 16 in the Senate. While leadership teams and their staff will be working through the long recess on the funding bills, they can’t make much progress with everyone gone.
That means Republicans definitely need to figure some stuff out while Congress is in recess, like how they’ll fight the tiny minority of their extremist members to avoid a shutdown. It’s either that or reconcile themselves to the fact that they’re going to let a dozen or so nihilists ruin everything, including the prospects for a Republican majority in the House after 2024.
Sign the petition to Congress: Say no to a nearly $1 trillion Pentagon budget.
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