Dec.29

electoral-vote.com

Dem 51

   

GOP 49

Funding the Government: Johnson Has Let It Slide for Too Long

Back when the House kicked the can down the road by keeping the government funded for a few months, everyone hailed that as one of the all-time great pieces of legislation. Of course, all it did was move the deadline and split it into two parts. A piece of the government will shut down on Jan. 19 if nothing is done and another piece will shut down on Feb. 2 if nothing is done. So far there is no progress at all on anything, and Jan 19 is now only 3 weeks away, with the next week basically lost to the holidays. Oh, and the House has also not dealt with Joe Biden's request for aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and some border funding. Your tax dollars not at work.

There is almost no time left. The first step is to determine how much money will go to each department. Then thousands of details have to be filled in. That alone can take a couple of weeks. There is so much to do and so little time in which to do it. Here are some of the points that are going to be very rough and will test Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to the limit.

• More Defense Spending: Both parties (and Joe Biden) want to increase defense spending, over and above the $886 billion signed into law a couple of weeks ago. The trouble is, spending a lot more on defense would bump up against the debt ceiling limit and the Freedom Caucus does not want to raise the limit. However, there are probably enough votes for defense spending without the FC votes, so once an amount is agreed upon, this should be the easiest problem to solve.
  
  
• Less Everything Else Spending: Republicans want to slash spending for just about everything else. Democrats want to raise non-defense spending. This is a perpetual problem. When the parties negotiate in good faith, it can usually be solved, but now the Republicans not only don't negotiate in good faith, they regularly renege on agreements they made in the past.
  
  
• No Emergency Spending: Senate Democrats and Republicans have agreed on $69 billion in extra "emergency" funding. This gets around the debt limit ceiling. The deal also reduces IRS funding by $10 billion, something Republicans want because although they love going after "welfare cheaters," for some reason they are much less interested in going after income tax cheaters. House conservatives want to ditch the whole thing and not have any emergency spending.
  
  
• Poison Pills: The funding bill House Republicans want to pass is full of stuff not related to government spending, including bans on abortion, drag shows, pride flags, diversity and inclusion efforts, and much more, none of which are acceptable to House or Senate Democrats. Democrats are going to scour the bill to see if somewhere in the middle of page 1615 there is a sentence like: "Effective immediately, all abortions in the United States and its territories are hereby forbidden."
  
  
• How to Sell It: Usually in this kind of panic situation in December or January, all the funding bills are packaged together into one giant omnibus bill. However, many members have gotten tired of this. Since there are now two deadlines on different dates, there is some interest in two "minibus" bills that are not quite as unwieldy. Actually doing it the normal way, one bill per department, isn't done anymore because that increases the attack surface for enemies of all government spending.
  

So will there be a government shutdown in January or February? Maybe and maybe not. A lot depends on Johnson's cat-herding skills, which haven't really been tested yet. (V)