Congress is already signaling it may miss this year’s deadline for getting all of its spending bills done, setting up the possibility of a shutdown showdown at the height of the midterm election campaign.
Despite having a bipartisan commitment to do things right this year, a topline spending number in hand and a relatively early start to the process, the lawmakers in charge of the appropriations process said they’re likely to go into overtime.
Rep. Tom Cole, Oklahoma Republican and chairman of a House subcommittee on health spending, said he’d be surprised if lawmakers manage to avoid passing another stopgap bill to get them past September, saying things always get more complicated in an election year.
“There’s less time, there’s more risk, and so it’s easier to punt sometimes,” he said. “But it’d be a good thing if we could get these things out, and we could get the majority of bills done.”
House lawmakers said they got all 12 annual spending bills done last year and should be able to do so again this year.
But the holdup has been the Senate, where Democrats maintain the ability to filibuster, and have flexed those powers in recent years to gum up the works on spending bills, figuring they had more leverage that way.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, Vice Chairman Patrick Leahy, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer all say they’re serious about avoiding something similar this fall.
“I think what’s important here is to move the Senate forward on appropriations, and we Democrats have every intention of doing that and cooperating,” Mr. Schumer said Tuesday.
Mr. Shelby said Tuesday it should be seen as “progress” if lawmakers can move half of them by the next deadline at the end of September.
“I never said I thought all of them would be done by Sept. 30,” he said. “If Sept. 30 we have four, five, six bills — that’s progress. And the others in the pipeline.”
Even that would be an improvement over recent years, when Congress has generally failed to pass any of the dozen bills on time, instead resorting to a cycle of shutdown showdowns, stopgap “continuing resolutions” to keep the government open, and then a massive “omnibus” bill months after the deadline that wraps all of the government’s spending into one measure.
President Trump signed such an omnibus in March, approving a nearly $150 billion spending increase, but vowed never to do so again.
Mr. McConnell is aiming to avoid an omnibus this year. He’s signaled he may keep senators in town for part of the scheduled August recess in order to move the spending process along and clear through a backlog of presidential nominations.
Having an overall spending number already in hand should make the process easier.
But policy fights over immigration and abortion can complicate matters. Last year, Senate Democrats fought Republicans to remove abortion restrictions attached to health money in House-passed bills. There’s likely to be another fight again this year.
Mr. Trump, meanwhile, has already signaled he would welcome a shutdown showdown this fall to try to get more funding for his proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, said he’s still awaiting more information on the logistics behind the president’s wall funding request.
“They’ve given us some of that information, but they haven’t given all of it,” he said.
But Mr. Tester did say he’s optimistic that this year will be different, saying the four leaders — Mr. McConnell, Mr. Schumer, Mr. Shelby, and Mr. Leahy — appear to be serious in their public pledges and forecasts about increased cooperation.
“I think it’s real,” he said. “They’ve been talking about it just about every subcommittee that I’ve been at. Leahy has been there and talked about the fact that they intend to do it.”
Rep. Chris Stewart, Utah Republican, said he’s not buying it yet.
“I don’t know that anything’s different this year than [the] last couple years, and that’s very frustrating,” he said. “The House is doing their work, right? We’re passing our bills — I’m confident we’ll get our 12 appropriations bills through the House, but then it all breaks down in the Senate.”
Matt Dennis, a former spokesman for House Appropriations Committee Democrats, said lawmakers got somewhat of a head start this year with March’s two-year budget deal, but that there’s still no guarantee of success.
“The process is more set up for success this year than it was last year,” he said. “That doesn’t mean you’re going to get bills enacted prior to the end of the fiscal year, but it’s at least conceivable. There’s a plausible idea as to how it could happen.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.