The government runs out of funding in less than 16 days, and Congress is scheduled to be in session for seven of them.
Lawmakers are starting to feel the time crunch.
“That’s a problem,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole told reporters Thursday of the limited session days before the funding deadline. “That’s a real problem. So we have to move fast.”
House and Senate Republicans have said they plan to advance a package of three individual appropriations bills — Legislative Branch, Agriculture, and Military Construction and Veterans Affairs — in addition to a supposedly “clean” continuing resolution to extend current spending levels for the rest of the federal government into November.
But with so little time remaining until the funding deadline, Republican lawmakers still need to align their topline funding figures with the White House. And Democrats need to decide whether they are going to get on board with Republicans’ plan or oppose the strategy in pursuit of health care-related concessions.
Complicating matters, Congress is slated to spend all of next week in recess for Rosh Hashanah, which is observed from Monday evening to Wednesday evening. Cole said that leadership is considering tacking session days back onto the end of next week to force Congress back to work sooner. But as of Monday morning, they had not made any changes to the calendar.
“Obviously, you want to be respectful of these holidays,” Cole said last week. “But the way the schedule worked out this year, showing up a day before Sept. 30 and thinking you’re going to get anything through this crisis? We would be better off to try to get a deal between now and the end of next week.”
Even if Cole wanted to resolve government funding this week, he told reporters that the text of a continuing resolution does not yet exist. To add to the stress, there’s continued debate about how long to extend funding — congressional Republicans are pushing for mid-November while White House officials have signaled they would prefer Jan. 31.
As Congress scrambles to work out its outstanding issues, the prospect of a government shutdown sounds increasingly likely to lawmakers. The top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, Rep. Brendan Boyle, went so far as to predict one to The Bulwark last week.
“I think we started late,” Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito told reporters, “because a new president always kind of holds you up.”
For now, Republicans are projecting confidence that they can negotiate the details of a spending package amongst themselves. As Capito put it, the GOP is currently reading from the “same chapter,” if not the same page.
Talks between Republicans and Democrats, however, have apparently stalled. That’s a potentially massive problem given Republicans need seven Senate Democrats to back their spending package if they want to avoid a shutdown.
Democratic leadership has not made a public, explicit ask from Republicans, saying just that they will use their leverage to seek some concession on “health care” broadly, like an extension to expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. House and Senate Democratic leadership have repeatedly demurred when pressed on the specifics of their demands.
Republicans have seized on that lack of specificity to blame Democrats for dilly-dallying with just days before the government shutdown.
Democrats “don’t know what they want, keep changing the goalposts. So this is one of those never-ending, when Lucy moves the football type exercises,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Thursday. “At some point, you just gotta fish or cut bait.”
President Donald Trump expressed even more frustration with Democrats on Friday during an interview with “Fox & Friends.”
“There is something wrong with them,” Trump said. “If you gave them every dream right now — they want to give away money to this or that and destroy the country. If you gave them every dream, they would not vote for it.”
“Don’t even bother dealing with them,” he added. “We will get it through because the Republicans are sticking together for the first time in a long time.”
If Republicans listen to Trump’s message to not “bother” to negotiate with Democrats, Congress very well may careen toward a shutdown. And, to hear House Minority Whip Katherine Clark tell it, icing Democrats out of the process is exactly what GOP leadership is currently doing.
“We have had absolutely no response from Republicans to come together and make this spending plan about reducing the cost of living and protecting people’s health care,” Clark told reporters last week.
Of course, there might be some strategy behind all of the partisan bickering.
Republicans are incentivized not to play ball with Democrats until the final moments and hold out for a handful of moderates to eventually cave without the party giving anything up. After all, that’s precisely what Senate Democrats did in March when seven of them voted with every Republican to extend government funding without getting any substantive policy win in return.
Democrats, meanwhile, might also be wise to keep their powder dry a little while longer. If they make a public demand too soon, Republicans might shoot it down before it stands a chance of making it into the bill text — as they are doing with the ACA subsidies.
The dynamic is becoming a game of chicken. And both parties appear to be banking that the other doesn’t actually have an appetite to shut the government down and litigate which party is responsible.
If Democrats don’t deliver the votes, Republicans are prepared to blast them for being intransigent and unreasonable at the expense of federal workers. If Republicans don’t throw Democrats some policy bone, Democrats are eager to accuse them of being bad-faith negotiators who can’t even manage to keep the government open when they control the House, Senate and the White House.
But Cole, at least, sounds like he’s preparing to have that debate.
“I think shutting down the government in a temper tantrum is not going to be helpful to the country,” he said of Democrats. “I don’t think it’s going to be good for them either.”