Congress has Friday deadline to avoid partial government shutdown

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers have accomplished some top priorities on their legislative checklist during the lame duck session, but the hardest one is yet to come: reaching a deal to fund the government through the end of the next fiscal year.

After lawmakers left for the weekend Thursday, negotiators from both parties continued to work on whittling down differences, starting with a top-line number for a spending bill on which the two sides are about $26 billion apart — all of it for Democrats’ nondefense items.

Congress faces a Friday deadline to decide the path they will take — that is when money funding the government from a short-term spending bill passed in September expires and threatens to create a partial shutdown of government operations.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, on Thursday said Democrats plan to introduce an omnibus spending bill Monday to pressure Republicans to accept it or face a yearlong extension of current spending.

But Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), the top Republican on that committee, pushed back. “It’s going nowhere. It might come out of the House, but it’s going nowhere in the Senate,” he said of the Democrats’ planned bill.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) last week acknowledged the two parties remain far apart on the spending bill, but urged Republicans to work with Democrats to pass an omnibus package to avoid a pointless government shutdown.

“While there’s still more work to do before we bridge the gap, I’m hopeful we can get a full government funding package done soon,” he said Thursday.

On Friday, White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters in her daily briefing that the White House thinks a budget deal can be reached.

“We were able to get government funding done in a bipartisan way last year. We believe it should be done in a bipartisan way this year,” Jean-Pierre said. “There is enough time to get this done.”

Parties have come together

The two parties have come together to pass some major legislation.

On Thursday, the House passed the Senate version of a bill that protects same-sex and interracial marriages, in case the U.S. Supreme Court follows up on its overturning of constitutional abortion rights by striking down landmark rulings on those types of marital unions.

The House also gave overwhelming bipartisan approval in a 350-80 vote for the annual National Defense Authorization Act. The Senate is expected to take that bill up and pass it in the upcoming week.

And passage of the Electoral Count Act, which aims to close any real or imagined loopholes that former President Donald Trump sought to use to remain in office, looks promising, according to a person close to Schumer.

But lawmakers are pressing for passage of many other priorities, not all of which will make it to the Senate floor because time is simply running out or the partisan resistance of one party or another makes it impossible to pass.

One significant measure that many lawmakers and budget experts expect to be kicked into next year is the raising of the debt limit, which will give the new House Republican majority a lever to demand cuts in spending, either for the 2023 or the 2024 fiscal years.

If no deal is reached on funding the government for the rest of this fiscal year, lawmakers have said they might need to fall back to a continuing resolution, which lawmakers often call a CR, which funds the government at the current levels of spending.

“Our strong preference is to have a bipartisan omnibus bill. We still see a pathway to achieving that,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Thursday. “However, if we don’t have that, we may be forced to put forth a yearlong CR.”

G. William Hoagland, a former congressional budget aide who is now senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said, “I think we're coming down to Monday when I think it's sort of what I would say is a ‘come to Jesus’ moment of some sort with members.”