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The immediate news coming out of a meeting of the House Republican caucus Monday was somewhat relieving: Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) plans to push through a short-term stopgap spending bill to buy more time ahead of a September 30 deadline to fund the government. That may put off a government shutdown for a little while, though McCarthy was quick to say that he didn’t want that to stretch into December, when Congress can get forced into passing something longer-term so they can leave for the holidays.
But in reality, this latest maneuver just delays a reckoning (or maybe not even that) on an ultimate budget and spending deal, in an environment where there is essentially no common ground. Contrary to the usual expectation, this is not primarily a fight between the parties, but between the two chambers of Congress, and more specifically a fight for the direction of the Republican Party, with the fate of government workers, public programs, and the broader economy in the background.
When McCarthy and President Joe Biden shook hands on a deal to raise the debt limit that set spending levels for the next two years, you might have thought that, well, that would set spending levels for the next two years. You would have been wrong, as the deal unraveled almost the moment it was agreed to.
The House immediately began to set appropriations bills at fiscal year 2022 levels, rather than the 2023 level laid out in the agreement. That translates into a cut of roughly $119 billion. Establishment Republicans are trying to accomplish this mostly through clawing back $115 billion in unspent funds, while far-right conservatives think that’s a gimmick, and want to cut current programs. House leadership has tried to square this circle by adding social-policy riders to mollify conservatives, but they had to abandon an annual spending bill at the end of July because moderates wouldn’t vote for an attached anti-abortion measure. Only one of the 12 spending bills has passed the House.
On the other side of the Rotunda, Senate Appropriations Committee leaders Patty Murray (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME) agreed to tack on an extra $14 billion on top of the FY2023 benchmark. All 12 of the spending bills cleared the committee on a bipartisan basis before the end of July, though none have come before the full Senate.
Added to the complications is a supplemental spending request the Biden administration released last week that totals $40 billion, including $24 billion to support Ukraine’s war with Russia, along with additional money for disaster relief (including for the recent fires in Maui and flooding in Vermont) and border security. McCarthy has rejected a supplemental bill for months, though a significant number of House Republicans still favor supporting Ukraine; only 70 Republicans voted to cut off funding earlier this year. On Monday, McCarthy said he’d look for “offsets” for the supplemental, which would be opposed by the Senate and the White House.
McConnell sees the spending fight as bound up with whether the party will sustain its traditional conservative posture, particularly on national security, or give over to Trumpism.
You could easily make the case—I have, in fact—that the $886 billion given to the military next year has ample room for giving $24 billion of that to Ukraine, and a supplemental emergency request is unnecessary. Using supplementals to boost the military budget is a time-honored tradition going back to Iraq and Afghanistan, one that should be stopped. But Senate Republican hawks think the $886 billion itself is too low, and have spent every day since the debt limit deal trying to raise it.
This intra-Republican fight is a fundamentally intractable standoff. The House is lowering spending below the agreed-to numbers, and the Senate is raising spending above it. But it’s more than that, actually, as evidenced by a long piece in Politico about the twilight of Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s career. McConnell sees the spending fight as bound up with whether the party will sustain its traditional conservative posture, particularly on national security, or give over to Trumpism. “This is the defining, final battle of his career, keeping the party away from this new flirtation with isolationism,” said one of McConnell’s top advisers.
On the other side, McCarthy’s tenure as Speaker may be on the line with this outcome. He has no majority if he sides with the hard-liners or with the moderates on this issue, and there’s little possibility for splitting the difference. With the debt limit deal, the real questions were deferred to appropriations. That’s where we are now.
It’s one thing to have a fight about where spending sits along a relatively narrow band. It’s another thing to wage a proxy fight about America’s place in the world, overlaid with the job security of the highest-ranking House member. That isn’t getting decided through a compromise of sprinkling a few billion here and cutting back a few billion there. Hard-line conservatives are already talking about the spending battle as “World War III.”
McConnell’s health, of course, is steadily declining, which doesn’t position him well to lead this fight. But Senate Republicans, with their infirm leader, are clearly more united than their House counterparts with their hale and hearty one, and McCarthy knows this. In his Monday conference call, he urged completion of the spending bills, highlighting the “97 percent yes vote” for the Senate versions in committee. In addition, the most vociferous holdouts on the House side are people who never vote for spending bills anyway; Republicans more inclined to make a deal wonder why they have to listen to automatic no votes.
It’s unclear whether the House would even be able to pass a continuing resolution. Hard-liners would want that to also reflect FY2022 levels; typically, a continuing resolution extends current-year funding. Others have called for riders to change border policy. Hard-liners have shown a willingness to take down rules for legislation, which would force McCarthy to rely on Democrats even to get a vote on many items. One rumor is that Democrats would ask to pair the stopgap with the emergency supplemental—which gets us right back to the existential battle within the right over foreign policy.
Democrats are kind of a bystander in this debate; they just want to honor the previous agreement. Some have suggested using the supplemental to hold off the child care cliff, the loss of billions in child care funding that was part of the American Rescue Plan. But by and large, they aren’t asking for much, just watching the dysfunction.
The reality is we are careening toward a government shutdown, whether because a continuing resolution cannot get agreement or because it eventually expires without a broader deal. Historically, Republicans in this situation—controlling one or both chambers of Congress with a Democratic president—have been disproportionately blamed for shutdowns, which aren’t as existential as a debt limit breach but still mean massive government employee furloughs, shuttered facilities, and general inconvenience.
There were a lot of tallies of winners and losers after the debt limit settlement, based on the topline budget numbers in the agreement. But those numbers are now unsettled; we don’t know where they’ll land, and any pronouncements on the debt limit outcome are subservient to that fact.
The one wild card here is a provision in the debt limit deal that automatically snaps spending below 2023 levels if there is no spending agreement by January 1. That would disproportionately cut military spending, and was put in place as a way to force everyone to the table. That’s become the real deadline, and it’s unlikely we’ll see a resolution before that. Happy new year.
