U.S.
House votes down GOP short-term spending bill with shutdown on horizon
By
The Washington Post September 29, 2023
Mariana Alfaro, Marianna Sotomayor and Jacob Bogage
The Washington Post September 29, 2023
The House side of the U.S. Capitol is seen on Sept. 19, 2023. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
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House Republicans on Friday failed to pass a short-term funding bill to keep the government open beyond Saturday, a collapse in House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bid to avert a shutdown after focusing on long-term spending this week.
McCarthy had hoped that concentrating on the passage of long-term funding bills would shake loose some support for a stopgap proposal that hard-liners had blocked. But when the gavel fell Friday afternoon, 21 Republicans had voted against the plan, and the bill failed, 232-198.
It was not immediately clear what McCarthy’s next step was. Talking to reporters after the vote failed, he chuckled and said, “It’s not the end yet. I’ve got other ideas.” He did not elaborate.
Had the bill been adopted, it would have cut hundreds of billions of dollars from programs important to millions of Americans, including nutritional aid for poor pregnant mothers, housing subsidies for low-income families, and medical research and environmental protection, among many other federal operations. Although the House GOP plan would spare the military, veterans’ benefits and immigration enforcement from cuts, many other domestic programs would face immediate 30 percent budget reductions, and some education subsidies and energy aid for poor families would be axed by more than half.
The legislation would fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate but reflects the lengths to which McCarthy is willing to go to pass a GOP-only bill to fund the government out of the House. Politically, its passage would have offered Republicans a firmer starting point in negotiations with the Senate.
The spending levels for the next fiscal year, which begins Sunday, were supposed to have been set in a deal that McCarthy and President Biden agreed to in exchange for House support to suspend the debt ceiling. But as McCarthy has struggled to win over a handful of conservative lawmakers, he instructed House Republicans to draft bigger and bigger spending cuts that make all full-year funding bills dead on arrival in the Senate. Initially, House Republican leaders had tried to advance more-modest across-the-board cuts that did not exempt the Defense or Veterans Affairs Departments from spending reductions.
McCarthy has had to navigate a similar dynamic with short-term spending bills, offering the latest proposal with its 30 percent cuts across most government departments even though leaders knew the bill would fail Friday.
With a shutdown on the horizon, McCarthy and his conference have tried blaming the government shutdown on Biden’s immigration policies, even though the White House has asked Congress for more funding to address the border and fentanyl crisis.
The Senate is expected to pass its own version of a stopgap bill either Saturday or Sunday, but McCarthy has said he will not put that bill on the House floor. Without an agreement on a short-term funding extension, the government would shut down Sunday.
McCarthy has said he wouldn’t bring the Senate’s plan to the House floor unless border security provisions are attached. The Senate continuing resolution in its current form would almost certainly pass in the House, carried by the support of Democrats. But some hard-right lawmakers have threatened that if McCarthy uses Democratic votes to pass any legislation that some Republicans oppose - as he did during the debt ceiling fight in June - they would begin the process of removing him from the speaker’s chair.
A small group of hard-right Republicans has vocally opposed a stopgap bill, instead demanding the House move forward on the 12 appropriations bills needed to fund fiscal 2024. The House has passed four of those 12 bills, but a fifth failed to move forward late Thursday night because more than 25 Republicans voted against the measure because of policy concerns.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-N.C.), who voted against the stopgap bill Friday, called his colleagues who oppose these conservative bills “liberals in the Republican conference.” Many vulnerable incumbents who helped clinch the GOP majority feel differently, acknowledging at several points in recent weeks that all the bills they are sending to the Senate will not pass.