A top House lawmaker has announced that Congress will pass a government-wide temporary spending bill to keep the government running through Dec. 20, forestalling a government shutdown as the House turns its focus to impeachment hearings.
Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., made the announcement Tuesday after meeting with Senate counterpart Richard Shelby, R-Ala., in hopes of kick-starting long-delayed efforts to find agreement on $1.4 trillion worth of agency spending bills.
The situation
A fight over President Donald Trump's demands for up to $8 billion in new funding for his U.S.-Mexico border fence project is largely responsible for an impasse on the huge spending package, which would implement the details of this summer's hard-won budget accord.
The politically explosive impeachment hearing and the possibility of impeachment and a trial aren't making the jobs of dealmakers such as Lowey any easier.
Credit: Alex Wong
Credit: Alex Wong
It's yet another layer of complications for senior lawmakers pressing not just for an agreement on agency budgets; it's also complicating action on a long-sought rewrite of the North American trade rules.
»RELATED: A timeline of past government shutdowns
The top leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees met Tuesday afternoon to try to make progress toward a year-end deal on a massive appropriations package. Greeting reporters after a meeting with Shelby, Lowey sought to dispel worries of a shutdown when current funding expires next Thursday.
Shelby and Lowey promised a renewed push toward completing their unfinished work in coming weeks but offered no specifics.
"We had a very productive conversation," Lowey said. "It's our responsibility as the chairs of the committees to get our work done and we intend to get our work done."
Border wall impasse
The central issue to resolve is Trump’s request for new border wall funds.
“It always comes up whenever I talk to the president about appropriations,” said Shelby, who met with Trump on Saturday in the congressman’s home state of Alabama.
He said lawmakers will try to come to an agreement in the coming weeks and present their plan to Trump.
Most notably, a recurring fight about the U.S.-Mexico border fence and immigrant detention practices is making it difficult for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to make progress on a broader, full-year $1.4 trillion spending bill.
Credit: Olivier Douliery
Credit: Olivier Douliery
That measure is needed to implement the terms of last summer's hard-won budget agreement, which distributed budget increases to the Pentagon and domestic agencies.
McConnell — a top force behind the July budget pact — is personally invested in a successful budget outcome and appears ready to get engaged more actively.
Optimism for new trade deal
The other top issue is a legislative update to the landmark North American Free Trade Agreement, which is especially sought by Trump's GOP allies and the party's Main Street supporters.
Pelosi is the key figure on trade, which is always a tricky issue for Democrats, even if the politics of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement are nowhere nearly as divisive as NAFTA was 26 years ago.
»RELATED: Unemployment pay not certain for workers during government shutdown
Passage of NAFTA in 1993 badly split House Democrats, but Pelosi, who represents the Port of San Francisco, voted "aye," as did Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., and powerful Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass.
Neal is leading a working group on the measure and said the group is "on the 5-yard line" and the optimistic take is that he and Pelosi will bring USMCA in for an easy landing.
The trade updates are generally seen as an improvement over NAFTA, whose provisions enforcing Mexican labor and environmental rules are considered inadequate by many Democrats. The selling points for the new pact are that it updates NAFTA for the 21st century with hard-won provisions on digital trade, intellectual property, financial services and agriculture trade.
What’s at stake
Any impeachment-related delays could tax patience and thrust politically freighted issues such as the border wall and the updated U.S. trade pact directly into the heat of the presidential primary campaign.
Credit: ERIN SCHAFF
Credit: ERIN SCHAFF
As the House returns from a quick break, the sole piece of must-do business before Thanksgiving is to pass a stopgap spending bill to avert the second government shutdown within a year.
Where Donald Trump stands
On spending, Trump is a wild card as usual. He single-handedly drove the 35-day partial shutdown that spanned the changeover between GOP and Democratic control of the House last winter. He has struggled to win much wall funding from Congress, where lawmakers in both parties have other designs for the money.
»FROM JANUARY: Government shutdown spreads across Georgia economy
Trump has had more success in exploiting his transfer powers to siphon money from Pentagon anti-drug and military base construction accounts toward the wall, and construction is finally beginning on the new segments he has long promised.
Trump could easily spin a successful wall narrative without much more in new appropriations. Simply funding the government on autopilot — though hardly anyone is advocating that — would give him perhaps $6 billion more this year.
A battle over Trump's powers to transfer military funding to wall building also has stalled an annual military policy bill that has become law for 58 years in a row.
What’s next
The House will vote on the stopgap measure next week before government funding runs out Nov. 21, according to Hoyer, the No. 2 House Democrat. The coming weeks could be the last, best opportunity for lawmakers to wrap up their work on the budget and the trade deal, even as stakeholders admit the timetable could easily slip amid foot-dragging and partisan flare-ups.
— Information from Tribune News Service was used to supplement this report.
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