US House Aims to Address Republican Disarray with Stopgap Spending Bill – Reuters

By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – On Wednesday, the U.S. House of Representatives appeared ready to prevent a partial government shutdown scheduled for next week, despite a significant faction of Republicans planning to challenge their leadership for not securing new federal spending reductions.

The proposed stopgap funding bill aims to sustain the government’s current discretionary funding of approximately $1.2 trillion annually through December 20. This measure would avert the furlough of thousands of federal employees and prevent a shutdown of numerous government services right before the November 5 election.

House Speaker Mike Johnson intends to employ a parliamentary tactic to push the legislation forward, bypassing the House Rules Committee to mitigate dissent within his own Republican ranks, which hold a slim 220-212 majority.

If Johnson is successful, the Senate, which has a Democratic majority, is also expected to vote on the bill, sending it to President Joe Biden for signing prior to the Monday midnight deadline for current funding.

Despite this, many House Republicans are likely to vote against the measure after former President Donald Trump advocated for a shutdown unless the spending bill included controversial legislation that would ban non-citizen voting in federal elections, an act that is already prohibited.

"We’ll work in a bipartisan way to make sure that this gets done," stated House Democrat Pete Aguilar on Tuesday.

Ahead of Wednesday’s vote on the "continuing resolution" (CR), some Republicans voiced their displeasure. "He (Johnson) committed to the conference that we weren’t going to govern by CRs anymore … here we are. So, I’m sure there’s a bunch of members that are frustrated," commented Republican Representative Greg Steube.

More conservative House Republicans had aimed for a six-month CR with provisions related to elections, but last week they could not advance that proposal, which would have faced challenges in the Senate.

Nonetheless, some hardliners believed Johnson and fellow Republicans should have resisted more fiercely against a Democratic win, even if achieving that meant a government shutdown.

Johnson has frequently been compelled to circumvent his own restless caucus to secure essential legislation. For instance, in March, the House passed the current funding bill despite 112 Republicans opposing it.

In April, a bill providing nearly $61 billion in new aid for Ukraine, amid its ongoing conflict with Russia, was passed, again with 112 Republicans voting against the measure.

This intra-party conflict follows the historic ousting of Johnson’s predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, by far-right Republicans who sought to penalize him for reaching across the aisle in a spending and debt limit agreement with Biden.

As the year progresses, the debates over full-year government funding will resume, with a crucial self-imposed January 1 deadline looming. Lawmakers will need to negotiate to either raise the national debt ceiling or confront the risk of defaulting on over $35 trillion in federal debt.