(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . MAGA Mike Johnson’s funding ladder to nowhere [1] ['Daily Kos Staff'] Date: 2023-11-07 The government will shut down in 10 days unless Congress finds a path to fund it, and both House and Senate Republicans—including House Speaker Mike Johnson—are working hard to throw obstacles in the way. The House Republicans met Tuesday to talk about three alternatives for a stopgap funding bill, or a continuing resolution, to keep the government running while Congress figures out the permanent funding plan for the remainder of the 2024 fiscal year. After the meeting, Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters they didn’t decide anything, but they’ve “got some more things to chew on.” They’re chewing while the clock ticks. One option the conference discussed is a clean CR that does not include the supplemental funding request from President Joe Biden for Ukraine and Israel. It would simply fund the government until January. Democrats in the House would probably accept that, as would the Senate. It would be a repeat of what happened to end the shutdown stalemate in September. The largest bloc of the Republican conference reportedly said this is the option they want in Tuesday’s meeting. A second option is negotiating with the Senate, which also makes sense since the bill does have to pass in both chambers—a fact plenty of House Republicans like to ignore. Punchbowl News reports that Johnson has been talking about this with various members of the conference, and that it would likely be a mostly clean CR that included yet another debt commission to talk about cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, or forced border policy changes. The third option is a “laddered” CR, a strategy that would have two temporary funding packages, one ending in early December and the other in mid-January. The first would include four less controversial funding bills and the other the remaining eight. This is the option the Freedom Caucus embraced in the meeting, which isn’t a surprise since they thought it up. Other House Republicans find this idea kind of batty. Rep. Steve Womack, an appropriator from Arkansas, told Politico, “I don’t have an opinion on [the ladder idea], because I don’t understand it.” Senior appropriator and Rules Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma said, “I really don’t know” how to explain it. “It’s an interesting concept. What would work better though is we pass bills, go to conference and come to agreements. Seems to me to be the best way to proceed.” The Freedom Caucus is championing this idea not as a way to fund the government but to pick a fight with the Senate. Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told Politico that he wants to use it to “force us to fight to get those done and force the Senate to table” to negotiate separate appropriations bills instead of doing an end-of-year combined bill. “Everything in this town is built around moving towards getting an omnibus bill all right for Christmas,” Roy said. “Part of breaking this town is trying to force the issue.” The Senate is indeed working on a larger combined spending bill, which is what the Senate does because it takes so long to get individual bills passed. It’s simply what they have the ability to do in the short amount of time they’ve got to do it. They’ve already passed one chunk of three funding bills combined. (Those three bills include funding for military construction and the departments of Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development.) And they’re looking at a combined bill for the remaining nine appropriations bills. All 12 of the Senate’s appropriations bills have been approved by the Appropriations Committee, so the hardest work is done. There’s bipartisan support for what some are calling a “maxi-bus.” Not that it’s all bipartisan kumbaya in the Senate. A handful of Republicans are complicating year-end work on the Ukraine/Israel/border package, which has to be in the year-end funding mix. Hard-right Republicans are demanding that the package include immigration policy changes, including making the parole and asylum process more difficult for immigrants, and resuming construction of Donald Trump’s border wall. The White House and Senate Democrats rejected that out of hand. RELATED STORIES: See MAGA Mike Johnson’s wacky ideas for how to do government House Democrats need to dust off discharge petition and pass Ukraine aid Democrats save the day, avert government shutdown [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/11/7/2204171/-MAGA-Mike-Johnson-s-funding-ladder-to-nowhere?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=top_news_slot_4&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/