Jeff Jackson gives quick rundown on current budget battle in House.
The government is set to shut down in six days.
There are two ways to avoid this: We can either pass a budget (which means passing 12 separate funding bills) or pass another temporary extension.
In reality, there’s no way the House and Senate are going to agree on a full budget in the next six days. The House has only passed seven funding bills so far and the House and Senate have agreed on zero of them. Even assuming everyone started working in good faith tomorrow, we’re still a couple months from an actual budget deal.
So that leaves a temporary extension.
BUT agreeing to a temporary extension is what got the last Speaker fired.
The new Speaker knows this - and he doesn’t want to be fired - so his plan was to pass as many funding bills as he can before asking his right-flank to go along with another temporary extension next week.
Basically, he wants to show his right-flank that he’s trying very hard to do things the way they want in the hope that they’ll cut him some slack when he inevitably tells them he has to do a temporary extension. (Which was roughly former Speaker McCarthy’s strategy, by the way.)
This week, the Speaker’s goal was to pass two funding bills.
Tuesday night we tried to pass the first one. We had been there for over an hour voting on all these random amendments for the bill, and then, at last, we reached the vote for the actual bill.
And just before it came to a vote, leadership took it down. No vote.
Same exact thing happened on the next funding bill. We had an hour of amendments leading up to the big vote on a funding bill, only to have the bill pulled off the agenda moments before the vote.
Why? Because of internal division within the majority party about the bills themselves. In short, some members of the majority want deeper cuts than others.
So, the Speaker’s plan didn’t work. Zero funding bills passed this week.
Next week is decision time for the Speaker. He’s going to have to go to his caucus with another temporary extension, and I honestly don’t know how they’re going to react.
The Speaker is hoping that his right-flank basically says, “Ok, we’re not going to vote for a temporary extension, but we also won’t try to fire you if you bring it to a vote and it passes.”
If we’re going to avoid a shutdown, that’s roughly what needs to happen. I don’t think there’s another path.
I'll keep you posted.
- Rep. Jeff Jackson
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