Avert government shutdown with massive spending?

Senate plots to avert government shutdown with massive spending bundle

By SARAH FERRIS

Senate leaders are closing in on a groundbreaking bipartisan strategy to fund the majority of government operations this summer, including the Pentagon, in a pointed bid to avoid a government shutdown.

Whether the plan makes it to the president's desk would still depend upon House Speaker Paul Ryan and his GOP conference, who would have to accept a hike in domestic spending in exchange for the assurance that defense spending would continue without interruption.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have agreed to bind Congress’ two largest appropriations bills into a single package in coming weeks, which holds the potential to become law before an Oct. 1 spending deadline.

A Senate vote on that fiscal 2019 package is likely to take place in the next few weeks, according to multiple lawmakers and aides. It would include the Defense and Labor-HHS-Education spending bills.

Senate action could even happen before senators leave town Aug. 6 for a weeklong break, one senior Senate Republican aide said.

That bill would make up two-thirds of all discretionary funding, most of which goes toward the Pentagon. That would make the package difficult for President Donald Trump to veto, even though the domestic piece of it, which includes health and education programs, would vastly exceed his own budget request.

Spending leaders say that could produce a win-win for Capitol Hill and the White House: Republicans could boast that the Department of Defense is safe from another dreaded stopgap funding bill. Democrats would have secured on-time funding for key domestic programs — a rarity for the government in recent years.

And it could avoid a knockdown funding fight just weeks ahead of the midterm elections.

Longtime budget watchers don't recall Congress deploying this defense-domestic strategy in the modern era. That includes former Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers, who has spent nearly four decades in the House.

"I think they would complement each other," Rogers (R-Ky.) said of the two bills, voicing his support. He added that he hopes his own appropriations bill which funds the State Department, will make it into the final package, because "it’s part military, part domestic."

Even some House Republicans acknowledge that the strategy may be the only way to get a Pentagon funding bill to the president’s desk by the time the new fiscal year starts on Oct. 1.

Rep. Tom Cole, who oversees the Labor-HHS-Education funding bill in the House, said he’s already begun lobbying his fellow House conservatives to back the dual-bill strategy.

“I’ve actually worked with some of our defense hawks, to try to talk to them and say, ‘Look, I know you want [Defense] as a stand-alone. I do too, that’d be great, but they’re going to CR it until they get Labor-H.’ So hopefully our people understand that,” Cole (R-Okla.) said in an interview, referring to a continuing resolution that would temporarily extend current funding. “For Defense, it would be tremendous."

Senate Democrats have said they’ll refuse to support a Defense bill on the floor without a promise on domestic funding.

During last year's funding fight, the House repeatedly tried to jam the Senate with defense-only funding bills. But the tactic failed because Democrats refused to lend votes to a Pentagon spending bill until they received assurances on domestic.

"We can pound the Democrats over it, and I think we should, but at the end of the day, my judgment is, politically you’re going to have to move both to get either one by Sept. 30," Cole said.

This year, Senate Democrats say they finally received those assurances.

“We have a commitment from Republicans that they will be linked and not broken apart at any time during the process, including in conference," a senior Senate Democratic aide said. "They must move together and be funded at a level that has bipartisan agreement or else the process breaks down."

The Senate’s two spending leaders, Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), have been quietly eyeing the two-bill package for weeks.

Shelby has pushed hard for the idea, meeting privately with McConnell and Schumer to get them on board. The first-term Appropriations chairman told reporters this week that he believes that if the Senate can approve that Defense and Labor-HHS package, the rest of the bills would follow.

“Those two bills together take a lot of the money. If we can pass those two, the others, I think, will fall in line,” Shelby said. “Nobody wants a [continuing resolution] for the Pentagon, I don't think the Democrats do, the Republicans sure don't."

The big problem, however, could be the House.

House Republicans already approved the Pentagon’s $675 billion funding bill on the floor. But it would be far tougher to convince fiscal hawks to swallow a $177.1 billion domestic bill which is $21 billion more than the hyper-partisan version the House passed last year.

GOP leaders would need to rely almost entirely on Republican votes, too. House Democrats have already ruled out supporting the House's current version of the Labor-HHS-Education bill, which they say is riddled with "poison pill" riders and underfunded in key areas.