House Republicans unveil stopgap bill to avoid shutdown, but can it actually pass?

House Republicans finally unveiled their long-awaited stopgap measure that includes a wishlist of arch-conservative priorities and is all but guaranteed to be rejected by the Senate.

Whether the bill can actually survive in the House is also unlikely.

The bill, called the Spending Reduction and Border Security Act, is essentially the same as the stopgap pitched by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy during a closed-door conference meeting last week. The speaker’s pitch was meant to appease members of the House Freedom Caucus, who at the time mostly vowed to not support a stopgap bill unless their demands were met.

Mr. McCarthy, California Republican, has promised that a bill would come to the House floor by Friday and is expected to discuss the measure Friday morning. 

The bill unveiled late Thursday is set to last until Oct. 31 and includes a nearly 30% cut in spending to $1.471 trillion for its duration. The measure also sets about the creation of a debt commission and includes most of the House’s marquee border bill, the Secure the Border Act. 

Provisions from that bill that made their way into the stopgap legislation include restarting construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall, reviving the Trump administration’s Remain in Mexico policy, bolstering DNA and biometric data collection from migrants and injecting funding to hire more border agents. Notably absent from the stopgap is the border bill’s E-verify provision.  

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Before the measure can make it to the House floor, it must pass a pair of procedural hurdles. Lawmakers on the House Rules Committee advanced the bill Friday morning to a test vote on the floor, which is expected on Friday afternoon. 

But a contingency of seven conservative lawmakers, and likely every House Democrat, will vote against the bill, meaning that Mr. McCarthy’s efforts to advance legislation that could avoid a partial government shutdown will likely die. 

The Senate has also produced a stopgap bill, which unsurprisingly, is a nonstarter for many House Conservatives because of its billions in funding for Ukraine and lack of border policy. 

Senate Republicans are working to amend the measure to include billions in border security funding, but that will likely not sway GOP lawmakers, who are more interested in policy than throwing money at the U.S./Mexico border.