House Speaker Mike Johnson is again looking to avoid a massive end-of-year spending bill, but first Congress has to avert a partial government shutdown.
The House is set to vote on the latest stopgap funding bill Wednesday. It’s likely to easily pass both chambers and thwart a lapse in government funding by Oct. 1. Once the legislation passes, lawmakers will still have to hammer out a solution to fund the government by Dec. 20.
Typically when Congress punts the spending fight to December, lawmakers turn to a catch-all spending bill called an omnibus that crams all 12 spending measures into one package. But Mr. Johnson, Louisiana Republican, told reporters on Tuesday that he has no plans to revive the practice.
“We have broken the Christmas omni, and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” Mr. Johnson said. “So there won’t be a Christmas omnibus.”
He also vowed to not advance smaller spending packages called minibuses, which he incrementally passed earlier this year to end the spending fight that dragged on for months.
“We don’t want any buses,” he said. “We’re not going to do any buses, OK? We’ll deal with that in the lame duck.”
One barrier to that plan could be how negotiations on topline spending numbers for fiscal 2025 pan out. Republicans want to spend up to the spending caps agreed to during the debt ceiling fight last year, while Democrats want to add extra funding, like more disaster relief money.
The speaker first must pass the latest stopgap bill, which was the product of bipartisan negotiations between House and Senate appropriators. The shorter bill doesn’t include the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act and trims out extra spending while adding $231 million for the Secret Service.
The House will vote on the bill under suspension, meaning that at least two-thirds of the chamber will need to support it for the legislation to pass. More Republicans will likely vote against this latest offering because the SAVE Act was removed, so the speaker will need to again rely on Democrats to pass the stopgap.
Pressure comes from former President Donald Trump, who wants Republicans to pass a stopgap paired with the SAVE Act or shutter the government. That could peel more GOP votes away from the stopgap.
Mr. Johnson scoffed at accusations that he had defied the former president by moving ahead with the latest, slimmed-down continuing resolution and noted that Mr. Trump understood the “current dilemma and that situation” the House GOP is in.
“I keep him apprised all the time of everything that’s happening because he is our nominee for president and he’s going to be the next president,” Mr. Johnson. “So we’ll continue working closely together. I’m not defying President Trump; we’re getting our job done, and I think he understands that.”
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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