WASHINGTON -- Republicans in Congress return to work today facing a packed agenda with little time to enact it, as party leaders aim to quickly pass their tax plan and then cut a budget deal with Democrats before the end of Friday to avert a government shutdown.
The Republicans' deadline on the tax bill is self-imposed. GOP lawmakers have for months been racing to meet President Donald Trump's demand that they send him tax legislation before Christmas -- a timeline that gained new urgency when Alabama Democrat Doug Jones won the Senate seat currently occupied by Republican Luther Strange.
GOP leaders aim to hold tax votes early in the week before moving to the budget bill. They need Democrats' help to pass the budget measure through the Senate but have thus far made little progress in bringing them aboard amid disagreements over spending levels, protection from deportation for certain illegal immigrants, and a health insurance program for children from low-income families.
Republicans have grown more confident about the outcome of the tax votes after Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Bob Corker of Tennessee pledged their support Friday. The two Republicans would give the GOP enough Senate votes to pass the legislation, even as Sen. John McCain, who is battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, returned to Arizona on Sunday and is not expected to vote on the final bill.
Trump told reporters that he had spoken to McCain's wife, Cindy, after her husband had spent about a week at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland.
"They've headed back, but I understand he'll come if we ever needed his vote, which hopefully we won't," Trump said after returning to the White House from Camp David. "But the word is that John will come back if we need his vote. And it's too bad. He's going through a very tough time, there's no question about it. But he will come back if we need his vote."
The measure's passage, after months of negotiations and a string of late adjustments aimed at winning over the party's final few holdouts, would mark the first major legislative accomplishment for Trump and party leaders in a year of stumbles.
Republicans fanned out across national news shows Sunday as part of a continued effort to sell the public on the bill, promising benefits to the middle class both from tax cuts and ensuing economic growth.
"We think as a result of lowering business taxes, wages will go up. So this is a huge opportunity for creating jobs, for creating tax cuts for working families," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Sunday on CNN's State of the Union.
Congress' nonpartisan tax analysts, joining several other nonpartisan assessments, concluded that the bulk of the bill's benefits would go to the wealthy and to corporations. Those analyses have also projected that the cuts would produce far less economic growth than Trump and administration officials are promising.
"What we are seeing here is a real massive attack on the middle class," Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who caucuses with Democrats in the Senate, said Sunday on CBS' Face the Nation.
Republicans plan to hold tax votes in the House and Senate early in the week.
SPENDING BILL
While the tax debate has consumed Congress, there has been scant progress toward reaching a spending deal before funding runs out at the end of Friday.
House Republican leaders filed a spending bill last week that would temporarily extend funding for most government agencies at current levels until Jan. 19, while providing longer-term military funding at higher levels -- $650 billion through Sept. 30. But it is considered dead on arrival in the Senate, where Democrats can block it because of the chamber's 60-vote filibuster threshold.
To cut a long-term spending deal, Democrats are pushing for an equivalent increase in defense and nondefense funding above the spending caps set under a 2011 budget agreement. Similar agreements were reached in 2013 and 2015 to raise the caps for the following two years. But bipartisan negotiations that have been open for weeks have yet to produce an accord.
Democrats railed against the House GOP gambit last week. In floor remarks Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called the proposal "a spectacle, a charade, a sop to some militant, hard-right people who don't want the government to spend money on almost anything."
"And it is a perilous waste of time as the clock ticks closer and closer and closer to the end of the year," he added.
The spending talks are suffused with other issues. For instance, Democrats and some Republicans want legislation providing legal status to "dreamers" -- immigrants brought to the United States as children without documentation -- to be attached to the year-end deal.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, struck a deal with Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to provide subsidies for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces in return for her vote on the tax bill, but it remains to be seen whether those provisions will be included in any final accord.
The Children's Health Insurance Program expired Sept. 30, and states have been warning for weeks that coverage could be threatened if Congress does not reauthorize it soon.
And a key surveillance authority used by U.S. intelligence agencies to monitor noncitizens abroad expires Dec. 31, prompting fears of a lapse in national security.
Even if a bipartisan agreement is reached on some or all of these issues, the timeline is tight: The House is not expected to vote on its spending bill until Wednesday at the earliest. That would leave little time for the Senate to take that bill, amend it and send it back to the House, and any hiccup could mean a breach of the Friday shutdown deadline.
Congress averted a partial shutdown earlier this month with a two-week deal that left spending constant and punted on all other policy questions, but it's unclear whether either side has interest in another short-term deal.
Mnuchin said he doubts there will be a government shutdown before Christmas.
"I can't rule it out, but I can't imagine it occurring," Mnuchin said on Fox News Sunday about a potential federal shutdown.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis and Patrick Reis of The Washington Post; by Jonathan Lemire of The Associated Press; and by Ros Krasny and Catarina Saraiva of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 12/18/2017