WASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders moved toward another short-term spending stopgap Wednesday after talks aimed at passing more-ambitious legislation appeared to collapse as a government shutdown deadline approached.
Republicans have pushed for increased military funding and disaster aid for hurricane-ravaged communities in the South. Democrats, meanwhile, want a boost to domestic programs and a solution for illegal aliens brought to the U.S. as children.
But with a Friday midnight shutdown deadline looming, as well as the coming holidays, GOP leaders in the House and Senate both indicated that lawmakers instead were likely to do the bare minimum by passing another short-term spending bill to keep the government open and then revisiting everything in January.
"There's a whole bunch of stuff that's got to get wrapped up and loose threads out there that have to be tied together at some point, and if we end up having to do that all in the first two weeks of January, I guess that's what we'll end up doing," said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 3 GOP leader in the Senate.
The path to passing a stopgap remained unclear late Wednesday, however. House Republicans met privately for more than an hour, airing frustrations over the spending legislation just hours after they sent a landmark GOP tax overhaul to Trump. They emerged without a clear plan to proceed.
"There's not enough votes to get it done right now," said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
The main roadblock came from advocates of increased military spending, who are frustrated that House Republican leaders abandoned plans to pass a bill delivering more than $600 billion in full-year defense funding after it became clear it could not pass the Senate.
Instead, leaders said they would continue current funding levels through Jan. 19, plus several billion dollars in extra funding to address "anomalies" in the defense budget. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told lawmakers that the plan had the blessing of Defense Secretary James Mattis, but that assurance fell short for many.
"You can't fix a systemic problem with anomalies," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
One potential land mine, however, was defused Wednesday afternoon when Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine -- who had conditioned her vote for the GOP tax overhaul that passed Congress on Wednesday on the separate passage of two health care provisions -- agreed to withdraw her demand that the health care provisions get attached to the year-end spending legislation.
That threatened to provoke a confrontation with House Republicans, who oppose the health bills that would pay out subsidies to insurers that participate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's health insurance marketplaces.
"Rather than considering a broad year-end funding agreement as we expected, it has become clear that Congress will only be able to pass another short-term extension to prevent a government shutdown and to continue a few essential programs," Collins said in a joint statement with Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn.
Thune said getting a Senate vote on the Collins provisions remained a priority but that other political factors had intervened.
"I know the [Senate majority] leader wants to get it voted on for Sen. Collins and others, but I think at this point the question of what the path forward is in the House is still kind of uncertain," Thune said.
Few Republicans showed any stomach for a Christmastime spending showdown, especially after delivering the tax bill -- even as GOP appropriators and defense hawks balked at the prospect of another stopgap.
"I can't think of a bigger act of political malpractice after a successful tax reform vote than to shut the government down," said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on military construction and veterans affairs. "Talk about stepping on your own message. I mean, how dumb would that be? But anything's possible around here."
A shutdown is "not going to happen," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday night. "We'll work it out, we always do."
Several top House Republican leaders said Wednesday that they were planning to put two separate spending bills on the House floor today -- a stopgap to keep government operating past Friday and an $81 billion disaster-relief package. GOP leaders dropped plans to combine the two after some conservatives complained about the price tag of the plan, which also contains billions of dollars for California wildfire recovery.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told fellow Democrats in an emailed update that talks with Republicans have continued throughout the day but that GOP leaders aren't yielding on a Democratic demand that nondefense spending increases match the budget boost for the Pentagon.
"Unless we see a respect for our values and priorities, we continue to urge a strong NO" on the temporary funding bill, Pelosi said.
The strategy of the two bills, House aides said, is meant in part to keep the Senate from taking a House bill, attaching the health care bills or other legislation conservatives oppose and sending it back to the House.
Before Collins made her announcement, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters that he didn't expect that the House would vote this week on the provisions she has sought.
"From the feedback that I'm getting in the Senate -- and this is just from members -- I don't see them putting something together on that," he said.
Another sought-after add-on for the spending bill concerns a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, set to lapse Dec. 31, that lets the National Security Agency intercept calls or emails from suspected foreign terrorists outside the U.S.
Critics say the FBI should be required to get court warrants to search data about Americans collected under the program in most cases. If an agreement on revisions can't be reached this week, Congress could enact a short-term extension.
McCarthy told reporters that the House intends to pass a spending bill the Senate can accept, then leave Washington for the holidays.
Democrats represented a key piece of the puzzle because no spending bill can pass the Senate without at last some Democratic votes.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., signaled anew Wednesday that Democrats would not agree to anything beyond a bare-bones stopgap as long as there was no bipartisan agreement on spending, immigration and other sensitive issues.
That spelled a likely end to any attempt by McConnell to add the health care legislation at Collins' behest, because some Democrats would have to support the move in order to leap a 60-vote Senate procedural hurdle.
"We cannot do a short-term funding bill that picks and chooses what problems to solve," Schumer said. "That will not be fair and will not pass. We have to do them all together, instead of in a piecemeal fashion."
He added, "Whether that global deal comes before the week is out or at a later date in January, it has to be a truly global deal. We can't leave any of those issues behind."
Information for this article was contributed by Mike DeBonis and Erica Werner of The Washington Post; by Erik Wasson, Laura Litvan, Jack Fitzpatrick, Billy House, Sahil Kapur and Toluse Olorunnipa of Bloomberg News; and by Andrew Taylor of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/21/2017