The Senate will adjourn this week, marking the start of a five-week recess for Congress that will leave lawmakers with very little time to pass critical funding measures when they return in September.
Over the past decade, it has become increasingly difficult for Congress to approve funding legislation for the government by Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. It’s forced Republicans, Democrats and the president to repeatedly work up short term funding measures that keep the government open, but at funding levels equal to the previous year.
This September will be no different.
While the House has passed six of the dozen spending bills that fund the government, the Senate hasn’t passed a single one. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that a short-term measure, known as a continuing resolution, will be necessary when Congress reconvenes.
“As you know, a CR, continuing resolution, is just the same dollar amount of the current year, which is debilitating to investments in people because our needs have grown, our veterans’ needs have grown and the rest,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said after the House adjourned last week for the summer recess.
Republicans hate CRs for different reasons, including that it doesn’t give Congress a chance to crack open the books and amend or even terminate programs that might have outlived their usefulness.
But spending isn’t the only issue Congress will have to deal with when it returns.
Both the House and Senate agreed to a three-month measure authorizing highway funding until October 29. At that point, lawmakers say they hope to come to agreement on a joint measure written by both House and Senate lawmakers, from both parties, that would authorize highway funding for up to six years.
With significant differences between parties and the two chambers, Pelosi questioned whether such a deal was even possible given the truncated timeline. The House and Senate have struggled unsuccessfully for a decade to come up with a longterm highway funding bill, but now they hope to achieve that goal in a matter of weeks.
Congress is not scheduled to reconvene until September 8, leaving just a few weeks government funding runs out, and before the temporary highway funding measure expires.
“It’s going to take some time,” Pelosi said of the highway bill negotiations. “We really don’t have that much time.”
The hurdles to a deal are also pronounced in the spending fight. Democrats in the Senate have blocked all spending legislation so far because they oppose funding caps mandated by the 2012 budget control act. Republicans say they’ll agree to raise the caps, but not with a tax increase, which leaves few other options.
Democrats wanted Republicans to begin negotiations before the summer break, but Republicans are holding out until September, when they hope to cut a last-minute deal with President Obama, as Congress has done in the past.
“We haven’t even begun to talk about the CR yet,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters last week. “We’re going to discuss how to fund the government after the August recess. For the moment we’re still trying to move bills that have bipartisan support.”
In the House, Republican leaders are already running into headwinds from within their own party on the September spending bill. A group of GOP conservatives last week sent Republican leaders a letter warning that they will not vote for any spending measure that continues taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood, after a series of videos showed officials discussing the sale of fetal body parts.
The letter sets the stage for a showdown over spending within the House GOP, which in the past resulted in a government shutdown and a perilous drop in poll numbers for the Republican Party.
House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said despite the spending bill stalemate, he’s not worried.
“Of course, we’re going to glide right through it,” Boehner joked with reporters. “It’s going to be exciting.”
