Since announcing his retirement last spring, House Speaker Paul Ryan has envisioned a successful close to his two decade career in the House and a chance, he said recently, to “run through the tape” upon his exit.
But his hope for an easy jaunt across the finish line may be blocked by obstacles — in the shapes of President Trump and conservative Republicans — who are insisting on money for a southern border wall that could greatly complicate efforts to fund the federal government on time. He also has to deal with Senate Democrats who could block legislation.
Ryan’s effort to pass food stamp reform and a second tax cut bill may also thwarted, in this instance by the Senate, where minority Democrats have the power to filibuster.
And he’ll face a time crunch: The House majority is at stake in the November midterm elections and Ryan wants to end the fall session with plenty of time to allow lawmakers to go home to campaign.
Overall, spending bills and nominations will dominate the fall agenda in Congress, which will remain in session until just a few weeks before lawmakers leave town to campaign.
Ryan is eager to avoid the typical spending gridlock that has plagued Congress in recent years. Earlier in the summer, the speaker said he secured an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Trump to pass most of the spending bills into law before the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year and to exclude the legislation that would fund the border wall until after the election.
Trump, however, has since signaled that he wants the wall funding and my refuse to sign spending bills and cause a partial government shutdown if wall funding isn’t secured.
“I would be willing to ‘shut down’ government if the Democrats do not give us the votes for Border Security, which includes the Wall!” Trump tweeted in late July.
Food stamp fight
Ryan also faces pushback on welfare reform, a longtime priority that he hopes to advance by passing the House version of the 2019 Farm Bill into law.
The House and Senate versions of the Farm Bill differ significantly when it comes to reauthorizing the nation’s food stamp program, which makes up most of the spending in the legislation.
Federal law requires some food stamp recipients to have a job. The House version widens the pool of those who would have to work, volunteer or receive training and it makes it much harder for states to waive those requirements, which House GOP aides said was happening through the manipulation of unemployment data.
The House version also shifts some food stamp funding to worker training programs, a move Democrats deeply oppose.
Republicans argue now is the best time to reform work requirements in part because the jobless rate has declined, and there are more jobs than people seeking work.
“We have 12-and-a-half million Americans, able-bodied, who do not have small kids at home, who are working age, who are not working, not looking for a job, not in school, they’re slipping through the cracks in society,” Ryan said this summer.
“Is it not absolutely the right thing to do to get people off the sidelines, into the labor force?”
Most Senate Republican lawmakers say they agree with Ryan, but face a tougher hurdle in the upper chamber where Democrats have the power to filibuster.
The Senate Farm Bill, written with the cooperation from Democrats, doesn’t bolster work requirements and largely leaves the program alone aside from provisions aimed at combating food stamp fraud.
Trump favors the House version, as does Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, who wants Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Pat Roberts to “move closer in the House’s direction,” on food stamps.
Roberts, R-Kansas, told the Washington Examiner recently, “That will be a subject we have to come to agreement on. We haven’t yet.”
Welfare reform has topped Ryan’s legislative wishlist for many years and is part of his longtime effort to curb the overall growth of entitlement spending.
Trump has resisted changes to Medicare or Social Security that would be aimed at controlling costs and specifically excluded reductions to those programs in his annual budget.
But he has sided with Ryan on the food stamp reforms. Before he retires, Ryan is hoping to pass at least one facet of entitlement reform into law by getting Congress to approve the House Farm Bill changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal name for the food stamp program.
“Our version would retool the SNAP program to focus on encouraging recipients to enter the work force,” Ryan said recently. “This is a model that we should be moving to — helping more Americans reach their potential, moving from welfare to work, getting on the ladder of life. In this economy, there is no better time to do this.”
Tax Reform 2.0
Ryan, a former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, achieved a top career goal in 2017 when Congress passed a significant overhaul of the tax code and reduced both individual and corporate taxes.
But the only way the GOP was able to keep the more than $1 trillion cost of the cuts low enough to ensure passage in both chambers was by giving the individual cuts a 2026 expiration date.
Before he leaves, Ryan plans to pass legislation that would make the individual tax cuts permanent. The legislation, named Tax Reform 2.0, includes a few new reforms, such as widening education savings plans and proposals that would expand ways to increase retirement savings.
A September vote is planned, GOP leadership aides said. But even if the bill passes the House, it faces an uphill battle in the Senate, where Democrats are warning that only the retirement savings proposals would win their support.
That’s bad news for Ryan.
The Senate GOP majority would need at least nine and perhaps 10 Democrats to beat back a filibuster. That number could go even higher thanks to GOP deficit hawks such as Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who told the Washington Examiner he won’t vote to make individual tax cuts permanent because of the high cost to the Treasury.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised only to “take a look at” the House tax cut bill after it passes the lower chamber.
Crowded schedule
In the Senate, the Republican majority will be laser-focused on confirming Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and passing 2019 spending bills so they can avoid familiar last-minute partisan showdowns by the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year, which is when federal funding runs dry.
McConnell is packing the schedule. He plans to take up House-Senate compromise spending bills and the Kavanaugh nomination before Sept. 30.
McConnell added to that list a vote on the still unsettled Farm Bill compromise as well as legislation directing how the federal government should spend billions in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic, he said last week.
McConnell in August made no mention of a vote on a second tax cut bill. Instead, he suggested senators would take up legislation aimed at curbing Russian meddling in the upcoming election.
McConnell said Russian sanctions legislation “would be high on the list for consideration for floor time,” after September.
In addition, Congress must pass a short-term bill to keep government funding flowing for three of the 12 spending bills that will not be completed by the end of the fiscal year.
One of those bills is Homeland Security, which includes border security, which Trump has pushed to include significant funding for a wall.
“Yes,” McConnell said when asked recently about the post-Labor Day Schedule, “I think we can sandwich all of that in.”
Like McConnell, Ryan is also eager to get the spending bills finished without a partisan battle, which would end years of last-minute threats of a government shutdown.
But It may be difficult to pass all of the legislation without a fight, or at least a complication.
The two chambers have largely broken the spending bill logjams of years past by passing several “minibus” bills. But they must now work out the differences between several minibus plans and they have very little time to do so.
The House and Senate return Sept. 4 and are in session jointly only 11 days before government funding expires.
Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said with the House out of session in August, the talks haven’t even started.
“We are not conferencing them because the House is gone but our staffs are talking and have been talking,” Shelby said last week. “We are optimistic.”
The first spending bill expected to hit the Senate floor for a vote is a package of legislation that would fund Energy and Water, the Legislative Branch, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs budgets for 2019.
Both chambers combined the three bills into a minibus and leaders are hoping to keep the package together, clear it from Congress and make it the first of all 2019 spending legislation to hit the president’s desk in September.
“We’d like to keep it that way and we’d like it to come the week we get back,” Shelby told reporters. “That’s our goal. We need to keep it our goal.”
Looming midterms
Ryan is eager get all spending bills wrapped up in order to allow lawmakers to return to their districts to campaign.
In the Senate, Republicans in the majority largely expect to keep the gavel thanks to a favorable election map. They are scheduled to work until the end of October.
But for House lawmakers, the midterms elections will be a battle over which party will take the majority in November.
House Republican leaders will be eager to stick to their mid-October target adjournment or to conclude work and leave town even sooner so dozens of extremely vulnerable Republicans can meet with voters.
Republicans are hoping to defy pessimistic polling and cling to power, but they face tough odds, despite Ryan’s record fundraising for House GOP candidates.
The non-partisan Cook Political Report predicts Democrats will pick up “between 20 and 40 seats” and likely take back the majority from the GOP.
In other words, Ryan’s run through the tape will be followed by a return to gridlock with a House and Senate likely to be governed by opposing parties beginning in January 2019.
“Voters will settle many of these questions in November, but it’s hard to see a scenario occurring that does not suggest the likelihood of legislative paralysis,” Charlie Cook wrote.
