“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” Bill Murray asks in Groundhog Day. “That about sums it up for me,” a drinking buddy answers.
Members of Congress can relate. They have just one week remaining to pass a spending bill amid unresolved feuds over immigration and budget caps, or the government will shut down. Didn’t we just do this?
Lawmakers have been stuck in this time loop since last September, when President Donald Trump announced that he would allow the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to expire on March 5, effectively throwing a wrench into bipartisan appropriations talks.
So Republican leaders are gearing up for their fifth short-term continuing resolution to keep the government open since the 2018 fiscal year started in October. They’ll have to pass the stopgap funding bill before February 8 or face a government shutdown for the second time in three weeks. Lawmakers are already going through the motions, igniting the same debates that they’ve been having for months.
“I don’t see a path for the Freedom Caucus supporting a fifth CR,” HFC Chairman Mark Meadows told reporters at a GOP retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia on Thursday.
The Freedom Caucus has used recent spending votes to negotiate concessions from Republican leaders in exchange for their support on the floor. Most recently, Meadows demanded a promise from House Speaker Paul Ryan to bring a conservative immigration bill sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (and doomed to fail in the Senate) up for a vote. Joining Meadows in airing grievances with the CR are a number of defense hawks, who argue that short-term spending bills harm the military. They want to see hefty boosts in military spending authorized for the rest of the fiscal year.
Nothing about this situation has changed since the last time these groups were frustrated with the prospect of passing another CR, except that their frustrations may have intensified — making the feat even more of an uphill climb for GOP leaders.
Republicans want to bust Budget Control Act caps so they can hike defense spending, but they need Democratic support to get such a measure to the president’s desk. In return, Democrats want a dollar-for-dollar parity deal to bust non-defense spending caps. For what it’s worth, leaders have said they are “close” to striking a budget caps deal for months. Complicating the matter, Democrats have linked budget negotiations to immigration — asking for a DACA replacement to protect the roughly 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to be included in the deal, which has proven a formidable task.
Democrats in the Senate signaled recently that they may be open to working through the budget deal independently of DACA talks, but their counterparts in the House appear to be standing firm on the demand.
Pressure from immigration advocates and progressive activists reached a fever pitch before the January 20 funding deadline, culminating in a three-day government shutdown when Senate Democrats withheld their support from a House-passed stopgap bill that would have averted the spending lapse.
In Groundhog Day, Murray’s character, having reached a point of sheer desperation, steals Punxsutawney Phil, hijacks a truck, and drives off a cliff. (Spoiler: The dramatic suicide mission fails, and Murray finds himself awake again hours later, still trapped in the time loop).
Congress’s equivalent of the truck cliff-dive? Last month’s government shutdown. And it’s entirely possible that another one could happen next week.
Members of Congress will have just four days to work out a deal when they return to Capitol Hill next week after taking this week off. It’s doubtful a DACA fix can be arranged before February 8. Reminder: the program expires March 5. The clock is ticking, with just a month remaining to prevent hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who were protected by the program from being deported.
“There’s different rumors out there that it’s fits and starts, and maybe more fits than starts,” Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski said of the state of immigration talks this week, according to Buzzfeed.
The bipartisan working group, comprised of 20-30 senators, wants to see a narrow agreement to protect Dreamers paired with funding for border security measures. But even if the group can get that bill to the floor and have it pass, its future in the House is far from certain. House Republican leaders are unlikely to hold a vote on such a bill, and conservatives like Mark Meadows have preemptively shot down its odds.
“It has zero chance,” said Meadows.
“I think Durbin is toxic,” the North Carolina Republican said of the Democratic whip, who has been heavily involved in immigration talks. Meadows predicted the White House’s framework was more likely to be the starting point in the Senate.
Trump’s framework would appropriate $25 billion to begin construction of a wall on the southern border, slash legal immigration numbers almost in half, and offer a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million unauthorized immigrants. The plan has already been roundly rejected by Democrats and has drawn the ire of some conservatives who object to its path-to-citizenship component.
Republicans have to depend on Democratic support to keep the government open; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell needs 60 votes to pass legislation in the chamber, where he has a majority of just 51 members. It remains to be seen whether Senate Democrats will hold firm on their previous promises to reject a CR if it does not include a DACA deal, as they did in January, when the deadline nears next week.
With the most recent spending bill came a pledge from McConnell to “take up legislation here in the Senate that would address DACA and border security, as well as other related issues,” with a key qualifier — “so long as the government remains open.”
But there’s no telling what that bill will look like yet, and there’s no telling if the government will remain open long enough to find out. For now, though, Republican leaders say they can probably avoid a shutdown.
“There’s a mutual agreement on both sides that shutdowns aren’t good, so I don’t think there is going to be another one,” said Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune.
In the meantime, Congress will once again live through this government funding deadline cycle. By the way, apropos of nothing, someone watched Groundhog Day and calculated that Bill Murray was stuck in the time loop for more than eight years. Happy Groundhog Day, folks.
