Senate

GOP tensions between Senate, House raise shutdown odds

by Alexander Bolton - 08/28/23 6:00 AM ET

Senate Republicans are signaling that they’re in no mood to back conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus who are demanding major concessions from Democrats in the annual spending bills, raising the odds of a government shutdown this fall.

Senate Republicans stood firmly behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier this year when he demanded spending cuts and other reforms in exchange for raising the nation’s debt limit.

But with the battle for future control of the Senate heating up, Senate sources say House Republicans shouldn’t expect the same support for their efforts to lower the top-line annual discretionary spending number from the level agreed to by McCarthy and President Biden in late May.

Nor will House conservatives get much help from Senate Republican leaders on insisting that ambitious conservative priorities, such as the House-passed Secure the Border Act, be attached to spending legislation.

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David Cleary, a former senior Senate GOP aide, said Senate Republicans “are going to want to avoid a shutdown.”

“Shutdowns do not accrue to the benefit of Republicans. There’s been one instance when Chuck Schumer tried to shut down the government that it blew back on him a little bit,” he said, referring to the brief government shutdown in January 2018 that occurred after Democrats refused to support spending legislation that didn’t address the legal status of immigrants who came to the country illegally at a young age, who are known as Dreamers.

“Every other time that the government is shut down, it’s Republicans’ fault, especially when Republicans go out and crow about the government being shut down,” he said. “I would anticipate that the Senate Republicans would pass a clean [continuing resolution.”

He said Senate Republican leaders likely view some of the bold demands being pushed by the House Freedom Caucus that have no chance of becoming law as “fundamentally ridiculous.”

“The leverage doesn’t exist” to substantially reduce the top-line spending number Biden and McCarthy agreed to earlier this year, or to add a House-passed border security bill or to crack down on the Department of Justice for prosecuting former President Trump, Cleary said.

Senate Republican aides say their isn’t any appetite within the Senate GOP conference to push spending bills that don’t have any chance of picking up enough Democratic votes to overcome the chamber’s usual 60-vote threshold.

“I don’t think anybody supports a government shutdown,” a Senate Republican aide said. “But the House is something we don’t have much control over, if any.

“We’re just moving forward on our side with the process, and we’ll have to see what happens over there,” the source added. “One of the main goals has been to return to somewhat of a normal appropriations process to avoid a big omnibus at the end.”

Senate GOP aides point out that Sen. Susan Collins (Maine), the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has worked well with Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the Democratic chairwoman, to pass all 12 spending bills out of the committee with overwhelming bipartisan votes.

Murray and Collins have a tacit agreement to keep poison-pill language off the spending bills to keep them on track.

For example, Senate sources say Murray dissuaded Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) from adding language to the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill requiring the Supreme Court to adopt a judicial code of conduct, something that would have been a nonstarter with Republicans.

Goldman Sachs warned clients in a report Sunday that it now views a government shutdown later this year as “more likely than not” because of differences over spending issues and “potential complications from various political issues.”

The House Freedom Caucus issued a statement Monday calling for defense and nondefense funding levels for fiscal 2024 to be lowered to the fiscal 2022 level of $1.471 trillion, well below the $1.59 trillion spending cap set by the Biden-McCarthy debt limit deal.

They pledged to oppose any stopgap spending measure that does not include the House-passed “Secure the Border Act,” which would restart construction of the southern border wall and resume the Trump-era policy of requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico during immigration proceedings.

Biden threatened in May to veto that bill.

House conservatives also insisted that spending legislation “address the unprecedented weaponization of the Justice Department and FBI to focus on prosecuting real criminals instead of conducting political witch hunts” and “end the Left’s cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon,” referring to the Defense Department’s policies of paying for service members to travel to obtain abortions, as well as its diversity initiatives and a policy treating transgender people according to how they self-identify.

Jim Dyer, the former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said he doesn’t see the Senate Republican Conference backing these demands.

“These are not the types of activities, respectfully, that you would find in a final product. I think that’s a huge management problem for the House Republican leadership if that’s the way these guys are leaning,” he said. “How the hell would you write legislation opposing the weaponization of the Justice Department?”

Dyer said he doesn’t see Senate Republicans backing up House Republicans’ demands for the stopgap spending measure that needs to pass by Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown or other spending bills.

He said both Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Collins have “lived through shutdowns and aborted attempts at [continuing resolutions].”

“They are political losers, especially for the Republicans. Mitch wants to take over the Senate, and if the Republicans get tagged as a bunch of people who shut the government over demands that you literally couldn’t right into law, he’s not going to get the Senate back,” Dyer said.

He noted recent talk that the Senate may move first on passing a stopgap spending measure to avoid a government shutdown given the difficulty of even passing a bill with the Freedom Caucus’s demands through the House. The House typically acts first on spending bills.

Senate Republicans are worried that adding policy riders that are nonstarters with Democrats to the spending bills will only delay them, leading to a backlog of legislation in December.

A pileup of unpassed spending bills at year’s end will put pressure on lawmakers to pass another massive omnibus package — which Republicans don’t want to do — or enact a long-term stopgap spending measure that would automatically implement a 1 percent, across-the-board spending cut as required by a fiscal reform that Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) pushed to include in the debt limit deal.

James Wallner, a former senior Senate Republican aide, said that “if history is any indicator,” Senate Republicans will want to avoid brinkmanship that could lead to a shutdown.

He said House conservatives don’t have much leverage heading into the spending talks because “right now, the environment is not conducive to a government shutdown.”

“Most Republicans — especially in the Senate — don’t like shutdowns,” he said. “There’s a general sense that, even though there’s no empirical evidence of this fact, that shutdowns hurt you politically.”

He pointed out that in December 2022, “we had a lot of senators very upset about the omnibus bill that came” to the Senate floor, but it was only “a matter of hours before there was a unanimous consent agreement” to vote on and pass the $1.7 trillion package.