Dem
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GOP
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Once again, the nation is on the brink of a funding crisis. And once again, it looks like it will be up to Senate Democrats to be the adults in the room, and to do what it takes to dodge a bullet.
On Wednesday, as expected, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) brought a stop-gap funding bill up for a vote. And, as expected, it failed to pass. The vote was 202 to 220, mostly along party lines, but with 14 Republicans voting "nay," 2 Republicans voting "present," and 3 Democrats voting "yea." The issue, for those Republicans who oppose, is that they want to slash spending big-time. The issue, for those (many) Democrats who oppose, is that they don't want to vote for verbiage (the SAVE Act, which was included with the Johnson bill) that implies the U.S. has a serious problem (or any problem) with undocumented immigrants voting.
Since the Speaker of the House has once again failed to, well, get his House in order, it is now up to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to try to clean up the mess. He's begun the process of passing a bill that would fund the government at current levels for another 3 months. That would, in effect, kick the can to the start of the next president's term, giving President Harris or President Trump a clean slate to work with.
Johnson has not yet publicly said what his "Plan B" is, merely that he has one. Privately, according to Axios, he has said that he's amenable to the 3-month plan. Maybe he thinks that's the only compromise that can get through both chambers and get a presidential signature. Or maybe he thinks he won't be speaker in 3 months, making this someone else's problem.
The biggest fly in the ointment, as per usual, is Donald Trump. Trump believes, almost certainly wrongly, that a government shutdown would benefit him and the Republican Party. Actually, he might not really think that; he just really, really, really wants the SAVE Act be passed into law, so that he has additional ammunition when he starts kvetching about election fraud and how victory was/will be stolen from him. Whatever his exact thinking is, he has instructed his loyalists in the House to kill a clean stop-gap spending bill. Whether he has that kind of pull, just weeks before an election, remains to be seen. That said, he singlehandedly killed the border bill, so it's certainly possible. (Z)