Johnson at a crossroads as House stopgap bill fails again

House Republicans again failed Wednesday to pass their stopgap spending legislation, edging Congress closer to the Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government without a plan both chambers can agree upon.

The measure went down in the House 202-220, with two lawmakers voting present. Even if it had passed, it was doomed in the Senate because it contained a provision requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections.

“The play that we ran tonight was the right play; it’s the right fight for the American people; it’s the one that they demand and deserve,” Johnson said after the failed vote.

Johnson didn’t say what he would do next, whether it’s to try to push through another partisan stopgap spending bill, or try for a bipartisan measure likely to anger his far-right flank. Johnson, almost a year into his tenure, is stuck between his conference’s calls to force through the voting provision, the SAVE Act, and the need to advance a measure that can pass the Senate.

With 11 days until a government shutdown, Johnson’s not yet calling his final play.

But it’s not just his conference that the speaker has to consider. On Wednesday, former President Trump threw a wrench into any plan Johnson may have had to sell a bipartisan stopgap measure to his conference. Trump posted on social media that he would rather see the government shut down than advance a government-funding bill without the SAVE Act attached.

“Be smart, Republicans, you’ve been pushed around long enough by the Democrats,” Trump posted. “Don’t let it happen again. Remember, this is Biden/Harris’ fault, not yours!”

But the GOP funding bill has split the right flank of the conference. Most of the 14 Republican “nay” votes came from ultra-conservatives who generally don’t vote for continuing resolutions out of principle, even if they're sweetened with Republican-crafted voting language.

“We’re $35 trillion in debt. We’ve got to get back to single spending bills like we do in Tennessee,” Rep. Tim Burchett, who voted against the stopgap measure, told reporters.

If Johnson doesn’t introduce a stopgap bill the Senate would take up, some Senate Republicans said they could see the upper chamber moving on its own early next week.

“I think everybody would like to give the House plenty of time [to do] what they can do,” Sen. John Boozman said. “But this is something that needs to be done, and I'm very much in favor of a short-term CR [and then] regrouping if we need a longer CR come towards the end of the year.”

Congressional Democrats, the White House, and some Republican appropriators want to extend funding only through mid-December, saying lawmakers should use the time to pass the 12 individual spending bills.

Both Congress and the White House say they want to avoid a shutdown, But the end-of-September deadline isn’t only for keeping the government’s lights on: Sept. 30 represents the end of the fiscal year, and with that comes the expiration of a host of programs and funding authorizations whose extension would need to ride along any stopgap bill.

House Republicans included some of those provisions in Wednesday’s failed legislation. They left others out, though, meaning the Senate is likely to make major changes to a continuing resolution once—or if—it makes its way to the upper chamber.

“There are many, many extensions that are not in the House bill and that truly are needed,” Senate Appropriations Vice Chair Susan Collins told reporters Tuesday. “That’s one reason we shouldn’t go beyond mid-December, because we need to do the negotiations on all of those issues.”

The House avoided one deadline Wednesday after it passed an emergency bill to cover a roughly $3 billion shortfall for the Veterans Affairs Department that could have impacted benefits at the agency by Sept. 20.

On a voice vote, the chamber passed the measure, which provided $2.3 billion for compensation and pensions and $597 million toward readjustment benefits. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that he would act quickly on the measure.

The 2018 farm bill is already operating on an extension, with Congress having passed a short-term fix to the five-year measure last November and parts of the bill expiring at the end of this month. Farm-state lawmakers have long said parts of the farm bill should not lapse and that Congress will need to pass an extension.

Congress has more time on the agriculture provisions, including addressing the so-called “dairy cliff.” Beginning in 2025, milk-price supports are set to expire, which could send prices on dairy products skyrocketing for consumers.

Congress must also decide whether to extend some $6 billion in weapons aid to Ukraine the White House has not yet used. That money comes from the Presidential Drawdown Authority, a component of the $61 billion foreign-aid package Congress passed in April. Authorization for those funds expires at the end of the month.

Authorization for the National Flood Insurance Program, the government-sponsored public-insurance program, also expires at the end of this month. Expiration of the program could delay homebuyers from getting a mortgage in flood-prone areas. The House stopgap bill would have extended the program.

The measure would have extended the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster-relief fund past the Sept. 30 deadline and added an additional $10 billion. The White House, though, has requested double the funding boost.

Absent from the House Bill was a bipartisan provision to authorize a federal cost-sharing program to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which was hit by a cargo vessel in March.

Program funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program is also set to expire at the end of the month.

But some lawmakers say there’s not enough time to get many of those measures into a bill this month, meaning the next funding measure, whether it’s an omnibus package of appropriations bills or another stopgap measure, would have to cover the lapsed programs.

“I think it's going to be a very clean CR,” Boozman said. “We might need to do some things in the bigger package, but that would be at a later date. But I don't see a lot of extraneous stuff put on the CR.”