Leaving a shit load of stuff hanging……
This is actually almost normal….
The legislative body only does critical work under deadline pressure….
House Speaker McCarthy is gonna HAVE to work at cutting out things his RightWingNuts want that will NEVER be enacted….
One can be almost completely assured that the two chamber’s of Congress leaders do NOT want a Government shut down that the RightWingNuts are fronting occurs…..
BIG headlines for the media come September ARE assured!…..
The House will not return to Washington until September 12 – at which point there will only be 12 days of session before the end of the fiscal year on September 30. The Senate returns a week earlier.
Congress must use that handful of days to push through 12 appropriations bills – which refill the budgets for every federal agency.
The House has passed one appropriations bill, 11 to go, and the Senate has passed none.
On Thursday the House passed the $317.4 billion Military Construction-VA bill, typically the least controversial of the 12 spending measures, a bill that provides funding for veterans’ benefits and military construction. Democrats opposed the bill – saying Republicans had loaded it up with extremist amendments.
House GOP leaders scrapped plans to hold a floor vote for a $25.3 billion Agriculture bill after the party’s far-right faction demanded deeper spending cuts.
If the House and Senate do not come together in agreement on 12 separate spending bills to pass – a longshot outcome at best – the nation could head for a government shutdown.
It’s looking less likely that the House alone will even pass 12 separate spending bills in 12 days. Even if it did, those bills would likely come in billions below the levels of the Senate’s spending bills.
Congress could also pass an over-arching omnibus bill, which jams all spending priorities into one vote, or a short-term continuing resolution – which would keep spending at fiscal 2023 levels for a set period and buy more time to work out disagreements.
If January 1 approaches without a year-long spending deal, one percent cuts across the board – including military and veterans’ spending – will kick in.
Conservatives have promised to use the appropriations bills to advance their agendas by targeting further cuts. In one example, House Republicans’ Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies funding bill for 2024 would cut the FBI budget by $1 billion – a 9 percent cut to the agency they claim ‘weaponizes’ against conservatives….