WASHINGTON — After a six-week summer recess, lawmakers return to the Capitol on Monday, facing a changed political landscape but a difficult, all-too-familiar challenge: figuring out how to avert a shutdown.
They only have three weeks to do it. Government funding expires at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and former President Donald Trump has called on Republicans to force a shutdown unless certain requirements are met. A shutdown would shut down federal agencies and national parks, while curtailing public services and laying off millions of workers just weeks before the election.
The presidential race is coming to a close for Congress; he is expected to leave again at the end of the month and return after election day. Home time left the city On July 25, President Joe Biden was new to the summer vacation left In the presidential race, the Democrats were preparing to choose Kamala Harris as vice president the new standard bearerand Republicans rushed to develop a new playbook against Harris.
House Republicans have now settled on some lines of attack that they will emphasize in politically charged GOP hearings and investigations of both Harris and his running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on issues ranging from border security to Afghanistan withdrawal.
Here’s what to expect in Congress’ final three-week sprint before returning to the campaign trail in October.
Another shutdown threat
Congress’s biggest task is to fund the government by September 30. It’s a foregone conclusion that lawmakers will need a stopgap bill to keep the government open after the election — they’re nowhere close to agreeing on a full-year funding measure. But the details and length of the bill are confusing.
Republican-led House of Representatives under pressure from Trump and right-wing members released the stopgap bill That would keep the money flowing until March 28, tying it to the SAVE Act, a GOP-led bill. revise voting laws nationwide by requiring proof of citizenship to vote. Democrats oppose the latter measure, noting that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote and that there are severe penalties for the practice. very rare. They also say it could discourage Americans from voting because many don’t have easy access to passports or birth certificates.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said House Republicans “have taken a critically important step to fund the federal government and secure our federal election process.” But if the bill passes the House, it will go nowhere in the Democratic-led Senate, and Johnson will have to decide whether to back down or stand firm, as the GOP risks being blamed for the shutdown as the embattled party.
“If Speaker Johnson takes House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the likelihood of a shutdown increases significantly, and Americans will know that the responsibility for the shutdown will be in the hands of House Republicans,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N. Y. and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., issued a joint statement Friday after the bill was released.
The farm bill for agricultural programs, which expires on September 30, has already been vetted once and is expected to be extended without interruption by a continuing resolution.
House GOP studies
After spending much of the 118th Congress investigating Biden, House Republicans are now turning their attention to the new Democratic presidential ticket.
House Committee on Education Waltz called For information on how his administration responded to a major pandemic fraud scheme in Minnesota last week. While the committee has been investigating the matter since 2022 and previously requested information from the state Department of Education, the subpoena was Walz’s first aid to himself.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee launched an investigation Last month, Walz contacted Chinese Communist Party institutions and officials in the early 1990s, when Walz was a teacher leading groups of students on study tours to China.
There are also Republicans Focuses on the failed US withdrawal from Afghanistan In 2021, owned by the Trump campaign He criticized Harris it’s over McCaul threatened Secretary of State Anthony Blinken with contempt if he did not agree to testify about Afghanistan on September 19.
House Republicans also have a full slate of hearings on the “Biden-Harris administration” this week. There is a Judiciary Committee hearing on the “Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victims’ Perspectives.” The subcommittee on Energy and Commerce is holding a hearing titled “From Gas to Food: Americans Pay the Price of the Biden-Harris Energy Agenda.” The Veterans Affairs Committee has a hearing titled “To Account or Not to Account?: Examining VA Leadership under the Biden-Harris Administration.”
Although the House committees investigating Biden’s impeachment issued a report in August that found the president guilty of impeachable crimes, all members of the House of Representatives are suspicious of the GOP’s razor-thin majority and some rank and file to vote to impeach the president. it is unlikely that he will. -file members. Only Johnson thanked the committees and encouraged Americans to read the report in a statement at the time.
Democrats are retreating
House Democrats, who lack subpoena power in the minority, have launched their own investigation into GOP presidential nominee Trump.
The top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, D-Md. Rep. Jamie Raskin and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the panel’s national security, border and foreign affairs subcommittee. He sent a letter to Trump last week asked him to prove that he never received money from Egypt.
Top Democrats have said they are investigating Trump’s 2016 election campaign bribery of $10 million from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The Washington Post on August 2 reported on a secret investigation by the Department of Justice into the alleged bribery; NBC News has not independently confirmed this report.
“Of course you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president — and a current presidential candidate — received an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the Democrat said.
Trump’s campaign responded by calling the news “fake news.”
In the Senate, Schumer notified members that they would vote to confirm the nominees and Federal judges selected by Biden for the rest of this year – including the post-election lame duck session.