Spending fight turns to stopgap as House GOP stumbles

Source: The Hill

07/26/24 5:30 AM ET


House Republicans are turning their focus to a debate over whether to fund the government through December or into next year after their hopes of passing 12 full-year funding bills before the August recess collapsed.

With no one expecting the annual funding process to be complete by a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline, hard-line conservatives are advocating for a stopgap measure, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), that would run into March of next year in order to avoid being jammed with a massive spending package under a lame-duck president.

They want to avoid a December funding deadline that historically has teed up a massive omnibus spending bill negotiated by leaders in the House and Senate. Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), a spending cardinal and member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said he and other Republicans would prefer a CR “into next year,” calling the prospect of a trillion-dollar-plus omnibus a “danger.”

“If the Democrats want to negotiate in good faith in December, we could always negotiate something in good faith,” he added. “But I’d rather not see a December deadline.”

Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/4793429-spending-stopgap-house-gop/

---

This is literally a radical shift in the LOON Caucus because they normally want to blow it all up rather than pass any kind of Continuing Resolution so they can "blame the Democrats". That has ALWAYS been their strategy going back to Newt Gingrich as SOH in the '90s (and I remember that shutdown because my agency was one of the few that actually had funding but our building had many other Departments and agencies in it and was empty save for a couple like us that also had funding - e.g., Treasury for Customs, etc.).