The odds the government will be at least technically closed for a day rose Thursday as both House and Senate leaders talked about efforts to prevent a shutdown dragging into the weekend.
“Things are coming down to the wire,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Thursday morning.
Schumer told senators they can expect to have a procedural vote on Saturday before getting to a vote on the Senate’s short-term funding bill keeping the government’s lights on through Nov. 17.
That process could drag into Sunday and almost certainly would not resolve the issue entirely, since House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has said he is not interested in having the House vote on the Senate bill. McCarthy’s struggles to unite his conference are the major force pushing the government toward a shutdown.
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Saturday night is when funding officially runs out, which would make Sunday the first day of a government shutdown. Essential functions necessary to preserve life and safety would still be fulfilled, but many government workers would be sent home and others, like military personnel and border agents, would have to work without pay.
McCarthy also hinted Thursday lawmakers will not meet the Saturday night deadline.
Appearing on CNBC, McCarthy declared: “If you want to do it by a clock, I don’t know what to give you the odds on a clock. But if you want to gauge at the end of the day, do we get this done, the answer is yes.”
“I don’t give up if the clock runs out,” he added. “I’m OK playing in overtime.”
A shutdown beginning and ending during a weekend would likely have only a limited impact. Politically, it could give McCarthy and Republicans proof they tried to push the White House and Democrats into border policy changes, but without any of the inconveniences to the public that would happen if the shutdown extended into the regular workweek.
“The only good news about any of this is that it will happen over a Sunday and of course that will not have a big impact,” said Bill Hoagland, senior vice president with the Bipartisan Policy Center and veteran of previous shutdowns while a budget staffer in the Senate.
“It’s that Tuesday and Wednesday when it will start to show some impact,” he said.
“I don’t give up if the clock runs out.”
– House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)
McCarthy acknowledged he faces problems getting his fractious fellow party members in line with his plan to have the House pass four spending bills that would fund almost three-quarters of the government and then pass a short-term stopgap funding/border policy bill to keep the government open while the Senate considers what the House sent it.
“I’ve got a challenge inside our conference. I’ve got members who have held us up since the summer not to be able to bring our appropriation bills up. Otherwise, we would probably have them all done. I’ve got members who will not vote to have a stopgap measure to continue to fund government,” McCarthy said.
“If you won’t do any of that, it’s hard to govern,” he said.
In a sign of how much McCarthy has been forced to maneuver to keep his own members in line, the House will vote separately Thursday on a provision to provide $300 million for training Ukrainian troops in their defense against Russian invaders and set up a special inspector general to oversee other inspectors general already tracking how U.S. aid is spent.
The House has voted twice on the provision, first as part of a defense policy bill in July and then Wednesday night as part of the defense spending bill. In both cases, amendments to kill the training were defeated overwhelmingly. Wednesday night’s vote saw 104 votes to kill the program, all from Republicans, and 330 to keep it.
The move to put the training money — which is separate from the $6 billion in new military and economic aid the Senate has proposed sending to Ukraine — in a separate bill is meant to win votes for the overall defense bill from GOP opponents of helping Ukraine.
But giving those opponents a second bite at the apple did not go unnoticed. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a social media post called it “immoral.”
“If the House gets their way, [Kyiv] is a Russian city within a year and the entire post World War Two order is shattered,” he wrote.
More evidence of the challenge facing McCarthy surfaced Thursday afternoon when the House Freedom Caucus, a group of conservative and libertarian Republicans, sent him a letter asking for a timeline on bringing other spending bills to the House floor and for a commitment to not bring the Senate’s bill to the floor.
The letter’s 27 signers linked answers to their questions with support for a short-term funding bill expected to be on the House floor Friday. McCarthy can only lose four GOP votes and still win without needing Democratic votes.
“What’s going to be the working calendar for the members of Congress to get their business done? That’s really what this is about,” said Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.), a member of the Freedom Caucus.