Next Week Will Be a Doozy

Next Week Will Be a Doozy

By Yuval Rosenberg and Michael Rainey
Friday, December 16, 2022

Welcome to the weekend! Sunday’s World Cup final between Argentina and France could be the biggest sporting event in television history. It is expected to draw a record-breaking audience of more than a billion viewers on television and streaming platforms. Who ya got?

With Short-Term Spending Bill Done, Congress Turns to Full-Year Funding

The Senate crossed a couple of big items off its year-end to-do list Thursday night, passing the annual defense policy bill and a stopgap measure to extend federal funding for one week and avert a government shutdown early Saturday.

The 71-to-19 vote buy congressional negotiators more time to finalize a roughly $1.7 trillion spending plan, known as an omnibus, that would fund the government through September.

“Next week hopefully we’ll finish the job, passing a package that will keep the government fully funded until next fall,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the chamber floor. “Nobody will get everything they want, but the final product will include wins everyone can get behind, including passing the Electoral Count Act, emergency aid for Ukraine and funding for our kids, our veterans, our small businesses and our military families. No drama, no gridlock, no government shutdown this week. It’s a win for the American people.”

The House had approved the short-term spending bill on Wednesday and President Joe Biden signed it into law on Friday.

The sprawling defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, calls for $858 billion in military and national security spending for fiscal year 2023. The total includes $847 billion in defense funding, or $45 billion more than Biden sought in his budget request, with $817 billion going to the Pentagon and $30 billion to the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons programs. Another $11 billion will go to accounts outside the jurisdiction of the congressional Armed Service committees. Nearly $19 billion of the total is meant to account for the impact of inflation on military purchases and construction projects. See more about what’s in the bill here.

The NDAA, passed by an 83-11 vote in the Senate after clearing the House in bipartisan fashion last week, would also repeal the mandate requiring active-duty military troops to get vaccinated against Covid-19, a change that the White House and Pentagon oppose. There’s no sign that Biden might veto the bill, though.

What’s next: The appropriators negotiating the omnibus spending bill have shared few details about the legislation ahead of an expected release on Monday or Tuesday. The package, combining 12 annual appropriations measures, will likely be thousands of pages long and contain thousands of earmarks. It will require at least 10 Republican votes to clear the Senate and could face some challenges from lawmakers opposed to certain details or to the speed with which they’re expected to sign off on such a huge spending package. “I don’t know why any Republican, let alone 10, would want to help them do that in those circumstances,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said earlier in the week.

House Republicans led by Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California had preferred to hold off on the funding bill until after they assumed control of the chamber next year and could exercise some leverage to cut spending. Lee had put forth an amendment to the stopgap funding bill in the Senate that would have extended federal funding until March, but it was voted down. “Senate Republicans don’t want to punt the issue into the new year when they fear McCarthy could control the House but can’t control his members,” Politico reported Friday. “Few say it out loud, but most Republicans know that clearing an omnibus now is a political gift to McCarthy.”

The bottom line: Next week will be a doozy. Congress will again face a deadline to enact funding legislation, with a potential shutdown in the offing if they fail to secure enough bipartisan support for the full-year spending package. The looming holiday will likely provide plenty of motivation to wrap things up, though. “Sometimes, miraculously, everything comes together because people want to go home,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Politico this week. That’ll be even more true with Christmas just a few days away.

McCarthy’s Push to Be Speaker May Cause Delays, Problems in 2023: Report

Politico reported Thursday that House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy’s imperiled bid to become speaker next month is “threatening to incapacitate Republicans during a crucial planning period, virtually guaranteeing a sluggish start for the new House majority.”

McCarthy has been working to secure the votes he’ll need to be named speaker in a January 3 vote, but he faces opposition from a handful of his own members — enough to spoil his bid. On Thursday, he pushed off the selection of committee leadership posts until after the January 3 election of a speaker, which Politico says could help him avoid backlash from lawmakers who don’t land the positions they want.

Olivia Beavers, Jordain Carney and Sarah Ferris report that the decision could cause problems next year:

“[T]hat delay will also mean days, if not weeks, of uncertainty for GOP committees as they begin their stint in the majority. Some of the most important panels, including those charged with tax-writing and border security, won’t be able to prepare bills, tee up hearings, or even hire staff. While some House committees already have uncontested leaders in place, those chairs won’t be able to choose their member lineup or potentially pay staff. The GOP’s subpoena power, too, will be frozen.”

On a related note, analyst Chris Krueger of the Cowen Washington Research Group writes: “When handicapping DC dysfunction potential for the next two years, it is worth noting the vote count for the one-week Continuing Resolution vote in the House that prevented a gov't shutdown this weekend. Of the 9 House Republicans who voted for the measure, only 2 are returning to Congress next year (the other 7 either lost re-election or are retiring).”

Read the full story at Politico.

Quote of the Day

“The one thing that is more dangerous than staring these guys down is not staring these guys down. Because if this becomes a tactic that works, it will never, ever end.”

— Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), talking to the Daily Beast about the Republican plan to use the need to raise the debt ceiling next year as an opportunity to extract concessions on spending from Democrats. Schatz said he will advise his colleagues not to sit down at the negotiating table on the issue, given the economic damage that could occur from a government default if Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling. “We have to tell them there is no table,” he said.

In Schatz’s view, Democrats should not “reward the hostage taking” by negotiating over a basic responsibility that needs to be taken seriously by lawmakers in both parties. “In exchange for not crashing the United States economy, you get nothing,” he said. “You don't get a cookie. You don't get to be treated like you're the second coming of LBJ. You're just a person doing the bare minimum of not intentionally screwing over your constituents for insane reasons.”

Not all Democrats agree, however, about the non-negotiable status of raising the debt ceiling. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said it was too early to discuss the issue. “After they take a hostage, will you be willing to pay ransom?” he said. “I’m not going to answer your question.”

At least one Democrat seems open to the idea of negotiating: Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. “We need a serious conversation concerning the debt of this nation and the direction we’re going, OK? We all ought to come together as adults and try to figure a pathway forward,” he said. “I consider any way I can to get the financial house in order. Right now, we’re on a trajectory that can’t be sustainable.”

Numbers of the Day

1 million: The U.S. has committed more than 1 million 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine as of last week, according to a Bloomberg report Friday. Plenty of more sophisticated weapons have been earmarked for Ukraine, as well, including 8,500 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 1,600 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, 4,200 Excalibur precision-guided shells and 38 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS. Military experts expect those numbers to grow as the war drags on.

Bloomberg’s Anthony Capaccio and Courtney McBride say the fighting in Ukraine is testing the ability of the U.S. to supply both its allies and its own armed forces amid a protracted ground war — a type of conflict that many military leaders had assumed was obsolete. As a result, the Pentagon is pushing to increase the production of all kinds of weaponry, with a special emphasis on basics such as the artillery shells that are being consumed in huge quantities in Ukraine.

It won’t be easy or quick, though, because the U.S. military-industrial base has long been focused on producing smaller numbers of high-tech weapons, with relatively small reserves. “We all would like to have greater stockpiles than we had in the last several years,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told Bloomberg. “I think we’re going to ramp up.”

84%: CNBC’s Spencer Kimball reports that the new Covid-19 boosters “are 84% effective at keeping seniors 65 and older from being hospitalized with Covid-19 compared with the unvaccinated, according to a study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday.”

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