WASHINGTON : Following a six-week summer break, Congressmen will reconvene in the Capitol on Monday, confronted with a reorganized political environment and an old, frustrating issue: finding out how to avoid a government shutdown.
They have three weeks to do this task. At the end of the fiscal year on September 30, the government’s funding runs out, and former President Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to cause a shutdown unless a number of demands are satisfied.
In addition to restricting public services and furloughing millions of workers only weeks before the election, a shutdown would halt government agencies and national parks.
Over the last few days in Congress, the presidential campaign is likely to loom; it is anticipated to depart once more at the end of the month and return on Election Day.
President Joe Biden had just announced his withdrawal from the presidential election, Democrats were getting ready to select Vice President Kamala Harris as their new standard bearer, and Republicans were scrambling to come up with a new strategy against Harris as the House adjourned for summer vacation on July 25.
In politically heated GOP hearings and investigations of Harris and her running partner, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on matters ranging from border security to the exit from Afghanistan, House Republicans have finally decided on a few lines of attack that they will emphasize.
Here are some things to anticipate in the final three weeks of Congress’s term before it resumes its campaign route in October.
An additional danger to shutdown
Meeting the deadline of September 30 to approve government funding is Congress’s single most important responsibility. There’s no denying that legislators are far from reaching a consensus on a full-year spending plan, so they will require a temporary bill to keep the government operating after the election. However, the bill’s length and specifics are concerning.
The Republican-led House passed a temporary bill on March 28 in response to pressure from Trump and right-wing lawmakers. It was tied to the SAVE Act, a GOP-led plan that would change voting rules across the country by demanding citizenship documentation in order to cast a ballot.
Democrats reject the latter proposal, pointing out that voting by someone who is not a citizen is already prohibited and carries severe consequences, making it an uncommon occurrence. They further claim that since many Americans do not have easy access to birth documents or passports, it would discourage them from voting.
Republicans in the House are “taking a critically important step to secure our federal election process and to keep the federal government funded,” according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana.
However, if the bill passes the House, it will not move forward in the Democratic-led Senate. Johnson would then need to choose between giving in to pressure from the GOP or standing fast and risking being held accountable for the closure as the party that started the conflict.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., released a joint statement on Friday following the bill’s release. “If Speaker Johnson drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up, and Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands,” they said.
The farm bill covering agriculture programs also expires on September 30. It has already been punted once and is anticipated to be extended with a continuing resolution on a temporary basis.
House GOP investigations
The majority of the 118th Congress was devoted to looking into Biden; however, House Republicans are now turning their attention to the Democratic Party’s new presidential ticket.
Last Monday, Walz was subpoenaed by the House Education Committee to provide information regarding the administration’s response to a massive pandemic fraud scam in Minnesota.
This subpoena was the committee’s first attempt to contact Walz directly, even though they have been looking into this matter since 2022 and had previously asked the state Education Department for information.
While Walz was a teacher taking student groups on educational visits to China in the early 1990s, the House Oversight Committee began looking into his interactions with Chinese Communist Party companies and officials this month.
Republicans are particularly fixated on Harris’s disastrous 2021 U.S. pullout from Afghanistan, which has drawn criticism from the Trump campaign. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been threatened by McCaul with contempt if he does not consent to testify on September 19 on Afghanistan.
This week, House Republicans have a packed schedule of hearings centered around the “Biden-Harris administration.” A hearing on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives” is scheduled by the Judiciary Committee.
One titled “From Gas to Groceries: Americans Pay the Price of the Biden-Harris Energy Agenda” is being held by a subcommittee on energy and commerce. Additionally, a hearing called “Accountable or Absent?: Examining VA Leadership Under the Biden-Harris Administration” is being held by the Veterans Affairs Committee.
Even though the House committees investigating Biden’s impeachment released a report in August stating that the president committed crimes subject to impeachment, given the GOP’s razor-thin majority and skepticism from some rank-and-file members, it is unlikely that the entire House will attempt to vote to remove the president from office. In a statement at the time, Johnson just expressed gratitude to the committees and urged Americans to read the report.
Democrats retaliate
Although they are not in a position to subpoena Trump as the GOP’s nominee for president, House Democrats have started their own investigations of him.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland who leads the Oversight Committee, and Representative Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California who chairs the panel’s subcommittee on national security, immigration, and international affairs, wrote a letter to President Trump last week requesting that he provide evidence that he has never received funding from Egypt.
Leading Democrats announced that they were looking into a potential “$10 million cash bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi” to Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. This came after a report from The Washington Post on August 2 about a covert Justice Department investigation into the purported bribe; NBC News has not independently confirmed that claim.
“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president — and a current candidate for president— took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the Democrats wrote. In response, the Trump campaign referred to the report as “fake news.”
In the Senate, Schumer has informed members that for the balance of this year, including during the lame duck session following the election, they will vote to approve candidates and federal judges chosen by Biden.
