Congress narrowly averted a government shutdown ahead of the holiday — but not without a bit of drama.
GOP leadership scrambled to meet tough demands from President-elect Trump and navigate a tight Republican majority, producing a deal that could also pass the Democratic-led Senate.
While lawmakers ultimately voted to keep the government going for a few more months, some see the drama as a dry run for Republicans as they ramp up work on the 12 fiscal 2025 funding bills early next year.
“The reality, for the better part of the first year, [is] we’re going to have a one-vote majority,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) said earlier this month. “So, in a way, it’s almost like practice, showing what we’re going to have to do.”
“On the upside, we know we’re going to have to sit in rooms and communicate and listen and work through some things,” he said. “Probably not going to be all easy times. Some will be. But I think it was a good trial run for 2025.”
House Republican leaders have been working to wrangle the various factions in their razor-thin majority, with mixed results.
While they previously aimed to have all 12 annual funding bills passed by the August recess, those hopes were dashed as internal divides over issues such as abortion reemerged.
“When you have a situation where the Democrats all vote no on every appropriations bill, you eventually hit a wall because, you know, we have a few of our own members that vote against some of these bills,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) said at the time, while also calling on the Senate “to start doing their work.”
The Senate has yet to pass any of its annual funding bills for fiscal 2025, while the House passed about half of its 12 full-year spending plans.
But the House bills are much more partisan than the bipartisan proposals crafted in the Democratic-led Senate, where a 60-vote threshold is required for most legislation. Republicans will soon control the Senate, but fall short of the 60-vote threshold.
The Hill's Aris Foley has more here.
