Congress

If Congress is going to avoid another shutdown, lawmakers need to start talking

Published

2 months ago

December 22, 2025

Congress has adjourned for the holidays having made no tangible progress toward funding the government ahead of a shutdown looming less than six weeks away.

The most conspicuous sign that Congress faces real obstacles before the Jan. 30 funding deadline came late Thursday, when Senate leaders gave up on passing a spending package and sent members home for two weeks, despite working for more than a month to appease senators who had objections.

But the impediments to reaching a deal that can pass both chambers are more extensive, starting with the fact that Republicans and Democrats on both ends of the Capitol have yet to start negotiating the details of the nine pending funding bills. The lack of bipartisan offer-trading is raising the likelihood of another short-term punt — or another shutdown.

“We wasted a lot of time because the Senate’s not negotiating yet,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said in an interview last week. “When they’re ready to negotiate, we can move fast.”

Cole and his counterpart, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine), just reached an agreement over the weekend on overall totals for the remaining spending bills Congress needs to pass. Lawmakers already passed three as part of the package that ended the shutdown last month — funding veterans and agriculture agencies, federal food aid and the Food and Drug Administration, along with Congress itself, through Sept. 30.

For more than a month Cole and Collins had been trying to bridge differences on key numbers while Senate leaders tried to advance a funding package that reflects consensus from only their side of the Capitol. Last week’s heave failed, but senators expect to try again in early January.

“We have different dynamics in our caucuses that we need to deal with,” Collins said this month as she left a meeting with Cole.

Democrats have been growing impatient. “They wasted all that time during the summer,” said Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the House’s top Democratic appropriator, about House Republicans spending the better part of this year crafting partisan funding bills.

Then Democrats had to wait for their GOP counterparts to strike the “majority to majority” deal on funding totals that finally arrived Saturday.

“Democrats are prepared. We’re ready to move. Let’s go,” DeLauro said.

Even if top appropriators can manage to agree on the nine remaining funding bills, other thorny dynamics threaten to complicate final passage in each chamber. The pitfalls include the mismatch between what appropriators want to spend and the demands of House fiscal hawks seeking flat funding for agencies — as well as the fact that Democrats will need to help pass any spending bills in the Senate, as they acutely illustrated with this fall’s record 43-day shutdown.

The totals top Republican appropriators just agreed upon are not public. But Cole said the deal will ensure overall funding would be below the level laid out in the stopgap funding patch enacted last month.

Maryland Rep. Andy Harris, chair of the House Freedom Caucus and a top Republican appropriator, said last week that he wants funding for the Pentagon and the largest nondefense agencies to be “no more than what was enacted” for the fiscal year that ended in September.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has the same idea: “I don’t want any spending higher than current-level spending,” he said. “If they’re busting the current levels, then they’re going to have to demonstrate to me why.”

If House hard-liners aren’t appeased when the funding bills come together, they could start making threats to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders, who already are on the outs with House Republicans over their handling of health care assistance this month.

“You can expect the smoke to start coming up from over that hill and that hill and that hill,” said Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.), who chairs the Homeland Security spending panel. “And there might even be some open flame.”

Amodei said some of his colleagues are openly talking about the potential for another shutdown. But many others think it is more likely that Congress is headed for another punt at current funding levels for the remaining nine bills.

Last week, Johnson told his conference in a closed-door meeting that he wants to pass those bills by the Jan. 30 deadline — a goal that many in the GOP ranks consider aspirational at best. One House Republican granted anonymity to describe the private meeting said he turned to one of his colleagues and whispered, “I wouldn’t bet on that on Polymarket,” referring to an online prediction market.

Senate leaders have their own conflicting demands to manage. Fiscal conservatives repeatedly objected to starting debate on a five-bill funding package in recent weeks, citing opposition to earmarks as they also sought promises related to other legislation.

But it was Democrats who blocked movement in the final days before the Senate adjourned Thursday. One late-breaking demand by Colorado’s senators was to reverse the White House’s move last week to dismantle a federal center in the state that supports research in climate and weather science.

Still, following the acrimony of the shutdown this fall, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are at least projecting a unified front on government funding ahead of the January deadline.

“Both Thune and I are in agreement that we’re going to work through the process and get the appropriations bills done,” Schumer told reporters late Thursday after Senate leaders decided to adjourn without passing the funding package.

Since top Republican appropriators reached an agreement on overall totals after Congress adjourned, lawmakers hope some negotiating can be done before they return to town Jan. 5.

“Staff has been instructed to — whatever they’re doing — take their laptops with them,” DeLauro said.

When Congress reconvenes, both chambers are only scheduled to be in session for three weeks before the shutdown deadline — with the House slated to be out of session the week immediately before.

Texas Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican appropriator, said he was hopeful his party’s leaders would keep lawmakers in town to pass any deal that might come together.

“This is people’s political livelihood on the line,” he said. “We’ve got to get this done. Nobody leaves.”

Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

Congress

Al Green, Menefee head to runoff in member-on-member Democratic primary

Published

12 minutes ago

March 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Texas Democratic Reps. Al Green and Christian Menefee are headed to a runoff, extending a member-on-member matchup defined by the latest fight over generational change.

Neither Green, 78, or Menefee, 37, earned a majority of votes in the newly drawn Houston 18th District resulting from Texas Republicans’ recent gerrymander of the state’s congressional map.

Green, a civil rights icon, jumped into the race after his former district was scrambled by the GOP’s redistricting. The matchup comes as the Democratic Party is engaged in an intense debate about whether the old guard should step aside and make room for a younger generation of leaders.

Green, who was first elected to Congress in 2004, has long represented the Houston area. He was the first Democrat to introduce articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump — long before most other House Democrats were on board — and famously protested his addresses to Congress.

Just weeks ago, Menefee had won a special election in an overlapping district to serve out the remainder of the late, former Rep. Sylvester Turner’s term.

Congress

John Thune urges Trump to endorse John Cornyn ‘early’

Published

21 minutes ago

March 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Majority Leader John Thune urged President Donald Trump on Wednesday to deliver a swift endorsement of Texas Sen. John Cornyn to potentially forestall what is widely expected to be an expensive and nasty primary runoff against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Thune told reporters he hasn’t yet spoken to Trump since the election returns from Tuesday’s primary came in but indicated he intends to personally redouble his efforts, saying Wednesday that “hopefully” the president will give Cornyn his influential nod.

“[If] Trump endorses early, it saves everybody a lot of money, and … 10 weeks of a spirited campaign on our side that keeps us from spending time focusing on the Democrats,” Thune said.

“If the president can weigh in it would be enormously helpful,” he added.

Thune and other Senate Republicans have been trying to nudge Trump for months to endorse Cornyn, who acknowledged last month that he didn’t expect the president to weigh in before Tuesday night’s election. The runoff is set for May 26, with the winner to face Democrat James Talarico, who avoided his own runoff Tuesday.

Other Senate Republicans are also expected to renew their case for Cornyn to Trump after the four-term veteran exceeded expectations Tuesday.

“I would encourage the president to endorse him,” Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso said Wednesday, arguing that Cornyn has the best shot of winning in November.

As of Wednesday morning, Cornyn is narrowly leading Paxton with 94 percent of the votes counted, according to the Associated Press. Many polls had Cornyn trailing Paxton ahead of Election Day.

Thune called it a “great night” for Cornyn. Other allies of the Texas Republican who were granted anonymity to speak candidly said his performance Tuesday means, in their view, a Trump endorsement is still a possibility.

Congress

Tim Walz accuses the Trump administration of singling out Minnesota amid fraud allegations, immigration crackdown

Published

21 minutes ago

March 4, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told lawmakers Wednesday that his state has been terrorized by the Trump administration over mass welfare fraud allegations, pointing to the killing of U.S. citizens in the midst of an immigration enforcement surge around Minneapolis.

“Let me be clear: In Minnesota, if you defraud public programs, if you steal taxpayer money, we’ll find you, we’ll prosecute you, we’ll convict you, and we’ll throw you in jail,” the Democrat said in his opening remarks at a hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

But, he added, “the people of Minnesota have been singled out and targeted for political retribution at an unparalleled scale, including blocking Medicaid reimbursements to our state just last week.”

Walz, the 2024 nominee for vice president, is fending off accusations from congressional Republicans that he didn’t do enough to prevent a scandal that has embroiled his state. Prosecutors have charged more than 90 people with defrauding the government, and two individuals connected to the Minnesota nonprofit Feeding Our Future were convicted of stealing federal nutrition funds in March.

The revelations have led the Trump administration to take drastic, punitive measures, such as prompting the Department of Health and Human Services to freeze its child care funding and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to cancel hundreds of millions in Medicaid money.

Walz, alongside Minnesota’s Democratic attorney general, Keith Ellison, have been hauled to Capitol Hill to testify before the committee about the scandal — and also to respond to an interim report committee Republicans released early Wednesday morning alleging that Walz and Ellison “knew about the fraud in federal programs administered by the State of Minnesota much earlier than they told the American people.”

House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) asked why Walz did not order the stop or suspend welfare program payments, despite warnings of fraud.

“We’re not going to stop payments to feed children until we have the proof that things happen,” Walz said.

Comer objected: “You didn’t stop payments because you didn’t want to rock the boat.”

In his opening statement, Ellison maintained that his office has pursued fraud convictions aggressively where it has the jurisdiction to do so.

Republicans have honed in on the welfare scandal as an opportunity to disparage the state’s Democratic leadership, but it also has fueled anti-immigrant rhetoric within the GOP — specifically against Minnesota’s large Somali community. At one point, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, who is also a member of the Oversight panel, asked Walz whether he knew how many of those indicted have been Somali-American.

“We don’t investigate or prosecute people based on ethnicity, religion—,” Walz said, before Jordan interrupted him.

“Neither do I, we shouldn’t do that,” Jordan responded. “85 percent of the people indicted were Somali-American, a key voting bloc, and I think that’s what drove this whole thing.”

The White House quickly amplified video of the exchange on X.

Democrats on the committee are using the opportunity to criticize the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda. The panel’s ranking member, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, pointed to a large poster of Renee Good’s bloody driver seat, after she was shot by ICE agents in January.

“This violence does not make us safer,” Garcia said. “It does not address fraud, waste, and abuse. It doesn’t help families with healthcare … And it certainly as we’re continuing to discuss, is not preventing the kind of fraud that Republicans are discussing here today.”