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Capitol agenda: Johnson’s turn to deliver a health plan

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Get ready for the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies to lapse.

All signs are pointing in that direction as President Donald Trump refuses to endorse an extension and Senate Republicans coalesce behind a plan from Sens. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that would end the Obamacare tax credits and instead expand government-funded health savings accounts.

Now House Republicans are racing to prepare their own health care framework to vote on next week before leaving for the holidays — one that also likely would not extend the expiring Obamacare subsidies, which were supercharged as part of the Democrats’ 2021 pandemic relief package.

Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise will brief their conference Wednesday morning on all the options for this framework, which Scalise and relevant committee chairs helped craft.

“It won’t just be concepts we’re talking about … It’ll be very specific things that are available in bill format,” Scalise told reporters Tuesday, noting some provisions will reflect proposals that ultimately did not make it into the final GOP megabill over the summer. He said each piece will be presented individually “to see where the consensus is and let members decide.”

— Moderates sound the alarm: Many rank-and-file Republicans are still pushing for an extension, worried about voter backlash over the ensuing skyrocketing premiums. Even some Trump aides have advised that an extension would be politically prudent.

“We can agree that the current construct is flawed, but that letting them expire is not acceptable,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) said in an interview Tuesday. “That doesn’t work.”

Fitzpatrick and Rep. Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) have been proposing their own blueprints that would include extensions. But neither has earned approval from GOP leaders, who are under pressure from conservatives who say the tax credits are rife with fraud and abuse.

Scalise didn’t rule out an extension Tuesday. Still, he said, “at the end of the day, we’ve got to do what the consensus of our members want to do.”

— Don’t rule out the discharge petition: While Republicans might not currently have the support in their conference to pass an extension, the Fitzpatrick and Kiggans plans have bipartisan backing. Fitzpatrick told Blue Light News last week he believes he has 218 votes for his bill and didn’t rule out filing a discharge petition to circumvent leadership and force a vote.

Some House Republicans told Blue Light News Tuesday they were even more inclined to back a discharge petition after Trump’s recent comments refusing to endorse an extension. That includes Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-N.J.), who told reporters Tuesday he would support a discharge petition for either the Fitzpatrick or Kiggans proposal, if there were no other options.

“I respect the speaker tremendously, but I disagree with them on this,” Van Drew said. “We just can’t listen to a handful of people.”

— Eyes on the White House: The Trump administration has yet to provide clear guidance on what they want Congress to pass. But Tuesday night, Blue Light News saw James Braid and James Blair — the White House director of legislative affairs and deputy chief of staff, respectively — head into a meeting with House GOP leaders and committee chairs.

What else we’re watching:   

— Dems blast Senate GOP health plan: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer will host a news conference on health insurance premiums at 10:15 a.m. It comes a day after he criticized Senate Republicans’ health plan as “dead on arrival.”

— House votes on NDAA: The House is scheduled to vote on the National Defense Authorization Act Wednesday afternoon as a group of hard-liners weigh whether to hold up the bill over complaints it would give aid to Ukraine and wouldn’t include a central banking digital currency ban. The big question is whether Republicans will be able to adopt the procedural rule governing floor debate on the NDAA.

Meredith Lee Hill and Benjamin Guggenheim contributed to this report.

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Congress

Shutdown likely to continue at least into Tuesday

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The partial government shutdown that began early Saturday morning is on track to continue at least into Tuesday, which is the earliest the House is now expected to vote on a $1.2 trillion funding package due to opposition from Democrats and internal GOP strife.

House Republican leaders have scheduled a Monday meeting of the House Rules Committee to prepare the massive Senate-passed spending bill for the floor. According to two people granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, the procedural measure teeing up a final vote would not happen until Tuesday, with final passage following if that is successful.

That’s one day later than GOP leaders had hoped. Their previous plan was to pass the bill with Democratic help under suspension of the rules, a fast-track process requiring a two-thirds-majority vote.

But that plan was complicated by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries telling Speaker Mike Johnson in a private conversation Saturday that Democratic leadership would not help Johnson secure the 70 or so Democratic votes to get the measure over the line, according to the two people and another person granted anonymity to discuss the matter.

The Tuesday plan remains tentative as GOP leaders scramble to navigate tensions inside their own conference, which could make passing the procedural measure difficult. Some conservative hard-liners, for instance, want to attach a sweeping elections bill to the package.

Jeffries said in a MS NOW interview Saturday that Republicans “cannot simply move forward with legislation taking a my way or the highway approach” while noting that House Democrats are set to have “a discussion about the appropriate way forward” in a Sunday evening caucus call — first reported by Blue Light News.

He did not rule out that Democrats might support the Senate-passed spending package, which funds the majority of federal agencies through Sept. 30 while providing a two-week extension for the Department of Homeland Security — including controversial immigration enforcement agencies.

Democrats, Jeffries said, want “a robust, ironclad path to bringing about the type of change that the American people are demanding” in immigration enforcement.

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Here’s what federal programs are headed for a (possibly brief) shutdown

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Government funding is set to lapse at midnight Friday for the military and many domestic programs, but cash will continue to flow at a slew of federal agencies Congress already funded.

House leaders are aiming to send a funding package to President Donald Trump Monday, days after the Senate passed the legislation just before the deadline to avert a partial shutdown.

The effect on most federal programs is expected to be minor, and employees who are furloughed would miss just one day of work if the House acts on schedule — which is not assured.

This time, many of the services that have the greatest public impact when shuttered — like farm loans, SNAP food assistance to low-income households and upkeep at national parks — will continue. That’s because Congress already funded some agencies in November and earlier this month, including the departments of Energy, Commerce, Justice, Agriculture, Interior and Veterans Affairs, as well as military construction projects, the EPA, congressional operations, the FDA and federal science programs.

Still, the spending package congressional leaders are trying to clear for Trump’s signature next week contains the vast majority of the funding Congress approves each year to run federal programs, including $839 billion for the military.

Besides the Pentagon, funding will lapse for several major nondefense agencies beginning early Saturday morning.

That includes federal transportation, labor, housing, education and health programs, along with the IRS, independent trade agencies and foreign aid. The departments of Homeland Security, State and Treasury will also be hit by the shutdown.

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Senate passes $1.2T government funding deal — but a brief shutdown is certain

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The Senate passed a compromise spending package Friday, clearing a path for Congress to avert a lengthy government shutdown.

The 71-29 vote came a day after Senate Democrats and President Donald Trump struck a deal to attach two weeks of Homeland Security funding to five spending bills that will fund the Pentagon, State Department and many other agencies until Sept. 30.

The Senate’s vote won’t avert a partial shutdown that will start early Saturday morning since House lawmakers are out of town and not scheduled to return until Monday.

During a private call with House Republicans Friday, Speaker Mike Johnson said the likeliest route to House passage would be bringing the package up under a fast-track process Monday evening. That would require a two-thirds majority — and a significant number of Democratic votes.

The $1.2 trillion package could face challenges in the House, especially from conservative hard-liners who have said they would vote against any Senate changes to what the House already passed. Many House Democrats are also wary of stopgap funding for DHS, which would keep ICE and Border Patrol funded at current levels without immediate new restrictions.

If the Trump-blessed deal ultimately gets signed into law, Congress will have approved more than 95 percent of federal funding — leaving only a full-year DHS bill on its to-do list. Congress has already funded several agencies, including the departments of Agriculture, Veterans Affairs and Justice.

“These are fiscally responsible bills that reflect months of hard work and deliberation from members on both parties and both sides of the Capitol,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine) said before the final vote.

The Office of Management and Budget has issued shutdown guidance for agencies not already funded, which include furloughs of some personnel.

Republicans agreeing to strip out the full-year DHS bill and replace it with a two-week patch is a major win for Democrats. They quickly unified behind a demand to split off and renegotiate immigration enforcement funding after federal agents deployed to Minnesota fatally shot 37-year-old U.S. citizen Alex Pretti last week.

But Democrats will still need to negotiate with the White House and congressional Republicans about what, if any, policy changes they are willing to codify into law as part of a long-term bill. Republicans are open to some changes, including requiring independent investigations. But they’ve already dismissed some of Democrats’ main demands, including requiring judicial warrants for immigration arrests.

“If Republicans are serious about the very reasonable demands Democrats have put forward on ICE, then there is no good reason we can’t come together very quickly to produce legislation. It should take less than two weeks,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Friday.

Republicans have demands of their own, and many believe the most likely outcome is that another DHS patch will be needed.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), for instance, wants a future vote on legislation barring federal funding for cities that don’t comply with federal immigration laws. Other Republicans and the White House have pointed to it as a key issue in the upcoming negotiations.

“I am demanding that my solution to fixing sanctuary cities at least have a vote. You’re going to put ideas on the floor to make ICE better? I want to put an idea on the floor to get to the root cause of the problem,” Graham said.

The Senate vote caps off a days-long sprint to avoid a second lengthy shutdown in the span of four months. Senate Democrats and Trump said Thursday they had a deal, only for it to run into a snag when Graham delayed a quick vote as he fumed over a provision in the bill, first reported by POLITICO, related to former special counsel Jack Smith’s now-defunct investigation targeting Trump.

Senate leaders ultimately got the agreement back on track Friday afternoon by offering votes on seven changes to the bill, all of which failed. The Senate defeated proposals to cut refugee assistance, strip out all earmarks from the package and redirect funding for ICE to Medicaid, among others.

Graham raged against the House’s move to overturn a law passed last year allowing senators to sue for up to $500,000 per incident if their data had been used in former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the 2020 election. But he backed off his threats to hold up the bill after announcing that leaders had agreed to support a future vote on the matter.

“You jammed me,” Graham said on the floor Friday. “Speaker Johnson, I won’t forget this.”

Meredith Lee Hill and Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.

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