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Capitol agenda: Texas’ massive delegation is losing its sway

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Thursday could determine whether the Lone Star State gets five more Republican-leaning seats next Congress. Yet the state’s Texas-sized influence is beginning to wane.

The Texas GOP delegation is losing its clout due to a combination of redistricting, retirements and bids for higher office.

The group is on track to lose the seniority and committee gavels it once wielded to influence key decisions in the House. With six retirements looming and another five new GOP-leaning seats in the proposed map — the Supreme Court could decide as soon as Thursday whether to approve it — the state is looking at potentially 11 new members in a 30-member delegation.

“There’s going to be a lot of introductory lunches, that’s for sure,” Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-Texas) told Blue Light News, noting it’s going to be a “drastic change.”

For decades, the GOP delegation was known for guarding its influence, holding weekly lunches to strategize, amassing seats on the influential steering committee that determines committee assignments and often voting as a bloc on key matters.

But the fact that President Donald Trump started his aggressive redistricting campaign with Texas — and that it proceeded at all — reflects the state’s relative impotence in Trump’s Washington. Republicans wary of the effort eventually folded under pressure from the president, and since then, a fifth of the delegation has announced plans to leave.

Those retirements include Budget Chair Jodey Arrington and Rep. Michael McCaul, the top Republican on two key committees for over a decade. At the start of Trump’s first term, Texas had seven gavels, including influential Armed Services, Financial Services and Ways and Means panels and three coveted Appropriations subcommittee chairs. Now, Texans hold only three committee gavels — including Arrington — and no Texans serve in the House GOP’s elected leadership.

“We were powerful,” said Rep. Roger Williams (R-Texas), who chairs the House Small Business Committee, recounting what the delegation was like when he first arrived in 2013. “But that all cycles.”

What else we’re watching:   

— Van Epps seated: Speaker Mike Johnson will swear in Rep.-elect Matt Van Epps (R-Tenn.) on the House floor at 9 a.m., giving the GOP a 220-213 majority.

— Health care talks: Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Jen Kiggans (R-Va.) plan to introduce a new framework at 9:30 a.m. to reduce health premiums as lawmakers scramble to figure out what to do about expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. It includes a one-year extension of the subsidies with new guardrails to crack down on fraud and a menu of separate pay-for options — not in the form of subsidies — to keep premiums low.

Senate Democrats are expected to propose a three-year extension of the subsidies, which Senate Majority Leader John Thune said was “designed to fail.”

— NDAA hurdles: Final legislative text on the annual defense authorization bill was originally expected Thursday but has been delayed as GOP leaders work through eleventh-hour intraparty issues that could put its passage in jeopardy. Leaders are now aiming to unveil bill text by the end of the weekend.

Meredith Lee Hill, Jordain Carney, Connor O’Brien and Joe Gould 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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