Congress's return to work Monday has an all-too-familiar theme: are Republicans going to shut down government to show, again, just how much they oppose President Obama and pretty much everything he does? The current funding for government ends on December 11, giving the extremists in the GOP yet another opportunity for brinksmanship. This year it's about immigration and President Obama's pending executive action. Republican leadership insists they will prevent a shutdown, but they need to figure out how to
appease their rank-and-file.
[I]nside Republican leadership, senior aides and lawmakers freely admit that the executive order—no matter how unpopular it is—will likely stand and there’s little Congress can do about it. So Boehner, McCarthy and Scalise need to craft a process that will allow conservatives to vent, but prevent a shutdown.
The strategy will begin to take shape Tuesday morning, when the GOP meets in a closed session in the Capitol basement.
One scheme has emerged as a favorite. The leadership would like to craft two bills to fund the government: one that would keep most of the government open through September 2015, and another that would fund immigration enforcement agencies through the first few months of the year. There’s also the potential for stand-alone legislation to try to target Obama’s executive action.
Extremists have been pushing for a much shorter funding extension, because they see every funding bill as an opportunity to threaten the White House and to try to get something unreasonable. But for McConnell and Boehner, 2016 is very near. McConnell is looking at a Senate map that is as bad for Republicans as 2014 was for Democrats. Clearly, another shutdown would be a public relations disaster for them, and a very bad start to the Republican takeover of the Senate and huge majority in the House.
Other actions Congress must take in the next two weeks include legislation to deal with expiring tax credits. After the White House threatened to veto a bad deal negotiated by Harry Reid that would end the extension of some middle-class tax breaks and make a whole bunch of corporate tax breaks permanent, they'll likely have to start over on those negotiations. On the Senate side, there are executive and judicial nominations to slog through.
What emerges after Tuesday's strategy session for House Republicans will tell us whether Boehner has any more of a hold over his raucous caucus, buoyed by very big wins in November. He might insist he wants to avoid a shutdown, but we've heard that from him before.