McCarthy enters make-or-break week still scrambling to avoid shutdown

Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his allies are 24 hours away from their next big gamble in Congress’ spending crisis. It’s still not clear they have the votes.

House GOP leaders on Tuesday will try to move forward on four spending bills jam-packed with conservative wins that would do nothing to avert a shutdown that looms Saturday at midnight. Given united Democratic opposition, McCarthy can’t lose more than a handful of Republican votes.

The speaker is projecting confidence that he’s flipped enough of the five Republican holdouts who voted against a similar vote just last week, as the Californian makes yet another attempt to get his fractured conference on the same page. Some leadership allies still have doubts, however, and are wary of another humiliating defeat on the floor as the shutdown ticks closer.

That’s just one of McCarthy’s many challenges in the coming days: As a group of conservatives signal they’ll continue to block a short-term spending bill, the centrist wings of both parties are unifying to present a deal those hardliners will despise even more, putting the GOP speaker in a lose-lose situation. McCarthy’s only other path to avoiding a shutdown is getting jammed by a Senate-passed bill that seemingly no one in the House wants.

“It’s a career-deciding week,” one House Republican said, speaking on condition of anonymity about McCarthy’s precarious position.

The Tuesday night vote will act as a gut check on the rest of McCarthy’s week. Teeing up the four spending bills for debate is a typically routine hurdle, but the House GOP has struggled to clear it three times this year amid conservative opposition.

Five GOP hardliners helped block the defense bill from coming up last week. And while Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) issued a statement Sunday reiterating she is a “hard no” ahead of Tuesday’s vote on bringing up the spending bills — which encompass the military, the Department of Homeland Security, State and agriculture — McCarthy is hoping that he’s flipped enough holdouts to at least get the package on the floor.

“I think, finally, they’ve grown where they agreed to do a rule for all four,” McCarthy told reporters in the Capitol on Monday about the hardliners.

The other GOP “no” votes last week include Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Eli Crane (Ariz.), Matt Rosendale (Mont.) and Dan Bishop (N.C.). Aides for the four didn’t immediately respond to questions about if they would vote against the rule on Tuesday.

And McCarthy declined to say who he thought he had flipped, but said leadership had heard from “a number of people who say that they would vote for the rule.”

To help shore up the votes, GOP leadership has been negotiating with a cross-section of the conference, including some of the hardliners, over what the top-line spending levels would look like for all 12 funding bills. It’s an effort to assuage right flank kvetching over the lack of an overall plan from McCarthy.

Even if Republicans are able to bring the bills up for debate, it’s far from clear that they have the votes to ultimately pass them. And the strategy does nothing to prevent a government shutdown set to start on Sunday. Instead, the House logjam has triggered bipartisan Senate efforts to craft legislation to keep the government funded.

In the House, the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus has put forward its own plan to avert a shutdown, which was formally endorsed by the caucus last week.

That plan would keep the government open through Jan. 11 at current levels, with $24 billion in aid for Ukraine and $16 billion in disaster aid. It would also come with a stricter policy on the Southern border — essentially reimposing Title 42, a pandemic-era policy used to block migrants from crossing into the U.S. — as well as the creation of a fiscal commission to study how to reduce the national debt.

The GOP leaders of that bill, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), have been mum on exactly how they might push that bill to a full House vote. But they believe there are mechanisms to force a floor vote, without the 30-day clock that comes with a discharge petition.

“I am willing to work with any member of Congress from either party in order to avert a damaging shutdown,” said battleground Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.) in a new statement, touting his membership of the group.

Meanwhile, McCathy is pushing forward with a Republican-only short-term funding bill, which he could put on the floor later this week. The Californian has pitched a bill that would extend reduced government funding for a month, combined with a GOP border proposal and a debt commission. However, he also opened the door to a 45-day stopgap during a conference call over the weekend.

There are at least nine Republicans who are opposed to McCarthy’s stopgap plan, leaving him well short of the votes he’ll need to pass a party-line proposal. But his allies hope that some of the “hell no” caucus — when it comes to supporting a short-term spending plan — will buckle in the final hours before a shutdown.

“Sometimes people have to put their hands on the stove, and I think a little bit of that’s going on right now,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), a McCarthy ally. “I think once you start getting up against backstops … you begin sobering up.”

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