In Desperation, GOP Leadership Turns to … Regular Order?

Well … sorta. After trying to extend government operations by CRomnibus and then in a mainly clean continuing resolution attached to a debt ceiling hike, House Speaker Mike Johnson has a new approach for Plan C. Why not — and we’re just spitballing here — break up the pending issues into separate legislation and let people vote on each?

You know … how Congress is supposed to work?

It’s not quite regular order, but it’s closer than we’ve seen thus far:

NEWS — We hear that house republicans are likely to split the bill in pieces. Hold votes on different titles in the bill — CR, debt limit, ag, disaster relief.

This would allow each piece to pass or fail on its own merit.

This is a world of ever shifting strategy. So we’ll… https://t.co/MwNPPEt6Dz

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) December 20, 2024

Fox’s Chad Pergram and Liz Elkind heard the same thing. One unnamed House Republican lamented, “We’ll be here all night,” which might be cause for sympathy … if they’d done this in September. Or October. Or pretty much any time between the election and this morning, but especially any time this week. 

Politico puts a little more meat on the bone:

Under the House GOP’s latest plan, Republicans will try to pass three separate bills: a short-term funding bill, money for recent natural disasters and a one-year farm bill extension with aid for farmers, according to a person with direct knowledge of negotiations. A shutdown deadline is now about 12 hours away.

The new plan will test his ability to wrangle his conference. Members believe Johnson is taking the proposal through the Rules Committee, trying to pass it through regular order so it only requires a simple majority on the House floor. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who is on the panel, said that he will back the plan, meaning it should have enough support to get out of the committee.

But then things get trickier. Johnson would need near unity from his conference to bring it up for debate on the floor, known as voting for the rule. Democrats typically don’t vote for rules and are loath to help bail out Republicans after they backed away from a bipartisan funding agreement earlier this week.

If Johnson can manage to clear that hurdle, members could then vote for the individual bills that they support and vote against the ones they don’t — meaning Congress could avert a shutdown while other pieces of the previous GOP-backed bill could be dropped, at least for now.

Again, file this under Things We Could Have Done Monday. The biggest takeaway here is that we’re back to a clean CR. Isn’t that pretty much where we started? 

The problem with regular order now is that Republicans don’t have “same day authority,” and the current CR expires at midnight. The only way to get the CR part of this package to the floor before the midnight deadline is to do so through suspension, which then requires two-thirds approval. However, that’s not really much of a problem. Even if the floor vote has to wait for Saturday or Sunday, the shutdown will have started but not have much impact at all. In reality, the House has a couple of days to deal with that issue, assuming the Senate will act once the House passes it. And even if the Senate needs a day or two, any shutdown would be so short as to only be noticeable through press-release Mad Libs:

This is progressive Mad Libs. “The [villainous noun] is marching [beloved noun] to a [catastrophic noun] that will [scary verb] to [demo du jour] because they would rather [villainous verb predicate] for [villain du jour] than [virtuous agenda item we ignored until now]” https://t.co/2pDDCdzaDG

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) December 20, 2024

The decision to break out each part of the previously combined legislation for separate votes might get House Republicans back on board. It may not fly with Democrats in either chamber, although one particular issue has been dropped — the debt ceiling, according to Jake Sherman. Three bills will come to the floor: the CR, disaster relief (which should pass overwhelmingly), and an extension of the Ag bill with some added direct relief to farmers. Sherman thinks that the components could be rearranged at some point, but those are the basic unresolved tasks — and it appears the debt-ceiling debate has been punted for now.

Manu Raju heard the same thing, and that Republicans aren’t interested in dealing with it now:

Where things stand:
House GOP plan:
Votes on:
– 3-month government funding bill
– $100 billion disaster package
– $10 billion farm aid

Punt debt limit to next year

Vote under suspension tonight or by rule tomorrow, per sources

Jeffries says they’re talking pic.twitter.com/F5v7b5Kxo9

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 20, 2024

What about the Democrats? Hakeem Jeffries says that Republicans are back to negotiating with them:

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries privately told his caucus Friday morning that communication had restarted with Republicans, according to two people familiar with his remarks granted anonymity to discuss the dynamics.

“Because of our display of unity, the lines of communication have been reopened,” Jeffries said, according to the people in the room.

Does that mean that Democrats will offer tacit approval for this new approach? Probably not, but it does show a little more realism after yesterday’s faceplant. Whether Republicans like it or not, Democrats control the Senate and will have a voice in any budget extension. That doesn’t mean we have to pass a CRomnibus, but it does require some communication to see what will fly and what won’t. 

Stay tuned. Plan D is undoubtedly around the next corner.