Congress will be at the edge of not one but two “cliffs” as the end of the month nears, explains ed_kilgore
Another wild September in our nation’s capital. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images Even for an institution prone to let obligations pile up like the dirty laundry of procrastinating adolescents, Congress has outdone itself this year in creating an autumn logjam.
The thing that must happen by the end of September is some action on appropriations to keep the federal government open, presumably by a stopgap “continuing resolution,” since Congress isn’t getting any of the 13 regular FY 2022 appropriations bills done when the new fiscal year begins on October 1. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has now told Members to expect a vote on a stopgap bill the week of September 20, extending current appropriations until December.
According to a previous decision by congressional Democrats, the plan is to connect an increase or suspension in the public debt limit to appropriations, nestling the unpopular debt measure into the must-pass spending bill. Since Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told the world earlier this week that action on the debt limit had to happen before the end of October at the latest, that means the stopgap bill had better include it.
The implications of these scheduling decisions is that Congress will be at the edge of not one but two “cliffs” as the end of the month nears: one involves the government shutdown that will occur if appropriations are not extended, and the other involves a debt default that will occur if that breached limit is not addressed then or very soon afterwards.
What Republicans want Democrats to do instead of going to the brink on spending and debt is to put a debt limit measure into the aforementioned unresolved budget reconciliation bill, which if all goes as planned will be enacted on strict party-line votes in both congressional chambers. This would let Republicans claim they had virtuously opposed both socialism and the socialist debt, while letting the stopgap spending bill slip through and avoiding a financial meltdown, too.
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