The latest stopgap funding bill gave lawmakers an early-March deadline, but now their schedules call for a light workload in February
Once the House on Thursday finished kicking the can on government funding until early March, lawmakers did what almost comes naturally at this point.
They left town for a 10-day break, not returning until the night of Jan. 29.
Exempting half-days that are scheduled for traveling into or out of Washington, the House has only five full legislative days on its calendar before lawmakers leave Feb. 16 for what is slated to be an almost two-week break from the Capitol.
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Instead, House Republicans have set themselves up with at least seven more weeks of haggling over these agency budgets. Now two weeks since agreeing to stick with the original $1.66 trillion outline, congressional leaders and top members of the Appropriations committees have yet to agree on slicing up that pie, which is the only way for Congress to then approve the 12 bills covering all the agencies.
these people dont want to achieve things, they want sound bites to get re-elected. the house is no longer functional. how do we fix that?
its not like they can control or fix this problem themselves.
Get rid of the Republicans.
Building on this idea, since Reagan Republicans have convinced people that government is the problem. So at this point, Republican voters don’t even expect their representatives to ensure a functional government. Notice that every time there is bipartisan agreement on a stopgap funding measure that a cadre of the Republicans is livid, because they don’t want the government to function.
They have been screaming for years about the crisis at the border, now that there’s a Senate bill to address it, they vehemently oppose it.
RepresentUs has a thorough comprehensive plan - https://represent.us/
thank you!
Actually show up to elections more than once every four years.
Conservatives are doing this shit. The normal people are working hard to try to convince the conservatives to be human, but they refuse.
Uncle Jay Explains Congressional Recess!
With a schedule like that, no wonder they can’t get anything done! But yeah, when 1/2 the govt literally wants to point and say “See! Government doesn’t work!” I don’t know how we can function without getting them out.
I wonder how much this would change if we didn’t know how our representatives voted. Thanks to Google sucking ass I can’t find a source, but it wasn’t until the 20th century when we knew how our individual Representative and Senator voted. That way lobbyists couldn’t buy votes, and fringe extremists couldn’t pressure specific politicians.
This is the same reason we vote anonymously: It prevents vote-buying and retribution. I wonder how different our Congress would act if we couldn’t blame “those other guys” but only “those clowns in Congress.” The political impetus would be quite different if AOC and Matt Gaetz were considered part of the same dysfunctional group.
Anyway, shit’s fucked.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That has left Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to focus on confirming presidential nominees and nudging along negotiators on the security package to bolster defenses of Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that also includes a legislative deal related to the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If we keep extending the pain, creating more suffering, we will pay the price at the ballot box,” Rep. Patrick T. McHenry (N.C.), a senior Republican who served as acting speaker during the October tumult, told reporters Thursday.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate spending panel, suggested that one or two of the dozen allocations were hung up in a partisan squabble and that has delayed everything else, because lawmakers need to settle precisely on how much money each pot gets before they can finish writing the appropriations.
With the House out of session till the end of January, and the Senate leaving Feb. 8 for half of that month, there won’t be much time to make these decisions and then decide how to process all the spending bills.
There is broad agreement that lawmakers want to finish their work — just 13 senators, all conservative Republicans, voted Thursday to simply extend current funding levels until the end of the fiscal year, against 82 pushing for a final budget — but they just keep going in circles.
It’s normal for Congress to blow past the Sept. 30 statutory deadline for funding the government, but lawmakers usually finish up before Christmas after passing a couple of “CRs” to avoid a shutdown.
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