The House GOP Picks Partisan Policy Battles Using Spending Bills
The House GOP Picks Partisan Policy Battles Using Spending Bills
Drag queen story hours for kids would be expressly forbidden on American military facilities.
The availability of mail-order abortion drugs for women would decrease.
Federal agencies would be prohibited from advancing critical race theory, and the congressional office in charge of diversity and inclusion would be shut down.
In order to intensify political conflicts over social issues, House Republicans have started adding partisan policy mandates to government spending bills. This has led to conflicts with the Democratic-controlled Senate in addition to the funding disputes that are already anticipated and could lead to a government shutdown this fall.
Republicans, bending to their hard-right members, insisted on lower funding levels than the two parties agreed on in a bipartisan pact to lift the debt ceiling, setting the two chambers on a collision path in terms of money. Republicans on the Appropriations Committee are now using the budget bills to pick fights on a laundry list of policy matters that appeal to their base, giving another acknowledgment to the demands of the far right.
The Justice Department is a primary target of Republicans who assert that it is politically biassed against the right, including former President Donald J. Trump, and a particularly contentious debate is currently raging over funding for the department. In addition to pledging to reduce the department’s budget, right-wing politicians have proposed a number of limits on the agency, including defunding the special counsel in charge of the investigations into the former president and delaying funding for a new F.B.I. headquarters.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, declared on Twitter that she would vote against any appropriations measure that would finance the weaponization of the government. She was announcing her plan to cut funding for the special counsel’s office in the Trump investigations. Whether such provision will be included in the law is not yet certain.
Such clauses might make many of the Republican-drafted spending bills unpassable as soon as they reach the Democratic-controlled Senate, opening the door to a government shutdown if the disagreements cannot be settled by September 30 or to automatic spending reductions in early 2025 if Congress is unable to pass all 12 of the individual spending bills.
Formerly, it was usual practise for lawmakers to attach so-called “riders” — clauses that occasionally have little to do with the underlying legislation — to appropriations bills in order to influence policy on a variety of contentious topics, such as abortion and the environment.
However, as the appropriations process on Capitol Hill has deteriorated in recent years, massive bills that combine all or the majority of federal funding into a single take-it-or-leave-it bill have replaced individual spending measures, limiting the ability of rank-and-file lawmakers to tack on such items.Now that members of both parties have committed to working through the 12 separate bills, policy riders are resurfacing and posing a threat to further exacerbate what is already expected to be a contentious process.
The twelve spending measures that fund the government must be completed and signed into law before the end of the calendar year, according to the bipartisan agreement to extend the debt ceiling that Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Biden negotiated last month. One percent of all spending would be slashed starting in 2025 if even one bill were to fail.
Another revolt among far-right legislators could result from the process if they are forced to endorse compromise legislation without their preferred policy riders. In that case, the task of getting the spending measures through the House would fall to a group of members akin to the one that approved the debt ceiling agreement.
Hard-right Even though they had no chance of being adopted by Democrats, who control the Senate and the White House, Republicans revolted earlier this month when the debt ceiling compromise did not contain numerous provisions they had pushed for and were included in the initial House G.O.P. proposal.
As they draught and pass their spending bills out of committee, appropriators have already approved policy riders that are similarly doomed to failure, claiming that they are using constitutionally protected mechanisms to oppose what they called the Biden administration’s divisive agenda.
