House Minority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) has warned members not to vote for a short-term government funding plan that Dems. and some establishment GOP want to be passed before a possible shutdown on Friday.
The shorter funding package was announced earlier Tuesday and is anticipated to be voted on later Wednesday on the House floor. The bill is intended to allow Republicans and Democrats additional time to negotiate a broader “omnibus” government spending bill for the current fiscal year.
“Once again, despite spending much of the year passing trillions in needless expenditure that has fueled inflation and driven our debt up,” Scalise added, “House Dems failed to meet the basic duty of funding the government.”
“So this one-week continuing resolution is an effort to secure more time for a big lame-duck spending plan in which House Republicans have had no say,” he continued.
The Republican House administration has voted against the short-term budget bill because it feels that upcoming Republican House members should have a role in federal spending in the omnibus package, which would finance the government until the conclusion of the current fiscal year on Sept. 30, 2023.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and retiring Senate Finance Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-VT) oppose House GOP leadership’s approach of whipping against the short-term budget plan. They agreed on a tentative agreement with Democrats on the omnibus measure which would set the budget for all of this fiscal year on Tuesday evening. If the shorter spending plan fails, it will increase the pressure on the establishment to give House Republicans a larger negotiating table.
“I think we’re pretty close to achieving an omnibus spending bill,” McConnell said Tuesday.
McConnell and Leahy’s omnibus bill has 7,500 earmarks totaling $16 billion. According to Bloomberg Government, the earmarks are as follows:
“According to a Bloomberg Government examination of nine Senate Appropriations Committee documents, the Senate included 3,123 earmarks totaling $7,780,973,000 in its fiscal 2023 appropriations proposals released in July. According to earlier this year’s research, lawmakers in the House added 4,386 earmarks totaling $8,231,999,565 in total. A consolidated Excel spreadsheet with all of the House earmarks is available here. The two houses have published a total of 7,509 earmarks worth $16,012,972,565.”
“The total designated amount is significantly less than 1% of the $1.7 trillion federal financing plan lawmakers hope to complete this year. Members agreed to impose a 1% cap on the new earmarking process when it was reinstated ahead of fiscal 2022, after a decade-long moratorium.”
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