House to vote on final funding measures as government shutdown deadline nears

Washington — The House is set to vote Thursday on the remaining bills to fund the government as the deadline to avoid another shutdown nears. 

After weeks of working through funding measures following the longest shutdown in history last year, House and Senate appropriators released the text of the final four bills earlier this week. The measures include funding related to the departments of Defense; Labor, Health and Human Services, Education; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development; and Homeland Security. 

Lawmakers face a Jan. 30 deadline to fund the remaining government agencies and programs. But GOP leaders faced hurdles heading into the day, with multiple groups looking to use leverage to extract concessions in the final funding fight until September. 

The House Rules Committee reconvened Thursday morning after members were unable to move forward with the funding measures Wednesday amid conservative opposition. Meanwhile, another faction of the GOP conference pressured leaders to include an ethanol provision that would allow the year-round sale of E15 fuel. 

The committee ultimately advanced the funding measures to the floor, teeing up a procedural vote on the funding measures that lawmakers narrowly approved later Thursday. The House is expected to vote on final passage in the afternoon, with the Homeland Security bill set to be considered separately. 

The DHS appropriations bill, which was originally expected to come as part of last week's funding package, has faced pushback from Democrats following the deadly shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis. Democrats threatened to withhold their support for the funding without ICE reforms. 

When the bills were released earlier this week, top Democratic appropriators acknowledged that the DHS funding measure would be insufficient for some members of their party, without broader reforms that some had sought. But they pointed to new restrictions on DHS' ability to allocate funds if it does not comply with reporting requirements, along with new training requirements for officers and $20 million for body cameras for immigration enforcement agents.

Top Democrats said they would oppose it anyway. Rep. Pete Aguilar of California, the caucus chair, said Wednesday that he and other leaders told members they would vote against the DHS funding bill "unless there were substantive changes." 

"We shared our feelings with the caucus," Aguilar said. "But ultimately I imagine that members will vote their districts and they will judge the bill on the substance."

With a slim GOP majority, the measure will likely find enough support for passage, and could pick up votes from some more moderate Democrats. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that he thinks the DHS funding bill will pass, citing its backing by Democrats on the Appropriations Committee. 

Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, urged lawmakers to "listen to the common-sense reasonable Democrats who helped to put these bills together."

The speaker touted the funding bills more broadly, saying they would "fund the Trump agenda and Republican efforts to restore peace through strength, to defend our borders and to deport criminal illegal aliens, to rebuild America's infrastructure and to make America healthy again."

Republican leaders have pushed for a return to regular order in the appropriations process, pursuing the passage of all 12 appropriations bills rather than the last-minute "omnibus" packages that have become commonplace in recent years. Johnson celebrated the appropriations work on Wednesday, saying there were many people who claimed "that this could not be done, that a regular appropriations process is a thing of the past."

"Critics said our margins were too slim to bring it back, to rebuild that muscle memory that I committed to when I became speaker," Johnson said. "They said we had too many bills left to pass and too many disagreements left to reconcile. But I'm happy to report that all of those prognostications were flat wrong, and we've gotten it done."

After passing the House, the funding bills would head to the Senate for approval. They are expected to be packaged together with two other funding measures passed in the lower chamber last week. 

Consideration of the final six funding bills in one package will make for swifter passage in the upper chamber. But with only a handful of days until the funding deadline, and a winter storm threatening to create travel headaches for senators' return to Washington early next week, the Senate will have to work quickly to avert a partial shutdown.