A pair of congressional Republicans is determined to keep the government open and willing to force their colleagues to stay in Washington, D.C., to get it done.
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, plan to introduce legislation that would keep lawmakers in town until a short-term government funding extension, known as a continuing resolution (CR), or spending bills are passed to avert a partial government shutdown.
Congress still does not have a plan in place to ward off a shutdown by the Sept. 30 deadline, and both sides of the aisle have already started the annual blame game as to which party would own the partial closure.
So far, the Senate has advanced a trio of spending bills, while the House has passed only two — although lawmakers in the lower chamber were gearing up to advance the Energy and Water appropriations bill on Thursday.
Lankford said in a statement to Fox News Digital that as the nation’s debt creeps beyond $37 trillion, ‘Congress cannot keep avoiding the hard choices to fix it.’
‘Shutting down the government does not fix the debt problem, it just makes it worse,’ he said. ‘The best way to finish negotiating the hard issue is to keep Congress in Washington until the budget is finished. That puts the pressure on lawmakers, not on families and important services.’
If Congress fails to get a deal in place to keep the government open, the duo’s bill would trigger an automatic CR ‘on rolling 14-day periods’ that would stay in place until lawmakers either pass all 12 appropriations bills or strike a deal on a stopgap bill.
The bill would also force Congress, their staff and members of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to stay in D.C. until the job is done.
It would require that no motions to adjourn or recess could be made for longer than 23 hours, mandatory quorum calls each day to ensure attendance, and no other legislation would be allowed to be considered until a CR or spending bills were passed.
‘In the real world, if you fail to do your job, there are consequences,’ Arrington said in a statement to Fox News Digital. ‘Yet, when Congress fails to pass appropriations on time, the burden falls squarely on hardworking Americans — taxpayers, seniors, and our men and women in uniform.’
Meanwhile, appropriators in the House and Senate are working to find a path forward on a deal.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said he hoped the CR would originate in the House, based off negotiations between House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, R-Okla., and Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine.
‘My hope would be that whatever that CR looks like, it’s clean, and that it enables us to buy some time to get a regular appropriations process done,’ he said.
But the White House’s move last week to cancel $4.9 billion in foreign aid funding through a ‘pocket rescission’ has some Republicans worried that it could jeopardize the bipartisan nature of the appropriations process in the Senate, where Democrats will be needed to keep the government open.
So far, it appears that Senate Democrats aren’t ready to totally buck their Republican counterparts, but are demanding that they be involved in negotiations to craft a CR.
‘If House Republicans, however, go a different route and try and jam through a partisan CR without any input from Democratic members of Congress, and they suddenly find they don’t have the votes they need from our caucus to fund the government, well, then that is a Republican shutdown,’ said Sen. Patty Murray, of Washington., top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee.