As the world turns, most of it is probably scratching its collective head at the United States Congress. As the latest crisis, Israel’s war against terrorists, enters its second week, President Biden pledged support. So what can we expect this week on the Hill? For more on the matter, Federal Drive Host Tom Temin talks with Zach Cohen, Bloomberg Government congressional reporter.

Interview Transcript: 

Tom Temin  Zach, good to have you back. Sure thing. And of course, there is the speaker parade beauty contest. I don’t know what you call it, but that does have implications for everything else that’s going on in Congress.

Zach Cohen Right. Absent a speaker of the House since the ouster of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month in a bipartisan vote, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to move legislation through the House or even through committees. The speaker doesn’t just set the schedule, but really sets the structure for the rest of the committees or the policy priorities. So absent some sort of agreement by Republicans alone or maybe in some unlikely bipartisan governing coalition with Democrats, it’s going to be very difficult to move appropriations bills ahead of the November deadline to fund the government or take up key authorizations like the National Defense Authorization or the five year farm bill that needs to be reauthorized.

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Tom Temin So that’s a little bit of an irony, because it was the Republicans in the House that were moving the bills in so-called some semblance of regular order before their blowup politically.

Zach Cohen That’s right. Republicans were making actually more progress in the House than the Senate was in terms of moving bills, although it is obviously easier to put bills through the House where you only need a simple majority compared to the Senate, where there are 12 bipartisan bills, just none of them have actually passed yet. House Republicans had hoped to pass all 12 individual appropriation bills for the current fiscal year, fiscal year 2024, which started a couple of weeks ago. But a couple of those haven’t made it to the floor yet, actually, the majority of it. And so we’re likely looking at another continuing resolution at this point on a stopgap bill, the length of which the various riders of the approach to it. It’s too early to say. But absent some real turn around here, these are very difficult, not just for the House and the Senate to pass individual bills, but to conference to come together on a final agreement on all 12 of them.

Tom Temin Right. And if there is, for some crazy reason, no speaker by the end of the C.R., then the House couldn’t vote on a new C.R..

Zach Cohen The only twist to that is the potential for maybe an empowerment, so to speak, of the current speaker pro tempore. Patrick McHenry, a Republican in North Carolina, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. And something of a ministerial role is very limited in what he can do in this sort of stopgap method between McCarthy and whoever McCarthy’s successor will be. But there’s talk of trying to give him a little more ability just to bring bills to the floor, but that would require a majority vote in the House, either among Republicans, a unified or mostly unified Republican conference or some sort of bipartisan agreement on that front, especially given the number of crises in the Middle East and Europe, there is an increased interest in trying to find some way of moving forward on these important matters, even while there is no official Speaker of the House.

Tom Temin Right. So in the end, even without a Speaker, and they probably will have one by then if it comes to a shutdown versus a another continuing resolution, there is a mechanism by which the House could avoid a shutdown.

Zach Cohen There’s always a mechanism when there’s a will, there’s a way. The question is, what can the majority of the House get behind? And right now, the majority, the House can’t even agree who’s leaving the House? And so it’s going to be very difficult to avoid a shutdown absent a duly elected speaker. But a newly elected Speaker isn’t required in order to avoid a shutdown come November 18th.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Zach Cohen. He’s congressional reporter for Bloomberg Government. And getting back to that farm bill, I mean, there’s some authorizations that need to happen, right? Besides agriculture.

Zach Cohen Yeah. In the stopgap bill, there was, for instance, an authorization of the Federal Aviation Administration through the end of the year. Another authorization does need to pass by the end of the year in order to keep up the underpinning of our entire aviation industry. Or there are two different bills on that front. The House passed its version. The Senate has its own version, but is actually stuck in committee over an issue in regards to pilot training and how much pilots should be able to use virtual or non real training as part of their training hours. That issue has been sitting out there for a long time. And so separate from any issues in the House, the Senate has its own issues with that bill. The farm bill, I think, is probably in a similar scenario. I was talking to Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow, and she said, I can still keep talking to G.T. Thompson, the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, on a farm bill, a five year reauthorization of various snap food benefits, conservation programs, farm subsidies. But Stabenow and the ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, John Boozman, still need to work out some really key distinctions in order to get their bill out. And so there are some substantive differences that need to be addressed in both of those bills. Even before we deal with the procedural question of how do they get through a chamber that doesn’t have a leader.

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Tom Temin Crazy, but it’s been going on for some time now. So we’re sort of getting into this weird status. And what about the military holds on promotions of generals? This goes back to Senator. Tuberville. A couple of them slipped through. I was talking to a general last week, though, at the Army show who should have retired back in April. But his successor nominee is waiting in limbo here. So it’s not universal even though a couple have gotten through. Any signs that that could crack or somehow the Senate could find a way around that one?

Zach Cohen Yeah. Tuberville for months has basically prevented the quick confirmation of hundreds of these senior military promotions. You know, the rank and file of the military still get confirmed. But these senior generals haven’t been able to get confirmed with a couple of key exceptions, as you noted, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CQ Brown, the former chief of staff of the Air Force. But he was only confirmed as well as a number of really key members of the Joint Chiefs because Senate Majority Chuck Schumer essentially forced a vote on those nominees, a step that he was not interested in really taking because it rewarded essentially Tuberville decision to hold up these nominees and basically gave in to his demands that a vote be held on these nominees. As Tuberville continues to protest the Department of Defense’s funding for troops who are traveling out of state in order to seek an abortion after the fall of Roe v Wade. And so it’s unclear how the rest of these hundreds of nominees get across the finish line. You might hear something about that in Congress this week. But given the fact that there are judges that Senate needs to confirm, a key EEOC nominee will probably be confirmed on Tuesday. And then another minibus, these appropriation bills that they want to get through. There’s just not a lot of floor time to deal with anything closely resembling filling all these military vacancies.

Tom Temin And what about the National Defense Authorization Act that was moving along? There were still some seemingly intractable issues, but now both tractors have stopped.

Zach Cohen Yeah, both the House and the Senate have passed their individual versions of the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military policy bill. The key question now is how they work out the differences between them. The House has a version, for instance, that would strip away this DoD ability to help troops who are seeking abortions out of state and cover some of their travel costs. That’s not going to fly with the Senate or certainly with the White House who’s fighting with Senator Tommy Tuberville on that exact provision. But there are conferees that have been named so those negotiations can take place to try to hash out an agreement between the House and the Senate on a bicameral, bipartisan basis, but a path forward for actually moving a conference report or any sort of actual agreement remains to be seen.

Tom Temin And just quickly, there has been some reporting early on Bloomberg had, too, about some members of Congress were trying to force the issue of federal employees back to the office or resolution of this whole limbo type of question that seems to be set aside for the time being because of everything else going on.

Zach Cohen We could see some of this litigated in the context of the spending bills that are being held up. There was a provision in one of the House bills, the one for financial services in general government that actually would have zeroed out funding for agencies that don’t return the federal employees back to the office to pre-pandemic 2019 stature. Now, that seems unlikely to get into a final bill. The Senate’s not going to go for that, and the White House wouldn’t go for that. Even though the White House is itself pushing to bring more federal employees back into offices more. But this is something that would need to be negotiated with the unions, something to be negotiated on an agency by agency basis, on a case by case basis. It’s a very complicated issue, and there’s not really even a ton of data on how many federal employees are working from home or from the office. So it’s something that Congress is very interested in trying to push. It’s actually simpatico with the White House on this. But the logistics and the specifics on how to get to that and the actual levels of in-office work remains to be seen.

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