Congress returns soon — but not for very long

When Congress returns next week after a long summer recess. It will only have 13 working days in September, before the end of the federal fiscal year. For a preview of what they’re likely to do, Bloomberg Government congressional reporter Maeve Sheehey joins the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin When Congress returns next week after a long summer recess, it will only have 13 working days in September before the end of the federal fiscal year. For a preview of what they’re likely to do, Bloomberg Government congressional reporter Maeve Sheehey. Maeve, good to have you with us.

Maeve Sheehey Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin All right. So I would say the budget. Well, we all think it should be on the top of their agenda. Do you think it actually is?

Maeve Sheehey Yeah. If Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something within the next month or so, they will have a shutdown, which would be pretty politically messy right before an election. I mean, elections are in November, and this would happen at the beginning of October, so it seems likely that they’ll probably manage to avert that again, just if solely for political reasons.

Tom Temin Right. And so a continuing resolution, then, would be something. And that’s kind of hard to handicap because the members are handicapping the election and whatever theoutcome is would affect what they would want to do with the budget. So that could somehow delay the CR, do you think?

Maeve Sheehey Yeah. So there’s a lot of agreement within the Congress as a whole that there should be a continuing resolution. And then it should go into the lame duck. But then there are some disagreements within the Republican Party, specifically in the House, where some people would like it to go longer, maybe a few years, because they think that Trump will be in office at that point and then he could influence the spending there. So that will be a big source of the arguments. And it could be politically messy for Republicans if they’re having this kind of publicized argument right before an election. But in the end, it is likely that they’ll come down with a CR that ends in the lame duck.

Tom Temin And do you feel a sense of, since you cover the House, do the Republicans actually have confidence they will take the House, keep the House, I should say?

Maeve Sheehey They say that they’re confident, but then again, so are the Democrats. It does seem like it could go either way, because this will come down to just a few House races. So it’s going to be really tight. It’s going to be important to look at California races and New York races and see who wins those, because they will likely take the majority.

Tom Temin All right. And there are a few bipartisan things going on, some legislation. What could we see perhaps between now and the end of the session, end of September, maybe?

Maeve Sheehey Yeah. So we probably won’t see a ton of bipartisan work happening before the election. And that’s mainly because, you know, we’re going into an election. No party wants to give the other party a huge bipartisan win. And especially Republicans are not going to want to give Joe Biden some sort of massive win to sign into law right before the election. But you could see smaller things, like, for example, the CR we’re talking about, it could have some disaster aid attached, and that would be a good thing for both parties to be able to agree on. And then also, there’s a budget shortfall at the Veterans Affairs Department. And that will come up on the 20th. That’s the deadline. So Congress will need to figure out something, some sort of stopgap patch to make sure that veterans and their families don’t start losing benefits at that point.

Tom Temin Veterans affairs is always something that is favored by both parties. They rarely disagree. Nobody wants to be painted with the people denying something to veterans, fair to say?

Maeve Sheehey That’s definitely right.

Tom Temin All right. And there’s a bunch of bills on the federal workforce that have some bipartisan support, such as making it easier to hire people using different hiring authorities, skills based hiring, this kind of thing. They’re good bills. They have bipartisan support. But does that mean there’s going to be any action on them? What have you seen there?

Maeve Sheehey I think there could be action on those in the lame duck. If we’re going to see any sort of bipartisan bills passed there, that is going to be the time that happens in that period right after the beginning of November, when we know who’s going to control the House, Senate and White House next year. But until then, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of hyperpartisan messaging bills, mostly on the floor. And just some discussions on spending bills will be the only real bipartisanship. We’ll see for now.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Maeve Sheehey. She covers the House for Bloomberg Government. And you know, elections have always been contentious. This one seems almost worse than ever. Is the partisanship out of the ordinary even for a crucial election year?

Maeve Sheehey It’s such a heated election season, and because control of the House is up in the air, control of the Senate is up in the air and the White House is, it’s kind of more heated on all of those realms. In the House, for example, Democrats are working really hard to take that back, and it’s unclear if they’ll be able to. So there’s a lot of hyperpartisanship going on. We definitely saw one side of that last week at the Democratic National Convention, and I think we’ll be continuing to see that right up until the election.

Tom Temin Yes. You were at the convention?

Maeve Sheehey I was, yes.

Tom Temin Was the so-called Project 2025 that has come out of the Heritage Foundation used kind of like a bloody flag by the Democrats, even though candidate Trump, former President Trump, has said that’s not his plan, that’s their plan, but that’s still a bloody flag that can be waved?

Maeve Sheehey Yeah, we heard a lot of mentions of Project 2025 and especially with abortion, there are some very anti-abortion provisions within Project 2025. And even though Trump has disavowed that and said that’s not his playbook, it was written by a lot of former advisers and people who he seems to trust. So, Democrats are trying to convince voters that, you know, for example, there would be an abortion ban if Trump were in office and he were able to enact Project 2025.

Tom Temin Right. I think Trump has said that should be a state issue. So and that’s what the Supreme Court said. So the I guess people are worried that Congress could do something national, legal or illegal or limiting of abortion.

Maeve Sheehey One of the Democrats’ main arguments this election is that if Republicans had a trifecta of House, Senate, White House, they would enact a national abortion ban. And now Republicans have not said that they would do that. But that is what Democrats are trying to paint their playbook as, as the election gets closer.

Tom Temin Hey, let’s talk about the National Defense Authorization Act. That is something that is fairly far along and something traditionally has always been managed to be passed, not in the fiscal year, but at least by the end of the calendar year. And it’s pretty crucial. It also is, I call it the magnet that attracts many shavings of other bills that need to get through, people desperately want to get through, so they attach them to that. What’s the status there?

Maeve Sheehey We actually haven’t seen too much movement on that over the past few weeks, mainly because Congress has been out of session, but we’ll definitely be hearing a lot more about that when they come back, starting September 9. And like you said earlier, you know, veterans are not somebody anybody wants, either party wants to deny benefits to. Same goes for the military. Nobody looks good if they can’t get a military funding bill passed. So I think we’ll be able to see a lot of movement on that.

Tom Temin Yeah. One of the strange phenomena this year is that some of the military spending agreements are out ahead of the NDAA. Usually you see the other way around.

Maeve Sheehey Yeah, yeah, it is quite unusual to see that.

Tom Temin And just getting back to what we mentioned at the top, the possibility of a federal shutdown, that’s something everybody absolutely wants to avoid. Or maybe some people feel it could be, you know, advantageous if that happened.

Maeve Sheehey There are definitely members of especially the House Freedom Caucus who do not seem especially concerned about a shutdown. It would probably hurt their party as a whole. But some of these people are in very deep red districts where it wouldn’t actually hurt their elections personally. And we’ve been flirting with a shutdown for that reason for pretty much the entirety of the 118th Congress. So even though it seems likely that lawmakers will avoid it, it is possible. And if that happens, it would be early October. There would be missed paychecks for federal workers. So it would be really dramatic, especially in the D.C. area.

Tom Temin Well, having lived through about six of them, yeah, I can say it’s no fun and all the sources dry up, too. Maeve Sheehey covers the House for Bloomberg Government. Thanks so much for joining us.

Maeve Sheehey Thanks for having me.

Tom Temin And we’ll post this interview with federalnewsnetwork.com’s Federal Drive. Subscribe to the Federal Drive wherever you get your podcasts.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.