WASHINGTON — Lawmakers return to the Capitol Monday after a six-week summer recess, confronting a changed political landscape but also a thorny, familiar problem: how to avoid a shutdown of Congress.
They have just three weeks to do so. Government funding expires at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and former President Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to force a shutdown unless certain demands are met. A shutdown would close federal agencies and national parks, while cutting public services and laying off millions of workers, just weeks before the election.
The presidential race is up in the air over the final stretch of Congress, which is expected to leave later this month and return after Election Day. When the House left town for the summer break on July 25, President Joe Biden had just withdrawn from the presidential race, Democrats were preparing to pick Vice President Kamala Harris as their new standard-bearer, and Republicans were scrambling to lay out a new playbook against Harris.
House Republicans have now identified a number of lines of attack they will emphasize in politically charged GOP hearings and investigations into both Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, on issues from border security to withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Here’s what to expect during the final three weeks of Congress before it resumes campaigning in October.
Another threat to the closure
The biggest task facing Congress is to fund the government by the Sept. 30 deadline. It’s a foregone conclusion that lawmakers will need a stopgap bill to keep the government open after the election — they’re nowhere near agreeing on a year-round funding measure. But the bill’s details and length have been a source of consternation.
Under pressure from Trump and right-wing members, the Republican-led House passed a stopgap bill that would keep money flowing through March 28 and tie it to the SAVE Act, a GOP-led bill to overhaul voting laws across the country by requiring proof of citizenship in order to vote. Democrats oppose the latter measure, noting that it is already illegal for non-citizens to vote, with stiff penalties that make the practice extremely rare. They also say it could discourage Americans from voting, since many don’t have easy access to passports or birth certificates.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said House Republicans were “taking a critically important step to keep the federal government funded and to safeguard our federal election process.” But if the bill passes the House, it will go nowhere in the Democratic-led Senate, and Johnson will have to decide whether to step down or stand firm as the GOP risks being blamed for a shutdown as the party that caused the gridlock.
“If Speaker Johnson pushes House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the likelihood of a shutdown will be dramatically increased and Americans will know that the responsibility for a shutdown lies with House Republicans,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in a joint statement Friday after the bill was released.
Also set to expire on September 30 is the agricultural program bill, which has already been postponed once and is expected to be temporarily extended by a continuing resolution.
Investigations by House of Representatives
After much of the 118th Congress focused on the investigation into Biden, House Republicans are now shifting their attention to the Democrats’ new presidential nominees.
The House Education Committee subpoenaed Walz last week for information about his administration’s response to a massive pandemic fraud scheme in Minnesota. While the committee has been investigating the matter since 2022 and had previously requested information from the Department of Education, this subpoena was the first time Walz himself had been approached.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee last month launched an investigation into Walz’s contacts with Chinese Communist Party organizations and officials. These contacts date back to the early 1990s, when Walz was a teacher leading student groups on study trips to China.
Republicans are also focusing on the failed 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which the Trump campaign has criticized Harris for. McCaul has threatened to sue Secretary of State Antony Blinken if he does not agree to testify on Afghanistan on Sept. 19.
House Republicans also have a full schedule of hearings this week focused on the “Biden-Harris Administration.” There’s a Judiciary Committee hearing on “The Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Victim Perspectives.” A Subcommittee on Energy and Commerce is holding one called “From Gas to Groceries: Americans Are Paying the Price of the Biden-Harris Energy Agenda.” And the Committee on Veterans Affairs has a hearing called “Responsible or Absent?: Investigating VA Leadership Under the Biden-Harris Administration.”
While the House committees conducting Biden’s impeachment inquiry released a report in August finding the president had committed impeachable offenses, it’s unlikely the full House will attempt to vote to impeach the president, given the GOP’s razor-thin majority and skepticism from some rank-and-file members. Johnson only thanked the committees and encouraged Americans to read the report in a statement at the time.
Democrats Strike Back
Democrats in the House of Representatives have launched their own investigations into Republican presidential nominee Trump, even though they do not have subpoena power in the minority.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the panel’s Subcommittee on National Security, Border and Foreign Affairs, sent a letter to Trump last week asking him to provide proof that he never received any money from Egypt.
Top Democrats said they were investigating a possible “$10 million cash bribe from Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi” to Trump’s 2016 campaign after The Washington Post reported on August 2 about a secret Justice Department investigation into the alleged bribery; NBC News has not independently verified that report.
“Surely you agree that the American people have a right to know whether a former president — and a current presidential candidate — accepted illegal campaign contributions from a brutal foreign dictator,” the Democrats wrote.
Trump’s campaign responded by calling the story “fake news.”
In the Senate, Schumer has informed members that they will vote on the confirmation of Biden’s nominees and federal judges for the remainder of this year — including in the “lame duck” session after the election.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
