Six-month CR fails again in House; seven working days til shutdown

WASHINGTON — After lurching back to the House floor Wednesday, the House speaker’s six-month continuing resolution again failed to rally enough support to pass the chamber.

The bill went down 202-220, with 14 Republican holdouts, two Republicans voting present and three Democratic supporters. It was mostly clean for the Department of Energy, aside from an anomaly that would have granted the agency permission “to sustain specialized security activities” for its defense nuclear programs.

It was the second time in as many weeks that the Speaker of the House, Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) unsuccessfully gambled that the bill’s combination of pushing a spending debate beyond the next president’s inauguration and requiring tough new voter ID laws would turn out Republican support.

Former President Donald Trump (R) on Wednesday again urged House Republicans to shut the government down if they do not get the voter ID laws included with any stopgap budget.

The House on Wednesday had seven more scheduled workdays, including Mondays and Fridays, when votes are rare, to pass some kind of emergency funding bill to prevent a partial government shutdown on Oct. 1.

In the Senate, Majority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) this week said Democrats in the upper chamber would accept only a three-month stopgap that adhered to the spending levels Schumer and Johnson agreed to earlier this year.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, every Republican lawmaker whose district includes a big DOE nuclear-weapons site voted for the six-month bill, though two, Reps. Charles Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) and Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), said they would have preferred a three-month bill.

On Wednesday, a day after he told an industry gathering that he wanted a three-month continuing resolution, Fleischmann told the Monitor that while the “shortest possible time” for a continuing resolution is “optimum,” and that “in an ideal world” Congress would pass a budget at the beginning of the fiscal year, Johnson’s bill was “preferable to shutting the government down.”

Under any clean continuing resolution, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would get the equivalent of $8.5 billion, more than either the $8.4 billion Senate appropriators approved this summer or the $8.3 billion House appropriators proposed. President Joe Biden (D) requested $8.2 billion.

As of deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor, House leadership had not announced plans to vote on another funding bill.

Sarah Salem contributed to this report from Washington.