Congress is already off to a slow start on its annual work on funding federal agencies. Only one of 12 bills has been approved by the House, and not one has been through the Senate.
This means the best-case scenario is for Congress to pass a stopgap funding bill ahead of the Sept. 30 fiscal-year deadline to keep agencies running on their current budgets while lawmakers try to hash out their mess.
But House Republicans are governed by a small band of far-right conservatives who traditionally hate such short-term continuing resolutions, as the measures are known on Capitol Hill. And the most recent charges against former president Donald Trump have angered those lawmakers, some of whom are threatening to block any bill that provides funding to the Justice Department unless they get to chisel away at money that in any way contributes to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations.
“I will not vote to fund a weaponized government while it politically persecutes not only President Trump but all conservative Americans,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a close ally of both the ex-president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), said in a statement after the announcement Tuesday of charges related to the January 2021 insurrection.
Calling FBI officers “henchmen,” she added, “Until we restore the FBI and the Department of Justice to the esteemed institutions they once were, I will not vote to fund these communist organizations.”
Other prominent House Republicans have used similar language. McCarthy referred to a “two-tier system of justice,” while Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) accused the Justice Department of “trying to suppress the will of the voters and meddle with the election,” given Trump’s lead in the GOP presidential primary.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And the most recent charges against former president Donald Trump have angered those lawmakers, some of whom are threatening to block any bill that provides funding to the Justice Department unless they get to chisel away at money that in any way contributes to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations.
“I will not vote to fund a weaponized government while it politically persecutes not only President Trump but all conservative Americans,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a close ally of both the ex-president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), said in a statement after the announcement Tuesday of charges related to the January 2021 insurrection.
It’s long past time for House Republicans to defund Jack Smith — and to impeach Biden and [Attorney General Merrick] Garland for their corruption, obstruction, and election interference,” Mike Davis, a conservative legal operative, wrote in an essay that the ex-president blasted out to his supporters.
Even if they agree to a short-term funding bill that keeps the government open into the late fall or winter, lawmakers face another hurdle because of a quirky provision in the earlier debt deal that sets up a domino effect for the rest of the federal budgets.
There is no automatic extension of government funding in the fall, but if all 12 spending bills are not signed into law by Jan. 1, agency chiefs will have to begin to plan out how they will administer this 1 percent cut — including at the Pentagon.
But Democrats privately say they will not go along with such a plan because that could give Republicans an incentive to work only on the bills funding their favorite departments — think Pentagon and Veterans Affairs — and then let the 1 percent cut hit the other agencies.
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