New Jersey’s members of Congress are back in Washington this week after the holiday recess, and they’ve got a major problem facing them already: parts of the government are set to run out of funding in just over a week.
Shortly before Thanksgiving, Congress passed a continuing resolution (CR) that temporarily funded the government in two different tranches, one that runs out on January 19 and another that will last two additional weeks until February 2. If funding bills for agencies like the Agriculture, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs Departments aren’t approved in the next nine days, the government will enter a partial shutdown.
On Sunday, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer unveiled a deal that would fund the government long-term with relatively few cuts. It’s an open question, though, whether that deal can get through Congress in time, especially since it’s come under fire from many of the House’s most conservative members.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis), an ally of Johnson who has voted against previous short-term funding bills, told the New Jersey Globe that he’d like to pass a full funding deal but would be open to supporting a CR if necessary.
“If we can get all the bills done that need to be done before the first deadline, let’s do them,” Van Drew said. “If we can’t do that, I still would rather do a responsible – responsible being the important word – CR. I don’t want a shutdown.”
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing), meanwhile, said that she’d be amenable to voting for a funding deal without conservative “poison pill” amendments, a standard which the Johnson-Schumer bill appears to meet, at least for now.
“[I want] Republicans to do the right thing, which is to pass spending bills without poison pills within them,” Watson Coleman said. “We’re not going to support poison pills that devastate communities, devastate programs, devastate the most needy.”
But in a sign of how fractious the House’s tiny GOP majority is, 13 right-wing Republicans sank a procedural vote on unrelated bills today in protest of the funding deal, preventing the House from conducting any further business. As it has been ever since Republicans took the House majority last year, getting anything substantive passed through Congress will be a challenge.
As Watson Coleman quipped on Twitter: “So I guess the GOP didn’t have ‘functioning branch of government’ as their New Years Resolution?”