Congress braces for partisan challenges to advance must-pass legislation
Cami Mondeaux
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Lawmakers are set to face a number of challenges in overcoming partisan differences and coming to agreements on must-pass legislation as members of Congress settle into their new committee assignments.
Both parties will have a hard time advancing their agendas over the next two years as Republicans hold a slim majority in the House and Democrats have an even slimmer majority in the Senate. As a result, lawmakers are bracing for likely dragged-out negotiations as they try to get their bills through Congress.
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That process is already beginning to play out. House Republicans passed the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Act last week, seeking to implement medical protections for fetuses that survive abortions. The bill passed the House in a 220-210 vote, with only one Democrat joining Republicans in backing the measure.
However, some Republicans criticized the bill’s passage as a waste of time. They argued it would never pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
“It’s never going to pass the Senate. It’s never going to get to the president’s desk to be signed into law,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told reporters in early January.
“If you want to make a difference and reduce the number of abortions with a Democrat-controlled Senate, the No. 1 issue we should be working on is access to birth control,” she said.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has also pledged to veto much of the Republican agenda — especially proposals to revoke funding for the IRS and abolish the federal tax agency.
But these kinds of messaging bills, legislation that is largely used as a symbolic vote rather than changing government policies, could become the new norm in the embattled Congress, some strategists say.
“For a lot of these guys, their main function is just pushing messaging bills and then using it to attack the other side in the next election,” Liz Mair, a Republican strategist, told the Washington Examiner.
“They are interested in driving and doing things that enable them to better attack the other side. I think that’s true for both Democrats and Republicans,” she said.
That’s likely to become a problem when it comes to legislation that must be passed by Congress in order to keep the government functioning — such as the debate over whether to raise the debt ceiling to avoid defaulting on the country’s loans.
The United States hit its debt limit on Thursday, beginning a countdown for the Treasury to miss paying a bill and raising fears of a default.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the department will take “extraordinary measures” to prevent the U.S. from defaulting on its obligations, but the Treasury will only have a few months before those measures are exhausted.
However, party leaders appear to be hesitant to compromise despite threats of a default. Democrats have refused to add spending cuts to debt limit legislation over the last several years, and the White House said earlier this week there would be no negotiations.
“The reality of the situation is that if we default, the ramifications for a lot of ordinary Americans are going to be so huge. I don’t think anybody wants to deal with it,” Mair said. “As cool as it sounds for both parties to be engaging in what I think is generally quite a lot of brinkmanship over this, the actual fact is it has really terrible consequences for the electorate.”
Aside from Democrats’ hesitance, intraparty divisions among Republicans may also be responsible for stalling progress on legislation.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has only a nine-vote majority in the lower chamber. That gives him little room for error when it comes to party defectors on a GOP bill. That struggle already came into play during the House leadership elections when it took 15 rounds of voting to elect McCarthy as speaker — a victory that required several concessions in order to win the support of some far-right members.
“If you look at the early returns on the new majority in the House, everything that’s happened suggests that it’s going to be very, very difficult for McCarthy to put together some kind of plan that will satisfy the Freedom Caucus and also keep the federal government working,” Brad Bannon, a Democratic strategist, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
McCarthy will especially face challenges over the next two years as he tries to balance keeping the federal government afloat while also appeasing far-right members of his party.
Some lawmakers, such as firebrand Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who both voted against McCarthy’s speakership, may use that balancing act to their advantage, according to Bannon.
“I think they do want to demonstrate their power [and] it may send a message, but it’s a message that is going to hurt them in 2024 … and will end the Republican House majority,” he said. “I think they do want to demonstrate their power and the leverage they have against McCarthy. But if they’re successful in doing that, it will backfire on them.”
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There are some ways for Congress to navigate their differences to approve the must-pass legislation. To pass the annual spending bill in previous years, parties have introduced omnibus bills that include unrelated measures in order to swing votes on the legislation as a whole.
“I do think that there are opportunities for bipartisanship in this particular political setup, but I think where you’re gonna see them is going to be on extraordinarily strange issues,” Mair said.
“For example, financial services kind of stuff or things that are issues that very few people talk about on a day-to-day basis,” she added. “But, you know, I would be surprised if that’s anything that gets a headline.”