McCarthy’s Stopgap Bill Teeters on the Brink as Democrats Object to Congressional Pay Raise and Lack of Ukraine Aid
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
With less than eleven hours to go before a government shutdown, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) made another attempt at pushing forward a stopgap spending bill on Saturday, but the bill’s success looked increasingly in doubt as Democrats complained about what they called a “rushed” timeline for passage — and then added more objections as they read through the 71-page bill.
The last stopgap bill flopped on Friday after 21 House Republicans voted against it, and McCarthy offered a new bill on Saturday that would maintain government spending levels for the next 45 days, with the addition of $16 billion in disaster relief funding in response to a request from President Joe Biden’s administration.
McCarthy’s challenge is to wrangle the hardline conservatives in his caucus while also convincing enough Democrats to vote for the bill, and end up with something that the Democrat-majority Senate and the White House can support too.
So far, the Speaker has shrugged off Democratic complaints about the time frame to vote on the new bill, arguing that it is “just a basic CR [continuing resolution].”
The Democrats remain unconvinced. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, posted several criticisms of the bill on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. One of these was the lack of a provision that would block the “Member Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA),” which would give members of Congress a pay raise in line with inflation.
The Senate version of the CR blocked the COLA, DeLauro wrote, but “[t]he House GOP CR does not.”
“News flash: a COLA is a pay increase for Members of Congress,” she added.
Saturday afternoon, DeLauro passed out a “one-pager” memo to her fellow Democrats spelling out the objections to the bill.
The text of the memo read blasted McCarthy’s bill as a “No So ‘Clean’ Continuing Resolution” and accused the House GOP of “still throwing everything they can at the wall to see if anything sticks.”
Republicans “have already proven they cannot and will not pass a continuing resolution on their own – even one with outlandish spending cuts that could never pass the Senate or be signed into law,” the memo continued, urging McCarthy to instead sign on to the Senate version of the CR.
The memo then laid out three key objections to McCarthy’s bill: 1) the COLA increase DeLauro tweeted about; 2) because it “[d]enies critical additional resources to the Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid” just as student loan payments were about to resume, which “could lead to longer call times when borrowers reach out to their student loan services;” and 3) because it “[b]etrays our commitments to Ukraine.”
Funding for Ukraine took up nearly one-half of the single page of the memo, lambasting Republicans for not including this funding in the House CR “[d]espite the fact that it is the majority’s will – demonstrated several times this week – to provide support for Ukraine’s self-defense.”
“The bipartisan Senate Continuing Resolution fights against Russian tyranny and aggression and provides support for Ukraine at a pivotal moment,” the Democrats’ memo argued.
