House Rules Committee advances rules package with four appropriations bills

The House Rules Committee advanced a rule package of four appropriations bills out of committee on Saturday, and the full House will vote on the rule on Tuesday.

After House Republicans failed to get the rule for the defense appropriations bill off the floor twice this week, they went back to the drawing board and devised a plan to combine four spending bills in one rule, and two of those bills slash government spending.

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The four bills are the defense appropriations bill, the homeland appropriations bill, the agriculture appropriations bill, and the state and foreign operations appropriations bill. The last two slash spending while the other two increase spending.

The rule will come to the floor for a vote on Tuesday, with its passage still up in the air. The rule would also prevent the House from sending the homeland appropriations bill to the Senate until the upper chamber passes H.R. 2 — the House’s border security bill.

After saying Friday he would strip out $300 million from the defense appropriations bill for training Ukrainian soldiers, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) said Saturday that would be too difficult to do, and so they are leaving it in, which will result in some members, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) voting against the rule.

“I think she’ll vote no on the rule if it’s in there,” McCarthy said. “That’s why I tried to solve it where everybody could be there, but this one, it didn’t work out.”

There will be amendment votes on both defense and state foreign operations appropriation bills to strip the Ukraine funding out of the bill, but they might not make it to amendment votes if members block the rule.

“Trying to address the diverse views of the conference, the plan allows for an amendment on both DOD and SFOPs to strike,” Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA) said. “We are going to let the will of the house prevail.”

On a private Republican member-only call on Saturday, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) urged members who are thinking about voting no on the rule to let his office know so they won’t be surprised on the floor.

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“A reminder to all members: We do not whip procedural motions, as they are partisan exercises and should be us, Republicans, versus them, Democrats. All that being considered. Please let the Whip team know if you are considering being a no on a procedural motion,” Emmer said on the call. “We cannot operate as a team if we can’t pass procedural motions.”

The government is set to shut down on Oct. 1, and this rules package doesn’t bring Congress any closer to avoiding a shutdown. But McCarthy and his allies hope that if they pass the four appropriations bills — combined with the veteran affairs spending bills, they passed earlier this year — it will put them in a stronger position when they start negotiating with the Senate. They also hope that it builds goodwill from some of the holdouts who oppose a continuing resolution and that it could convince them to support one, or at least not block one, from coming to the floor.