House Republicans float a new idea for funding the government ahead of shutdown

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is floating a new idea for a temporary spending measure to fund agencies separately as a way to keep the government open past Nov. 17.

A “laddered CR,” as Johnson put it, would extend the funding for individual agencies up until a set date. The set date would differ for each agency, but the thinking is this would create a sense of urgency to pass individual appropriations bills and avoid an omnibus or another continuing resolution.

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This could also possibly help win over hard-line conservatives who historically oppose continuing resolutions for a multitude of reasons, but especially because they believe it just punts government spending problems without ever solving them.

The idea was originally floated by Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture,

“Part of the frustration of a lot of people on our side of the aisle is that — two frustrations — one is the Senate always wants to seem to want to do an omnibus bill. And the other one is the Senate appears not to be willing to take up individual bills,” Harris said. “So, I think you have to provide some kind of incentive to the Senate to actually take up bills individually. And I think that kind of plan does that.”

Harris said that since there are two appropriations bills ready to go into a conference committee right now, both the House and Senate, the Military Construction and Veteran Affairs appropriations bill and the Agriculture Appropriations bill.

While the House has not passed the agriculture appropriations bill off the floor, it failed back in September; Harris still believes this bill is ready to go into conference with the Senate.

“I think the next step, instead of taking up more floor time trying to solve problems that may be unsolvable, is probably just going to go to a conference with the Senate on it,” he said. “They have a position, we have a position with the with the self-executed amendments that came out of Rules for the body has taken a position on a bill, it wasn’t the final bill, but it was a position on the bill that came to the floor.”

But, since a conference committee will likely take more time than they have with government funding set to run out on Nov. 17, he believes the laddered approach to a continuing resolution is the right way to go about doing it.

While this has never been done before, in theory, a laddered continuing resolution would make Congress focus on the appropriation bill or bills for agencies that are the next up to lose funding and then, once that is complete, focus on the next set of bills and pass those before the date they lost funding.

“They don’t need a long-term CR because they should be ready to go to conference and start conferencing,” Harris said. “In the case of two of the bills, maybe pre-conferencing whatever, come up with bills right now. There’s no reason to to delay those for some long period of time, and the only way you do that is you do what I have termed a laddered CR.”

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But whether or not this plan actually comes to fruition is still up in the air as some members aren’t fully sold on the plan.

“I’m much more interested in just getting the Senate to pass a bill so we can go to conference,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) said. “Let’s just do that, get a CR to buy the time that we need.”