As Congress returns to Washington, a high-stakes showdown is brewing on Capitol Hill to avert a government shutdown before the annual funding deadline of Sept. 30.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is hoping to pass a six-month-long continuing resolution to fund the government at current spending levels well into next year.
The move sets up an early funding fight for a potential Kamala Harris or Donald Trump administration.
But Johnson has told House Republicans he wants to attach the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, to the funding package.
Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already illegal, and multiple independent studies have found it is extremely rare.
The inclusion of the bill is expected to generate rampant opposition by most Democrats.
Critics argue it is unnecessary and could inject last-minute confusion — among voters and state officials — into the 2024 election.
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Meanwhile, Democrats say they want a short-term extension of the current spending bill, pushing a 2025 funding fight till after the election, with no SAVE Act attached.
"[My] view is that [the short-term spending bill] should go into December," Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told Scripps News on the sidelines of the DNC in Chicago last month.
"Let's get rid of what we did the last time," DeLauro continued, referencing the protracted government funding battle earlier this year. "We got rid of all of the policy riders that [Republicans] put in, 99% of them," she continued. "Those should go by the wayside."
If the government shuts down, hundreds of thousands of federal workers could be furloughed, and more could be required to indefinitely work without pay, though they would receive back pay once the shutdown ends.
A shutdown could also affect the 2024 election. In early 2019, at the end of the longest government shutdown in American history, the chair of the Federal Election Commission wrote a letter to Senate Democrats, saying the agency was "not exercising its core functions," adding, "campaign finance enforcement has ground to a halt."
House Republicans' current plans to avert a shutdown have them on a collision course with Democrats.
Any plan to keep the government open past the end of September will need to be bipartisan in order to pass the Republican-majority House, Democratic-majority senate, and get a signature from President Joe Biden.
A source in House Republican leadership told Scripps News on Wednesday that the vast majority of House Republicans don't have the appetite for a government shutdown ahead of the November election.
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