House vote on government funding bill expected Thursday

A stopgap funding bill to avoid a government shutdown on Oct. 1 will be released Tuesday afternoon, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said.

The House is expected to vote Thursday on the measure, which would last through Dec. 11.

Rogers said the expiration date will be in December so that members of the next Congress can start with a “clean slate.”

“I want to see us get our business done and come into the next year with a clean slate. I don’t want the new Congress in January to spend their first weeks and months dealing with past problems,” Rogers said after a House GOP conference meeting.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Texas) indicated that the stopgap bill, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), would be released after the congressional leadership’s meeting with President Obama at the White House at 3:15 Tuesday afternoon. They will meet to discuss the threat of Sunni militant group Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The CR could include defense funding specific to ISIS.

“When the Speaker hears from the president, then that will finish the final touches on the package that we’ll have,” Sessions said. “It would be bad to preempt the meeting with the president.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) said that he would not support the short-term spending bill because he feels it would essentially negate all of the House’s work on appropriations over the summer. The House passed seven fiscal 2015 appropriations bills under an open amendment process even though the Senate did not pass any.

“We debated and amended and we were here until midnight some nights all summer,” Massie said. “And we’re just going to throw that all in the trash. And as somebody who’s only been here for two years, that’s hard for me to fathom.”

It is unclear if a short-term reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank will be attached to the CR. The bank’s charter will expire along with the current federal spending bill on Sept. 30.

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told his conference that Democrats are pushing to include a five-year extension of the Ex-Im Bank to the CR. But McCarthy told Democrats that wouldn’t be a possibility.

Rogers noted that the CR will not include any new funding for agencies to deal with the migrant surge at the southern border.

“They really don’t need it. We’ve looked at that, and think there’s sufficient funds that the departments have that if they’re allowed some flexibility in moving monies around, they can handle it. So that’s the way we hope to deal with it, is to allow them more flexibility,” Rogers said.

– Martin Matishak contributed.