If more than two dozen of the House GOP’s far-right flank oppose the strategy, House Speaker Paul Ryan would need to lean on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for votes. | Win McNamee/Getty Images House GOP leaders plot to avert shutdown, but may need Democrats

House GOP leaders are forging ahead with a spending strategy that has drawn flak from far-right members, making it increasingly likely they will need help from Democrats to avert a shutdown.

Less than one week before federal funding expires, the chamber’s spending panel released a two-week patch Saturday. A House passage vote is expected midweek, with Senate action to follow.


House Speaker Paul Ryan confirmed to members Friday in a Republican Conference meeting that the House will vote on two separate short-term spending measures, with this first one extending through Dec. 22 and another through January.

Under the newly released bill, certain spending constraints would be temporarily lifted to help states that are running low on money from the Children’s Health Insurance Program after Congress failed to extend funding for the program in September. States could more easily receive leftover cash from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as a tide-me-over until the program-specific funding is renewed.

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Ahead of the legislation’s unveiling, the Office of Management and Budget held a call Friday warning federal agencies to put contingency plans in place in case Congress fails to extend funding by the deadline, noting that such guidance is routine and doesn’t indicate a greater likelihood of shutdown.

“There is no reason why a lapse in funding needs to occur,” OMB Press Secretary Meghan Burris said in a written statement. “Prudent management requires that agencies be prepared for the possibility of a lapse.”

Enactment of the two-week patch is far from a sure bet, however.

The two-part plan is intended to drum up pressure on Democrats to strike a much-needed budget deal by the time government funding runs out on Dec. 8, GOP aides say. But the unconventional tactic has been met with skepticism from conservatives, who fear leaders will abandon their priorities in a last-minute deal before the holidays.

Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), a member of the House Freedom Caucus, warned of an “end-of-year Christmas party of spending with Democrats.”

“The budgeting never goes good when everybody loads up the Christmas tree,” Brat said. “You got to give me one heck of a good argument for a two-week [continuing resolution]. I haven’t heard it yet.”

If more than two dozen Republicans oppose the strategy, Ryan would need to lean on Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to deliver Democratic votes. That tradeoff would almost certainly require the GOP to make painful concessions in the spending deal, like bigger boosts for domestic programs.

House GOP leaders explicitly warned during the closed-door meeting Friday that they would need to seek help from Democrats if their own members voted against keeping the government open.

“They said, basically … ‘Hey, if we’ve got the votes, then we do it. If we don’t got the votes, then you got to go do things to get votes from elsewhere outside the conference,’” Rep. Mark Amodei (R-Nev.) told reporters.

Democrats are so far refusing to commit to helping Republicans pass a spending bill, ticking off a list of long-simmering political issues like protections for Dreamers, or young undocumented immigrants, and funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

“We have no resolve on CHIP, we have no resolve on the Dreamers, so without any of that resolved, why, why would I vote for an extension?” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told POLITICO. “I’m going to wait and see what we’ve got.”

Pelosi stressed her commitment to higher domestic spending levels, as well as a “Dreamers” deal, in a news conference Thursday. But she also underscored her intention to avoid a public showdown. “We want to keep government open. That's what we are about,” the minority leader told reporters.

By Friday, many Republicans said they remained undecided. The biggest question: What will GOP leaders concede to Democrats in spending talks over the next week?

Both parties say they hope to have a basic funding deal in hand before the deadline — laying out fiscal 2018 limits for the Pentagon and domestic programs. Members said that agreement will likely be the biggest deciding factor in who votes for the bill.

“I think it’s 50-50 right now,” said Rep. Mark Walker (R-N.C.), who leads the influential Republican Study Committee, adding that he and many of his members will remain undecided until they learn the spending levels.

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In the Senate, support from Democrats is key to reaching the 60-vote threshold for advancing the spending plan. And conservatives say they’re worried about the changes that could come in the upper chamber, where GOP leaders have privately floated the idea of attaching an Obamacare stabilization provision to help win votes for its tax package.

“I think there’s some double-bank shots involved with the Senate tax piece. I think there’s a couple tricky deals here,” Brat said.

Passage of the bill to fund the government beyond Dec. 8 would still require Congress to pass a second stopgap measure on Dec. 22, which would buy time to actually craft an omnibus with updated levels through the end of the fiscal year. That spending process has been on hold for months as GOP leadership slow-walked negotiations during a hectic push for a tax bill.

Republican appropriators dubbed the “double CR” as a last-ditch plan to force leadership of both parties into a long-awaited spending accord.

“This gives us a chance to get that number before a shutdown looms Christmas Eve,” Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), a former Appropriations chairman, told POLITICO.

“We have no choice,” he said. “[Leadership] has been preoccupied, rightly so, with the tax bill, but now this shutdown is looming upon us, and that’s the urgent thing that we’ve got to address.”

Rogers acknowledged that Democrats would likely be needed in next week’s vote, though House Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) disputed the idea.

“Let’s give the leadership some opportunity to talk to some of the members,” he said.

Once leaders have settled on topline spending caps, appropriators are expected to need at least a month to arrive at more minute funding levels dictating cash for each federal agency for the rest of fiscal 2018.

In the Senate, the last of the 12 annual spending bills were only recently reported out of committee and none have received a floor vote — more than two months into the fiscal year in question.

For their part, House Republicans passed a comprehensive spending package in September. That bill — which advanced with only Republican votes — is both politically unrealistic in the more-moderate Senate and was written without the still-unsettled spending caps as guideposts.