Second Session Of 118th Congress Underway For 2024

The first session of the 118th Congress formally concluded Wednesday and the second session opened, but with both the House and Senate still in recess and most members still in their home districts.

When lawmakers return next week, they will have a lot to get done.

First and foremost, Republican and Democratic leaders in both the House and Senate will have to quickly come to an agreement on how to fund the federal government for the rest of the 2024 fiscal year. What's been made difficult enough by ideological disagreements over where to set the topline spending limits is likely to be made even more so by the political calculations that intensify in a presidential election year.

Certainly, politics was one reason Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and dozens of his GOP House colleagues were not in Washington but in Eagle Pass, Texas, drawing attention to the record numbers of migrants who've been entering the country illegally during the Biden presidency.

Awaiting Speaker Johnson on Capitol Hill is a problem of his and Congress's own making -- a two-tiered funding deadline that Johnson insisted be a condition of the stopgap continuing resolution (CR) Congress passed in November to avoid a government shutdown. The first deadline, January 19, applies to funding for the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs. Funding for all other departments of the federal government is scheduled to expire on February 2.

Neither the House nor the Senate has passed all 12 appropriations bills; the House has passed seven, while the Senate has passed three. More significantly, House and Senate leaders have yet to reach an agreement on the topline budgets for each department, making it impossible to begin reconciling appropriations bills, even in the few cases where each chamber has passed its respective version.

Johnson has promised he will not support the passage of another CR, but with so little time before the deadlines, it's hard to see what other option Congress will have short of shutting down government agencies.

Meanwhile, the carnage continues to pile up in Ukraine, and additional U.S. military aid remains held up by a divided Congress. Specifically, Republicans -- both in the House and the Senate -- are insisting that any new aid, whether to Ukraine, Israel or allies in the Indo-Pacific, must be coupled with significant changes to U.S. border policy.

"The situation here and across the country is truly unconscionable," said Speaker Johnson (R-LA) at a press conference along the border. "We would describe it as both heartbreaking and infuriating."

Democrats say House GOP leadership continues to show it's more interested in political stunts than in actually fixing things.

"It's very nice that they have a trip to the border," Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Majority Leader, told reporters at the Capitol Wednesday, "but the only way to solve this is here, working in a bipartisan way."

And, in fact, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, the Senate GOP's lead negotiator on border policy, came back early to resume talks.

The rest of Congress returns next Tuesday, meaning they’ll have just eight full work days before hitting the first funding deadline.