The Democrats’ Lame-Duck Agenda for Congress

When Congress reconvenes next week, Democrats will be working against the clock on a number of agenda items. With their control of Congress coming to an end, it will be President Biden’s last chance to get party-line bills passed for at least two years.The two most pressing issues relate to the country’s finances — government funding and the debt ceiling. The deadline for a government funding bill is December 16. Given that it takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate, both parties will work together on a package that will likely include tax relief and spending cuts in order to avoid a government shutdown. Some observers say the Democrats should pass a long-term funding deal during the lame-duck session to avoid getting roped into working with the Republican House come January. A senior fellow at the left-wing Brookings Institution, Molly Reynolds, says that the Republicans’ narrow majority will make it very difficult to pass any omnibus spending package after January 1.“[A] high-stakes showdown over keeping the government open just weeks into a new Congress may be an unattractive enough proposition for some GOP legislators that they will be willing to leave it to the lame duck session,” Ms. Reynolds wrote recently.Another promising sign for Democrats pursuing a spending deal is the number of Senate Republicans who did not run for re-election this year, and who could help fund the government before leaving office.Senator Portman of Ohio, the lead Republican negotiator on last year’s infrastructure legislation, has a record of working in a bipartisan way and will not be returning to the upper chamber in January. Mr. Portman, like Senators Shelby, Blunt, Burr, and Toomey — all of whom are retiring — could be among the GOP legislators about whom Ms. Reynolds speculated. The debt ceiling is a more difficult issue for Democrats. By some estimates, the United States will breach the debt ceiling in 2023, meaning a potential showdown between the White House and the new Republican majority. Congressman Kevin McCarthy, likely the next House speaker, has already said that his party will use the debt ceiling as leverage to extract policy concessions from the Biden administration. Secretary Yellen recently offered a more radical proposal, however. In an interview with the New York Times, Ms. Yellen said the debt ceiling should be raised high enough that it would not need to be addressed until after the 2024 election, thus removing a key piece of leverage Republicans could use in negotiations. Last year, Ms. Yellen called for the debt limit to be eliminated entirely. It was nearly a decade ago that a Democratic president and a Republican House speaker clashed over the debt limit issue. At the time, President Obama and Speaker Boehner spent months negotiating over tax cuts and entitlement reform in the hopes of avoiding that financial cliff. Congress eventually passed a debt limit increase, but it came just one day before the U.S. was set to reach that ceiling. Ms. Yellen would like to avoid a rerun of that scenario. Another key issue for Congress is a bill protecting marital rights for same-sex couples. A Senate bill doing just that has cleared a procedural hurdle with the support of all 50 Democrats and 12 Republicans. Senator Tillis, who voted to advance the bill, introduced a bipartisan amendment that would protect the First Amendment rights of religious organizations. “We look forward to this legislation coming to the floor and are confident that this amendment has helped earn it the broad, bipartisan support,” Mr. Tillis said. The Senate is all but guaranteed to pass the bill, with the House to take up the legislation shortly afterward.Lame-duck sessions of Congress have, in the past, proven to be very efficient. After two years of governing, Democratic members of Congress looking down the barrel of either retirement or minority status hope to get a few legislative items across the finish line before being relegated to the status of minority party in the House. After the Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 midterms, Congress moved quickly to pass agenda items they had not addressed during President Obama’s first two years in office. In November and December of that year, the Senate ratified a nuclear arms treaty with the Russian Federation, Congress passed the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal Act of 2010, which allowed homosexuals to serve openly in the military, and they adopted Mr. Obama’s $858 billion tax reform. That lame-duck session proved to be a whirlwind of legislative action. Now Democrats are hoping to do it again.

The Democrats’ Lame-Duck Agenda for Congress

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