Rules Committee to Reconsider HR 3055 as CR

Today the House Rules Committee will meet to formulate the rule to consider the Senate amendments to HR 3055, the first House minibus. The Committee will consider substitute language for the Senate amendment that will turn HR 3055 into a continuing resolution that would extend the date of the current CR until December 20^th, 2019.

The hearing web site shows that three amendments have been offered on the revised language. The current proposed language is very similar to HR 4378 (the current CR) and is a relatively clean CR. Two of the offered amendments (Amash and Womack) are more than a little controversial and are unlikely to make it to the floor of the House; where they would be rejected in near party-line votes anyway. The third, Brindisi, is a study and report amendment which are generally less controversial, but I doubt that it will be included either.

Given the Thursday deadline on the current CR, I expect that the House will take up this bill tomorrow and pass it with a significant bipartisan vote. The Senate may take it up tomorrow as well and it will make it to the President’s desk before midnight Thursday in any case. According to news reports, the White House has indicated that the President will sign it, but you never can tell.

There is one bid of potential bad news with HR 3055 being used as the vehicle for this CR. HR 3055 is the only spending bill that the Senate has been able to pass. This should have been the one spending bill that could have made it out of conference. Using it for a CR would seem to indicate that the conferees could not work out a deal on this bill. That bodes ill for an omnibus bill next month. We may still end up with a full year CR.