Lawmakers Eye Border Deal to Help Avert a Shutdown

Happy Thursday! President Joe Biden warned in a major speech today that something dangerous is happening in the country: “There’s an extremist movement that does not share the basic beliefs of our democracy: The MAGA movement.” Read more about Biden’s speech here.

Meanwhile, the shutdown watch continues with little sign of progress. Before we get to that, though, we want to mention that China is taking back its pandas, which makes us feel like this.

Lawmakers Eye Border Deal to Help Avert a Shutdown

We’re just two days away from a likely government shutdown that would leave millions of federal employees, including military service members, without paychecks.

As the hours tick away, congressional lawmakers still have no clear path to averting the looming pain and disruption, though both the Senate and the House are working on stopgap measures to fund the government.

At the moment, there’s no indication that either bill can pass the other chamber, but lawmakers are reportedly working to add border security measures to the short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, in an attempt to win over some House Republican holdouts.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in search of a way out of the bind he and his party’s hard-right members have created, has tried to drag President Joe Biden into the standoff and wring some sort of policy concession or political victory out of the current spending fight by turning it into a battle over border security.

“By floating a stopgap funding bill that would slash spending while imposing stringent immigration restrictions demanded by conservatives, Mr. McCarthy is attempting to shift the debate from an issue that has divided members of his party toward one where they are united — and where they believe Mr. Biden and his party are vulnerable,” Catie Edmondson, Carl Hulse and Karoun Demirjian of The New York Times report.

To some extent, McCarthy’s play has worked, tapping into existing bipartisan concerns: “Some lawmakers now say it is likely that any deal to end what appears to be an inevitable shutdown on Saturday at midnight will eventually have to include some money or policy provisions to address the border,” the Times report notes.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona are reportedly heading up an effort to negotiate an immigration deal and add border provisions to the bipartisan short-term spending plan that already includes about $6 billion each for Ukraine aid and disaster relief. The discussions reportedly involve adding another $6 billion for border security and changes to eligibility for migrants seeking asylum.

Even as those talks continue, though, the reality is that the House GOP’s border policies can’t get though the Senate and Republican hardliners’ immigration and border demands are unlikely to be satisfied by any potential bipartisan compromise. And that’s far from the only challenge. “Beyond any border measures, any funding bill that passes the Senate would adhere to the spending levels agreed to by President Biden and congressional Republicans when they brokered the debt ceiling deal — levels that Mr. McCarthy and House Republicans have since reneged on and sought to cut even further,” the Times reports.

McCarthy, meanwhile, reportedly still lacks the votes for his own continuing resolution — and he may not be able to get them given all the outstanding issues and the simple fact that some of his members oppose the very idea of a stopgap bill.

As the deadline draws near, tensions among Republicans continue to run high. McCarthy and Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida had a testy exchange at a closed-door meeting of the House GOP conference Thursday and Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona indicated to CNN that he would support ousting the speaker. “Quite frankly, I don’t believe, based on what I’ve seen, that there was any effort to do the appropriations process,” Crane told CNN, adding, “I think members should be looking for stronger leadership.”

Other House Republicans have also criticized the House appropriations process as a failure of leadership.

What’s next: The House is expected to try to pass a few more of its annual appropriations bills — funding the Departments of Homeland Security, Defense and State — but ongoing divisions threaten to derail the Agriculture bill. The House Rules Committee on Wednesday night cut $300 million in Ukraine aid from the Defense bill in order to smooth its passage. The House today advanced separate legislation to provide that funding.

The Senate is moving ahead with its continuing resolution, which could still be amended. McCarthy has indicated he would not bring that bill up for a vote in the House as it currently stands and he has said he instead plans on putting the House GOP bill to a vote on Friday. That bill includes the House Republican border plan and steep cuts to non-discretionary spending except for Defense and Veterans Affairs.

The bottom line: A shutdown is probably still in the offing and any path out of it will have to be bipartisan, meaning that we’re probably a long way from a resolution.

Chart of the Day: Still No Recession

Revised data released Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that economic activity was a bit weaker than previously estimated in each of the first quarters of 2020, 2021 and 2022. (For a rundown on the many minor changes in the data, see this thread by former White House economist Jason Furman.)

Overall, though, the revisions did little to alter the picture of the economy over the last two-plus years. University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers summed up the situation this way: “Following this morning’s revisions to the GDP and GDI data, it's time to update this graph. (Spoiler: The U.S. isn't in recession, nor was it at any point during the past two years of the post-pandemic recovery, despite the relentless recession! fear mongering.)”

Number of the Day: 8.5

Life expectancy has been falling in the U.S., and a new paper from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton highlights just how bad that decline has been for Americans who lack a college degree. In research presented this week at the Brookings Institution, the economists found that between 1992 and 2021, the gap in life expectancy between those with college degrees and those without jumped to 8.5 years, up from 2.6 years initially.

Although both groups saw improvements in life expectancy between 1992 and 2010, progress stalled and then reversed for those without college degrees from 2010 to 2019. From 2019 to 2021, life expectancy declined across the board due to Covid-19, though far more sharply for those without college degrees.

The authors, famous for their analysis of the rising number of “deaths of despair” among working-class Americans, argue that the data is an indictment of how wealth is distributed in the U.S. “GDP may be doing great, but people are dying in increasing numbers, especially less-educated people,” Case said. “A lot of the increasing prosperity is going to the well-educated elites. It is not going to typical working people.”

The authors also note that the U.S. is unique in this regard. “While mortality rates and mortality trends for less- and more-educated people in other rich countries differ in both levels and trends, the US appears to be the only western country where life expectancies are trending in different directions, one up and one down,” they wrote.

Fiscal News Roundup

• Border Takes Center Stage as McCarthy Seeks to Shift Shutdown Blame – New York Times
• Senate Republicans in Discussions to Add Border Security to Stopgap Bill – Washington Post
• The Small Group of House Republicans Who Might Force a Government Shutdown – Washington Post
• Freedom Caucus Presses McCarthy for Answers Before Supporting Stopgap – The Hill
• Vulnerable Republicans Try to Head Off Blame for Shutdown – New York Times
• McCarthy’s Hail Mary: Strip Ukraine Aid and Finally Pass Pentagon Spending Bill – Politico
• U.S. Government Starts Notifying Federal Employees a Shutdown May Be Imminent – Washington Post
• White House Staff Told to Brace for Furloughs as Shutdown Nears – Bloomberg
• How Painful Could a Shutdown Be? That’s Up to Biden – Wall Street Journal
• Medicaid Rolls Are Being Cut. Few Are Finding Refuge in ACA Plans. – Washington Post
• House Bill Would Reduce Defense Secretary’s Salary to $1 – The Hill
• Powell Says Public’s Understanding Key to Fed Impact on Economy – Bloomberg
• Trump Tariff Proposal Abandons Tax-Cutting Legacy, Pence Says – Bloomberg
• Access to New Coronavirus Vaccine Frustrates Providers, Parents – Washington Post

Views and Analysis

• The Third Kick of the Shutdown ‘Mule’: McConnell’s Warnings Go Unheeded – Paul Kane, Washington Post
• The GOP’s Knucklehead Caucus Courts a Shutdown for No Good Reason – Hugh Hewitt, Washington Post
• Risks Are Growing of a Double-Dip ‘Vibecession’ – Jonathan Levin, Bloomberg
• New Data on Ultra-Rich Tax Cheats Wrecks the ‘Working-Class GOP’ Ruse – Greg Sargent, Washington Post
• Fact-Checking the Second Republican Primary Debate – Glenn Kessler, Washington Post
• DeSantis Forced to Say Why He Enjoys Denying Health Insurance to Poor Floridians – Jonathan Chait, New York