(The Center Square) – Four days into fiscal year 2027, Congress is already behind schedule on funding the government for the next 12 months.
Lawmakers punted the Oct. 1 government shutdown deadline to Dec. 11 by passing a continuing resolution. Yet neither the House nor Senate made any progress during September on the 12 annual appropriations bills, none of which have passed both chambers and only three of which have passed the House.
While the House would normally be in session this week, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., released his chamber two weeks early — despite protests from members who wanted to tackle AI safety legislation and advance a second Epstein files discharge petition.
The Senate has also left town, despite failing to approve the three House-passed government funding bills and send them to the president’s desk or even bring them to the floor for consideration.
Congress is in recess until after the midterm elections, leaving lawmakers extraordinarily little time when they return to finish the fiscal year 2027 appropriations process.
It is also unclear how election outcomes could influence appropriations negotiations, which have imploded multiple times during the 119th Congress, resulting in record-long government shutdowns.
Though Congress is supposed to renew and update funding levels for all federal agencies via 12 annual appropriations bills, it rarely does so on schedule.
Lawmakers usually pass at least a short-term funding stopgap to buy more time, sometimes passing multiple stopgaps to cover an entire year, as they did for fiscal year 2025.
(Legal Newsline) — When the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments starting Monday in a high-profile case testing whether state and local governments can sue oil companies over climate change, the lawyer at the podium won’t be from the county or city governments that brought the case but from a private firm working on a contingency-fee basis.
(The Center Square) – Despite pointed questions from some of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices challenging the oil companies in Suncor v. Boulder, Republican attorneys general following Monday’s arguments said they came away optimistic about the case’s direction.
(The Center Square) – U.S. Sen. John Fetterman joined most of his Democratic colleagues in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin expressing concern about its actions ahead of the midterm election.Â
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