House to leave for August recess without resolving key spending fight, as government shutdown threat looms in fall

By Clare Foran, Haley Talbot and Lauren Fox, CNN

(CNN) — The House will leave on Thursday for August recess without resolving a key spending fight that has exposed divisions among Republicans with the threat of a government shutdown looming in the fall.

In a sign of how difficult the road ahead will be, House Republicans were unable to pass an agriculture funding bill this week as hardline conservatives pushed for deep spending cuts that even some members of their own party balked at, and moderates expressed concerns over a controversial provision related to abortion.

The House had been expected to pass the bill – to fund the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and other related agencies – this week, but the internal GOP divisions derailed the effort.

The House did pass a separate spending bill for military construction and veterans affairs before leaving town by a vote of 219 to 211.

Asked by CNN about the issues with the agriculture funding bill, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said that “negotiations are ongoing, and we’ll have those through August. Conversations will continue.”

“We’re not going to stop working. We just passed the first bill … we got most of the bills out of committee and we’re going to keep working to get more of them that can come to the floor and pass,” Scalise said when asked by CNN about the outlook for getting additional spending bills passed.

Government funding is set to expire at the end of September – and the GOP-controlled House is already on track for a showdown with the Democrat-controlled Senate with House Republicans pushing for lower spending levels.

The deeper the spending cuts in the House bills, the bigger the clash with the Senate in the fall.

The situation poses yet another challenge for House Republican leaders who must attempt to unite their narrow majority around a minefield of contentious spending and policy issues.

Republicans acknowledge they’ll likely need to pass a short-term stopgap measure to give them more time to finish the work of funding the government this fall.

And some hardline members are signaling that they’d be comfortable with the prospect of a government shutdown if it achieves their goal of slashing spending and driving down the national debt – though they insist that a shutdown is not the goal.

“We should not fear a government shutdown,” GOP Rep. Bob Good of Virginia said at a news conference this week. “Most of what we do up here is bad anyway.”

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