Good morning. I'm playbook co-author Rachel Bade. It's Monday, September 18th. Some breaking news for you

overnight. House Republicans have announced a plan to try to avert a government shutdown on October 1st.

Leaders of the Conservative Freedom Caucus and the centrist Main Street Caucus spent the weekend haggling out and trying to come up with an agreement to extend government funding.

Now, this would allow negotiators more time to talk about and iron out long-term spending bills.

And they came up with this.

It's an extension for about a month, but it includes an 8% across the

board cut to most non-defense programs. It also includes a bunch of Republican policy riders on the

border, namely increasing border patrol agents, continuing construction of the border wall,

and limiting asylum claims. But we should first get this out of the way. This bill that was introduced

last night is going absolutely nowhere, and that is if it even passes the House at all. The Democratic

led Senate and the White House, they're not just going to swallow a bunch of partisan policy

writers to keep the lights on, and they still want to attach Ukraine funding to any short-term CR that they

pass. But the point here is not to actually get this House proposal signed into law.

Republicans know that's not going to happen. But what McCarthy is doing is trying to give

himself the strongest negotiating hand that he can possibly have. If you remember back a few months ago,

he did something similar with the debt ceiling talks. He thought that if House Republicans came

together and united on a bill that increased the debt ceiling, but also included a bunch of

conservative priorities, that the White House would eventually have to negotiate with him and give

him something. And that's what

ended up happening. He didn't get everything he wanted back then, but he did get an across-the-board

freeze on government spending, even though Democrats control the Senate and the White House. So McCarthy's

hoping he can do something similar with this CR. The deal also in theory is going to break this

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