From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Congress scrambles once again to fund the federal government as a pre-Christmas shutdown deadline nears.

Plus, the jockeying begins for the GOP's best strategy next year on using the budget reconciliation process to pass President Trump's agenda.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with the Wall Street Journal.

We're joined today by my colleagues, columnist Kim Strassel, and editorial board member, Mnay Uquay-Bruwa.

The latest expiration date on funding for the federal government is December 20th, which I must say feels a little bit grinchy.

Nobody wants a Christmas government shutdown.

Speaker Mike Johnson has said previously that he has no interest in passing a pre-Christmas omnibus spending bill. So Kim, how do you see this

playing out? What does it look like Congress is setting itself up to do here? Yeah, so here we are

again, and why are we here? We are here because government is supposed to, in both the House

and the Senate, passed 12 annual appropriations bills, funding different departments, which then are supposed to, in both the House and the Senate, passed 12 annual appropriations bills, funding different

departments, which then are supposed to be signed by the president. They never get that done.

Once again, they haven't got it done. The way that they have dealt with this in the past is these

big omnibus bills where they just throw it all into one great big Christmas spending bonanza.

But Republicans have said that they are against doing that anymore. By the way, the House did

pass probably, I think through the full House, about six of their bills. The Senate had all of

theirs ready to go, but Chuck Schumer would not make any time on the Senate floor to get them

done because he wanted to give

that time to confirming Biden judges. So what the decision has been is that rather than try to

sort this all out before the end of the year, they're going to pass another continuing resolution,

which will just maintain current funding levels. It'll probably take them into March of next year, which means that a new Congress, under a new

president, would sort out the funding for the rest of the year.

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