WASHINGTON (AP) – Congress returns on Tuesday with a critical need for a characteristic rarely evident through a contentious spring and summer – cooperation between Republicans and President Barack Obama.
Lawmakers face a weighty list of unfinished business and looming deadlines, including a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open beyond Sept. 30. The most intractable issues – a solution to a yearlong battle over agency budgets and a deal on a long-sought highway bill – have been kicked to the fall.
“It’s going to take a sense of give and take on both sides,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. “The big deal will be, ‘Can you come to a deal on transportation, debt ceiling and avoiding sequester?’ So a large budget deal will determine, I think, whether or not we’ve really been successful.”
Painful automatic budget cuts are the result of the law Obama signed in a 2011 deal commonly known as the “sequester.”
GOP leaders are playing down talk of a government shutdown that’s being driven by conservatives determined to use the spending legislation to strip funds from Planned Parenthood. The organization is under intense scrutiny after secretly recorded videos raised uncomfortable questions about its practices in procuring research tissue from aborted fetuses.