There's plenty of reasons to think the bulk of the federal government will be funded beyond the fiscal year deadline by a continuing resolution and the farm bill under consideration by House Republicans is one of those reasons.
Unlike the Senate farm bill, the House farm bill includes one of the last fuck-yous to the working poor that Speaker Paul Ryan wants to pass before he leaves office.
More specifically, the House farm bill would kick up to 2 million people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) including hundreds of thousands of seniors and disabled people.
Under the bill, states could remove about 8 percent of those receiving aid from the rolls, according to the research firm, Mathematica, which used data from the Agriculture Department’s Food and Nutrition Service.
About 34 percent of seniors in the program, or 677,000 households, would lose benefits under the proposal, according to the study. More than one in 10 people with a disability, another 214,000 households, would also lose eligibility.
Those estimates do not account for another proposal in the measure, which would impose strict new work requirements on beneficiaries. An additional 1.2 million people could be stripped of aid under that plan, according to a separate analysis released in May by the Congressional Budget Office, the study’s authors said.
House and Senate Republican negotiators are reportedly having difficulty reconciling their bills, obviously, because the Senate bill doesn't include these measures but the House bill does.
In the unlikely scenario that Republicans do manage to agree among themselves what their final bill should look like, it would still have to survive a filibuster by Senate Democrats and probably even a handful of Senate Republicans who don't want to vote for this right before the election.
That brings us to a continuing resolution.
This may seem like a very familiar scenario because Paul Ryan has wedged Republicans into this trap every single year since at least 2011 when he became the chairman of the House Budget Committee. This is why they've never completed the appropriations process. Paul Ryan is why they've never completed the process and why they may not ever again.
I legitimately have no idea what House Republicans will do without Paul Ryan. Ryan has dictated House Republican priorities for the last 7 years and they have very little to show for that. Will they keep trying to pass his agenda even when he's gone?
My gut says future Republican leaders will embrace something even more radical than Ryan's plans.