Capitol agenda: Congress leaves health mess for January

Congress is about to leave town for the holidays — and put off their health care troubles until January.

The House and Senate will take their last votes of the year Thursday, officially allowing Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire Dec. 31. The House passed its GOP-led health care package Wednesday night, though the Senate has no plans to take it up.

Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to work “much more” on health care in the new year, after moderate Republicans joined a Democrat-led discharge petition for a clean three-year extension of the subsidies. Johnson said “it’s inevitable” that the discharge petition comes up after lawmakers return.

“We’ll deal with it in January,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters Wednesday. “These things take a lot of twists and turns. Just this week, we’ve had a lot of twists and turns.”

The Democrats’ discharge petition is a shell bill, which means lawmakers could add Senate-passed language to it — though it’s not clear what could reach 60 votes in the Senate. GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said the plan for now is to send the clean three-year extension.

Meanwhile, moderate rank-and-file members in both chambers are trying to come up with a last-minute consensus plan that could pass the House and Senate. But nothing could come together until January, when Congress will have less than a month until the next funding cliff.

At the center of these health care talks is Fitzpatrick, who is working behind the scenes to get an ACA fix even after the subsidy expiration date.

“I think it’s a mistake,” Fitzpatrick told POLITICO of allowing the credits to lapse. “I’m going to exhaust every single option I have to get this done.”

It’s unclear if they can pull it off. The lawmakers already failed to secure an extension before the expiration date — it’ll be much harder to revive them after.

In the meantime: Interest groups on both sides are diving furiously into the blame game over the subsidies lapse. It’s an early test of the messaging battle over health care — an issue that could define the 2026 midterms.

What else we’re watching:   

— Appropriations movement: Senate GOP leaders have won over all the Republicans who objected to moving a five-bill package of government funding measures this week. Now it’s Democrats’ turn to check for holds on their side for the “minibus,” which contains the Labor-HHS-Education, Defense, Transportation-HUD, Commerce-Justice-Science and Interior-Environment bills.

— Stock trading talks: Reps. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) and Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) expect to meet with Johnson Thursday to discuss a ban on congressional stock trading. So far, their discharge petition is nowhere close to the 218 signees necessary to force a vote in the House.

— A fight over broadband money: Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) will introduce a bill Thursday that would give states access to an estimated $20 to $22 billion in broadband deployment funding — a proposal at odds with efforts from Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) that would claw back the funding entirely.

Benjamin Guggenheim, Meredith Lee Hill, Nicholas Wu, Amanda Chu, Jennifer Scholtes and Katherine Tully-McManus contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misidentified Ted Cruz's state affiliation.