GOOD EVENING! Welcome to Inside Congress, the play-by-play guide to all things Capitol Hill, on this Friday, July 12 where we celebrate the ability to move throughout downtown D.C. (a bit) more easily again. UPDATE: HOUSE GOP’S SPENDING GOALS LOOKING TOUGHER Stop us if you’ve heard this before, but House Republicans are looking at a painful couple of weeks on spending. Passing a dozen of their government funding bills before August recess was always going to be tough, especially during the last two weeks of July, when GOP leaders want to pass seven of their fiscal 2025 spending measures. But the surprise collapse of Republicans’ $7 billion bill for parts of the legislative branch on Thursday, which should have been an easy win, injects so much more uncertainty into what was already an incredibly ambitious push. When the House returns from its week-long break, Republicans are eyeing floor action on their Agriculture-FDA, Interior-Environment, Energy-Water and Financial Services bills. The remaining measures certainly present more pitfalls than the comparatively tiny Legislative Branch bill. Unpopular agriculture cuts and cannabis banking issues, among other things, could cause major headaches during the week of July 22. That leaves three of the hardest fiscal 2025 funding bills for last: Commerce-Justice-Science, Transportation-HUD and Labor-HHS-Education are all potentially leftover for the week of July 29, standing between House GOP leaders and August recess. The CJS bill lacks any of the provisions demanded by conservatives to target the prosecutors going after Trump, while proposing cuts that Democrats are already weaponizing as defunding law enforcement. Labor-H and THUD are also sure to cause discomfort within the GOP conference, thanks to steep cuts to Title I funds for schools that serve low-income students and slicing to popular infrastructure programs, among myriad other issues. — Caitlin Emma A CENTRIST GOP SENATOR’S PLEA TO BIDEN Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) has said she can’t vote for Trump or Biden. But she has a direct plea to the incumbent — and it sounds like one many of his fellow Democrats have made. “As a president — and as a person and one who loves his country deeply — he should be thinking about his country first and not his own personal ambition, the desire to ‘see this thing through,’” she told Inside Congress on Thursday, before Biden’s press conference. “For the good of the country, be the patriot that we know you are.” Murkowski, one of the most centrist members of Congress, said the U.S. is “just in such a bad place right now” and “most people in this country are very worried about the two choices that we have. It gives me no degree of comfort to be able to say I told you so, but I feel like that’s kind of where we are.” She jokingly said she’d been pushing Sen. Joe Manchin (I-Vt.) to revisit his oft-dangled centrist third-party bid for the presidency: “I keep bugging him about it. He hasn't changed his mind.” — Anthony Adragna
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