Government Funding Fight May Drag On Until After Christmas

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The pageantry around selecting a new Pope in the Roman Catholic faith is full of ritual and diplomacy, secrecy and sometimes even spycraft. Oh, and spite. Lots and lots of spite.

It is, to be frank, an accidental model for Washington.

When it comes time, the Cardinals who elect the incoming implicitly infallible leader of the world’s billion-plus Roman Catholics are sequestered, incoming and outgoing: no guests, no reporters, no tweets. The conversations are strictly private, both in the moment and for time immortal. Up until the early 20th century, when European monarchs could unilaterally block the incoming Pontiff, that secrecy was a matter of national security. Now it’s more about preserving the church’s ability to present a unified front and to speak with one voice.

Ballots that don’t result in an election are set on fire, sending chemically-tinged black smoke billowing over the rooftops of the Vatican to signal that round of voting was a dud, or white when at least two-thirds of the Cardinals are in agreement: Habemus Papam. We have a Pope.

Well, D.C. sure takes a shine to such pageantry too, although the stakes are clearly different; dogma and canonical practice don’t hinge on democracy and more than a hope and a prayer can deliver a spending package for lawmakers. Still, with Friday’s deadline looming to fund the government and prevent a shutdown, a whole lot of Capitol Hill is holding optimism that their own version of white smoke—the release of a self-congratulating joint statement signaling the end of an equally byzantine process: Habemus Omnibus.

Congressional appropriators—known as cardinals themselves in no accidental nod to Catholicism—are still trading ideas with days left to finalize a deal. The process isn’t as opaque as a papal conclave but the path to a resolution is almost as mysterious, and perhaps as needlessly overdone. Democrats and Republicans remain about $26 billion apart in their topline spending on domestic buckets of cash, meaning they don’t even know how big the pie is that they’re crowding around with carving knives, though both sides agree it will be north of $1.5 trillion through Oct. 1.

Top lawmakers and their aides had hoped to have wrangled an agreement by late Friday. That didn’t happen but progress continued, sufficient enough that the staff—and many of their bosses—stayed at the table and on email chains through the weekend and into Monday. No one is ready to walk away, but there is an increasing understanding that they may have to boot Friday’s late-night deadline into the following week, meaning lawmakers could end up stuck in Washington right up until the holiday break. A Dec. 16 deadline meant to force conversation is now very likely to be pushed back to at least Dec. 23. While no one is eager to say it, that Dec. 23 deadline may even…