This story was originally published on nationaljournal.com on April 4, 2017 If you could be a fly on the wall eaves­drop­ping on a meet­ing these days, only one would be more in­ter­est­ing than the brain­storm­ing ses­sions that Sen­ate Ma­jor­ity Lead­er Mitch Mc­Con­nell and House Speak­er Paul Ry­an are hav­ing with their re­spect­ive lead­er­ship teams. It would be the meet­ing at which White House Chief of Staff Re­ince Priebus and his le­gis­lat­ive-af­fairs team ex­plain to Pres­id­ent Trump the mech­an­ics and con­sequences of a loom­ing April 29 gov­ern­ment shut­down, which would co­in­cid­ent­ally fall on Trump’s 100th day in of­fice. The timeline is tight: Con­gress leaves this Fri­day for the East­er-Pas­sov­er re­cess, the Sen­ate re­turns on April 24, the House re­turns on April 25, and the cur­rent con­tinu­ing res­ol­u­tion ex­pires at mid­night on April 28. A shut­down would af­fect vir­tu­ally the en­tire fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. Last year, only one of the 12 ap­pro­pri­ations bills, for vet­er­ans and mil­it­ary con­struc­tion, was fun­ded bey­ond April 28. In re­cent years, Con­gress has be­come heav­ily de­pend­ent on passing om­ni­bus ap­pro­pri­ations bills, with vir­tu­ally everything tossed in­to the mix.

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