Sen. Roger Wicker is holding up the stopgap spending measure over negotiations around the annual national defense bill, senators said on Wednesday afternoon.

The Mississippi Republican, who is the ranking member on the Armed Services Committee, is seeking to enter into negotiations with the House on the National Defense Authorization Act. Senators were optimistic they could finish the spending bill on Wednesday and break early for Thanksgiving, but that requires agreement from all 100 senators.

And Wicker at the moment isn’t giving it.

Wicker “wants assurances that we’ll go to conference on the NDAA. It keeps getting kicked back more and more. So he sees a little point of leverage and he’s going to use it,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). “It’ll get resolved. We may not vote on it tonight, but it’ll get worked out.”

The NDAA is one of Congress’ remaining major outstanding items this year; the bill has passed every year for decades. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said of the negotiations on voting on the stopgap: “We’re trying to get it worked out.”

Republican senators will again push to confirm military nominees Wednesday evening in a direct challenge to fellow GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville and his blockade on promotions.

The move, according Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska, will be a repeat of an earlier Senate floor confrontation with Tuberville, who has opposed swiftly confirming hundreds of officers in a bid to force the Pentagon to overturn its policy of covering travel costs for troops seeking an abortion.

“I made a commitment to the men and women in uniform that I would continue to try to move them. I keep my commitments,” Sullivan said in a brief interview.

Sullivan said he, potentially alongside Sen. Joni Ernst and the other four lawmakers who challenged Tuberville on Nov. 1, would return for another Republican-on-Republican clash. The list of participants will depend on whose travel schedules will permit it, he said.

A day after Senate Rules Democrats advanced a measure aimed at skirting the holds, Sullivan said he was chagrined with a lack of progress overall.

“I would say [talks with Tuberville] are going good, we have a lot of ideas, but we haven’t resolved anything,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”

The Senate holds the fate of many weekend plans in their hands as they work to find a time agreement to speed toward vote on the House-passed stopgap spending measure.

But as of midday Wednesday, they’re not there yet.

“They’re working on it,” said Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), the No. 3 in Senate Democratic leadership. “I think it’s certainly on the way to getting done and it’s conceivable it could be later today.”

Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) also said he thinks the stopgap bill will go Wednesday. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Wednesday morning that he’s working with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on reaching a deal. Schumer filed cloture on the bill Wednesday morning — and despite Speaker Mike Johnson’s wonky “laddered” construct, Schumer has offered minimal critiques of the legislation.

But conservatives could still stand in the way of any quick deal. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — notorious for threatening to withhold unanimous consent — hasn’t publicly made any promises to let the measure sail through. And if amendment votes come to the floor, it will significantly slow the process down.

The Senate is scheduled to be in session Thursday. But if lawmakers do manage to send the bill to the president’s desk Wednesday, they could leave town early ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday.

“It would be nice to wrap this up,” Stabenow said.

House lawmakers rejected a push to slash the salary of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra as they considered spending legislation Wednesday prior to breaking for Thanksgiving.

The amendment, offered by Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), failed 162-262 with one member voting present.

Several other efforts to slash the salaries of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet officials have passed, notably including Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, even as none of the bills will become law in anything resembling their present form.

Another House Republican spending bill hit the skids Wednesday, as the chamber punted legislation to fund the departments of Labor, Health and Education until after the Thanksgiving break thanks to opposition from within their own party.

After voting on dozens of amendments to the Labor-HHS bill Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, GOP leadership announced they would not move forward on the bill itself.

“People want to get out of here, and they’d like to get out sooner rather than later,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) the vice chair of the appropriations committee, told POLITICO. He added that had the vote gone forward, Republicans would have “lost a lot of votes.”

“The cuts are really big,” he noted. “It’s hard to move.”

It’s the latest setback for Republicans’ attempt to pass all 12 appropriations bills in the coming weeks. Bills to fund the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Housing, Transportation and the Food and Drug Administration met a similar fate after it became clear they didn’t have enough GOP votes to pass.

Speaker Mike Johnson and his allies, including several committee chairs, unsuccessfully lobbied Republicans this week to rally behind the Labor-HHS bill, arguing that another faceplant would raise the likelihood of getting jammed by Senate Democrats at the end of the year.

“If we want to afford to avoid an omnibus, we’ve got to pass our appropriations bills,” Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) said Tuesday. “This is truly a unique opportunity and people ought to take it.”

Freedom Caucus members who huddled with Johnson on the floor on Tuesday — including Reps. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) — told POLITICO the new speaker asked them for “a little grace” and to trust his “plan to actually cut spending” by passing staunchly conservative spending bills that they can use as leverage in negotiations with the Senate.

But a handful of GOP holdouts from the more moderate side of the caucus were unconvinced.

“I represent my district and they don’t like that bill. So I would have voted against it,” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) told POLITICO, citing the bill’s “cuts across the board on it in a number of areas that I care about” and anti-abortion provisions that “have no place in any of these bills — zero.”

Fitzpatrick also rejected Johnson’s argument that passing the Labor-HHS bill would give Republicans more negotiating power down the line.

“You can’t pass a single-party bill here and expect it to navigate 60 votes in the Senate. It’s not real,” he said.

House Ethics Chair Michael Guest said Wednesday his panel’s report on Rep. George Santos should be out by “the end of the week” and won’t suggest a course of action for the indicted congressman.

But he expects another vote to expel the embattled lawmaker.

“We did not go through the longer process of coming forth and recommending sanctions because that would have taken several more months,” Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters. “The information that we intend to release in the report, [we believe] that that will be enough for members to be able to make a decision as to whether or not they believe it would be proper to expel Rep. Santos.”

Guest said he believes expulsion is “an extreme punishment should be used only in very rare cases” but that the report would give members enough information to decide how to vote when another expulsion vote is called.

He added of the Santos (R-N.Y.) investigation: “We wanted to make sure that we prioritize this. I think we’ve done that.”

The report’s release comes as many of Santos’ critics are already plotting another move to oust the first-term Santos, if the report is as damning as many expect it to be.

House Republicans tanked a GOP spending bill on Wednesday — marking a major setback for Speaker Mike Johnson less than 24 hours after passing a bill that would avert a shutdown.

GOP leadership then canceled the rest of the votes for the week, sending the chamber home early for a Thanksgiving recess.

Roughly 20 Republicans joined with Democrats to vote against allowing a funding bill covering the departments of Commerce and Justice, among other provisions, to come up for debate.

The bill faced obvious challenges over its funding levels for the Department of Justice and the FBI. Conservatives are eager to overhaul those agencies, which have been some of the House GOP’s biggest targets as they accuse parts of the federal government of blatant politicization.

But Republicans voting against even letting it come up for debate comes a day after Johnson leaned on Democrats to help pass a short-term funding bill — a move that angered his right flank and sparked talk of retribution.

Conservatives had explicitly discussed blocking bills from being able to come to the floor. With an exceedingly thin majority and Democrats not helping the majority party on basic governing votes, Johnson needs almost unanimous GOP support to start debate on a bill. Conservative hardliners used a similar tactic after then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy struck a deal with the White House on the debt ceiling that those members hated.

Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), a member of the Freedom Caucus, warned that this could keep happening.

“I think it gets bumpy from here on out,” he said. “Anything and everything is on the table.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) is making clear he isn’t afraid of a fight — or using unconventional tactics in a donnybrook.

“I’m not afraid of biting. I will bite,” he said in an interview with a local podcast, “Undaunted Life: A Man’s Podcast.” “I don’t care where I bite, by the way.”

The comments, first flagged by Democratic super PAC American Bridge, came after Mullin nearly came to blows with Sean O’Brien, the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, during a Tuesday hearing where Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the HELP Committee, had to intervene.

Mullin went on to say: “I’m still a guy from Oklahoma.”

“I’m not a very good Christian — I try to be a good Christian,” he said. “I won’t start it, but I’ll sure do everything I can to finish it.”

Something close to a holiday miracle is cooking in Washington: It now appears a question of when, not if, the Senate will pass Speaker Mike Johnson’s “two-step” short-term government spending patch.

No Senate votes are scheduled yet on the measure, but with Thanksgiving looming — and the vibes very much off on Capitol Hill — it wouldn’t surprising if jet fumes move the process along.

“I’m happy the House passed this bill that excludes hard-right partisan cuts and poison pills with a strong bipartisan vote. I’ll now work with Leader McConnell to pass this bipartisan extension of funding as soon as possible,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement following House passage Tuesday.

McConnell, by the way, also endorsed the legislation on Tuesday: “It’s nice to see us working together to prevent a government shutdown.”

While we wait: Senators are expected to vote on a disapproval resolution this afternoon from Bill Cassidy (R-La.) on President Joe Biden’s latest student loan repayment plan.

Over in the House: Lawmakers will continue work on two spending titles — the Labor-HHS-Education funding bill and the Commerce-Justice-Science measure.

More fireworks on the horizon? The House Homeland Security Committee meets at 9 a.m. to hear from FBI Director Christopher Wray and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for a hearing on threats to the homeland. That comes just a couple days after the House narrowly punted an effort to impeach Mayorkas.