Washington is reaching a consensus: the government will shut down in 10 days — and Republicans will bear the brunt of voter disgust over it.
With House GOP leadership on Wednesday again showing little progress in moving a stopgap funding bill to prevent a shutdown, officials have begun a two-pronged effort to prepare for a shutdown that seems less avoidable every day.
There is the official side of government, where the Biden administration’s Office of Management and Budget has been working with agencies to make contingency plans for when funding runs out. And there is the political arena, where party operatives are focused on a different goal: inflicting maximum pain on their Republican adversaries and seeking to pin them with blame for an interruption in federal services and paychecks for government workers.
While both sides will inevitably throw blame at the other, Republicans are feeling a keen sense of apprehension that their party will suffer badly should a shutdown transpire.
“We always get the blame,” said Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), a senior appropriator. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”
This whole thing is unbelievably stupid. Past shutdowns were also stupid, but the Republicans shutting down the government had something they wanted (entitlement cuts, funding for the border wall, whatever). Here there is no unified demand, it’s just a dozen or so Republicans who were elected to burn it all down keeping their campaign promises. So why not just ignore them? Because McCarthy will lose his speakership if he so much as thinks about a bipartisan compromise.
There’s no game plan here, no options, no strategy. For the dozen holdouts, the plan is the government shuts down until Biden and Senate Dems cave and agree to slash government spending by 10%, fund the border wall, and give the middle finger to Ukraine. That’s not happening, ever. And they know that, these aren’t serious demands, this is just an attempt to burn it all down but disguised as a principled position on government spending. McCarthys dumb plan was to pass a super partisan continuing resolution to keep the government funded for a month, which the Senate strip it of all the conservative junk and send it back to the house, and then ??? What conservatives would accept that??? We’d be right back in the same situation we’re in now. But the holdouts won’t even agree to that dumb strategy.
There’s a longshot where all Dems and a handful of Republicans could sign a motion to vacate forcing a clean CR onto the floor, but 1) procedurally that takes a full month to do, and 2) you need Republicans willing to sign on bucking both McCarthy and the base. Even if this scenario saves the day, the government will still shut down for a month or more, and again it’s only a continuing resolution so we’re back in this same clusterfuck in another 30 days after it passes.
The only realistic way out of this is McCarthy does the right thing, works with Democrats to find a bipartisan solution, and stops listening to the derangement caucus in his party. He’ll probably lose the speakership, he’ll probably lose it no matter what happens anyway so maybe just do the right thing?
As I’m sitting here today, it feels like we’re in for a looong shutdown, not because Republicans are dug into a demand, but because they have no demands at all. You elect people to burn it all down, and that’s exactly what they are going to do.
Yes, this is the big difference this time around, previously the threat of being blacklisted from the RNC/CPAC plus local obligations (contracts/ect) falling through. This time though we have people outside that establishment that want the government to shutdown. They want this to happen and to hurt, the only good move here is McCarthy working with Dems.