For weeks, it’s been clear that the extremist grip on the House Republican conference is making it nearly impossible for Congress to avoid a government shutdown before the money runs out at the end of September. And now the situation is getting steadily worse. Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s nemesis, Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, has now convinced a critical mass of his House GOP colleagues to reject any stopgap spending measure (known as continuing resolutions, or CRs, in congressional jargon), even one crafted to right-wing specifications. McCarthy, who cannot get the votes to pass a CR (particularly after Donald Trump urged Republicans to defund the government), is going along with the Gaetz strategy. The idea is to let the government shut down and remain shut down until Congress has enacted all 12 single-subject appropriations bills. Last time that happened was in 1996. As Politico Playbook reports, we’re potentially looking at a very long stalemate.
The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.
With House Republicans miles apart from Democrats (and even some Senate Republicans) on spending levels in a wide array of areas, negotiating and then enacting all these individual appropriations bills would take ages. Absent a CR, the federal government could remain shuttered for an unprecedented period of time.
Meanwhile, the Democrat-controlled Senate is moving toward enactment of a CR, which in the normal course of events the House would consider in frenzied late-night sessions just prior to the deadline for avoiding a shutdown. The Gaetz plan means rejecting this overture; if McCarthy even thinks about negotiating to get Democrat votes to pass a CR (just as he did, to the fury of conservative hard-liners, in enacting a debt-limit measure in May), Gaetz will spring a motion to vacate the chair and McCarthy would almost surely lose his gavel, assuming Democrats join Gaetz and other hard-liners in defenestrating the Californian.
But might House Democrats save McCarthy’s bacon and at the same time prevent or end a government shutdown by voting against a motion to vacate the chair? It’s a tantalizing possibility that must have occurred to the tormented McCarthy, for whom kowtowing to Gaetz must be agonizing. But in an interview with Politico, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark made it clear Democrats would demand a high price for any McCarthy rescue effort. The concessions they want would begin with the Speaker returning to the spending-level deal he cut with Joe Biden before the debt-limit vote, which under right-wing pressure he has abandoned in favor of much deeper domestic spending cuts:
We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.
But that’s not all Democrats want:
We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.
Kaboom.
Suffice it to say that if McCarthy can only keep his gavel with Democrats’ help, and abandoning the Biden impeachment inquiry he was forced to undertake is part of the deal, he will alienate the MAGA wing of his conference and his party until the end of time.
McCarthy has regularly shown he is above all a survivor devoted to his own ambitions. But in the current crisis over federal spending, he is really caught in a vise between totally craven surrender to the most irresponsible of his troops or earning their eternal enmity.
Perhaps public reaction to a completely pointless government shutdown that may damage a fragile economy will get McCarthy out of his jam and enable the bipartisan deal that looks so unlikely now. But it probably won’t happen for quite some time. “Nonessential” federal workers and those who rely on the services they provide should hunker down for a long wait.
They don’t have to. But Democrats are distinct from Republicans in one important aspect: they’re interested in good governance, even if it means giving up some political advantage they could wring out of a crisis. So they’re going to demand concessions from McCarthy in order to secure their help, and those concessions will be about helping people instead of empowering themselves.
The political cost for this action will be paid by McCarthy, not the Democrats. They have no way to lose here.
Which incidentally is why they keep losing. Getting real sick of the high road bullshit; I want someone to call boebert a trailer park whore or gaetz a child trafficking pedo just for the optics.
Mccarthy wanted the speakership so damn bad that he made this exact fucking scenario possible and likely. I guess if the dems bail him out they can use him like a puppet for anything he can’t get unanimous republican support for, but it’s probably better overall if his shit gets wrecked. Hell, imagine if enough Republicans get fed up with the lunatics’ bullshit and vote a dem into the seat.
The Alt-Right Playbook: You Go High, We Go Low by Innuendo Studios
I’m really not going to complain about Democrats not acting like Republicans. Instead, I would like to focus our attention on the fact that Republicans are more interested in gaining and keeping power than they are governing. Maybe that’s self-defeating in the current climate, but how does demanding Democrats act like Republicans not make the situation worse?
I don’t claim to have all the solutions. But I don’t see how that can be a solution at all.
It’s not demanding that they act like Republicans (ie psychopaths), it’s demanding that they make use of whatever power they have to make things better. The GOP is hell bent on making the US into a nightmare theocracy. You need to commit to working at least as hard to prevent that. “Playing nice” and letting the R’s walk all over them has not gotten them anywhere. One of the reasons the R’s do it is that they know it will never be done back to them.
What Tuberville and his ilk are doing are all within the rules. It isn’t ethical, but it is permitted. The Democrats need to be at least as ruthless about using the rules to get their priorities accomplished, even if it isn’t “nice”. People keep talking about how they don’t want to violate “norms”. The reason those norms exist is because both sides knew if they violated them, they as pay. Once the democrats decided to follow the rules when the republicans wouldn’t, everything went off the rails.
Being ruthless is precisely how the Republicans got where they are. Dragging the Democrats along with them makes the situation worse.
I’ve already outlined how Democrats hold all the cards with this one. The government shuts down and everyone knows it’s because of the Republicans, which will hurt them in the next election. But if they do a deal with McCarthy, McCarthy pays the political cost for it while Democrats get to remind voters that they’re the reason people didn’t miss their Social Security checks. They lose out on making Republicans look bad, but they still get political capital out of it.
So no, I don’t want Democrats to behave like Republicans any more than they already do.
They could take a more drastic approach with worse short-term results and better long-term results, by letting not only McCarthy but the whole Republican party take the hit. Think of it like surgery to remove cancer. Sure, you’ll feel worse than you would for the first few weeks if you hadn’t had the surgery, but you will live a lot longer.
I don’t know enough about politics, especially American politics, to predict the best course for Democrats or America, but paying danegeld to the Republicans hasn’t been working too well, either.
They could. And tens of thousands of people would suffer as their paychecks disappear, just like the last two times Republicans shut down the government.
I would rather support a party willing to abandon a temporary political advantage for the benefit of the nation than one willing to be cutthroat enough to ignore the suffering of our civil servants just to watch the opposition founder.
And I can appreciate that point. So do the Republicans, which is why it keeps happening. This band-aid is going to hurt when it comes off, and it’s up to Democrats to determine how they will resolve it, or the Republicans are going to keep tugging at it with no real resolution.