The federal government is going to shut down this weekend, barring some miracle. And Democrats really need to make sure Americans know exactly who insisted on this avoidable crisis. It’s the House GOP, as I explained at New York.
If you are bewildered by the inability of Congress to head off a government shutdown beginning this weekend, don’t feel poorly informed: Some of the Capitol’s top wizards are throwing up their hands as well, as the Washington Post reports:
“’We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing,’ said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain has started referring to the current GOP House-led impasse as “the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown,” a reference to the popular sitcom widely known as ‘a show about nothing.’ ‘The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.’”
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. Many House Republicans, led by a band of right-wing hard-liners, want to impose their fiscal and policy views on the nation despite the GOP’s narrow majority in the House. Their chief asset, beyond fanaticism, is that the federal government can’t remain open past the end of the fiscal year without the concurrence of the House, and they don’t really mind an extended government shutdown, if only to preen and posture. They are being encouraged in this wildly irresponsible position by their leader and likely 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump.
But the hard-liners’ real motive, it seems, is to use the dysfunction they’ve caused in the House to get rid of Speaker Kevin McCarthy for being dysfunctional. The not-so-hidden plan hatched by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz is to thwart every effort by McCarthy to move forward with spending plans for the next fiscal year and then defenestrate him via a motion to vacate the chair, which just five Republicans can pass any time they wish (with the complicity of Democrats). Indeed, the Post reports the rebels are casting about for a replacement Speaker right now:
“A contingent of far-right House Republicans is plotting an attempt to remove Kevin McCarthy as House speaker as early as next week, a move that would throw the chamber into further disarray in the middle of a potential government shutdown, according to four people familiar with the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.”
McCarthy’s tormenters would like to have a successor lined up who will presumably be even less inclined to compromise with Democrats than the current Speaker. And that’s saying a lot, since McCarthy has already bowed to the Gaetz demand that House Republicans reject even the idea of a continuing resolution — the stopgap spending measures used to forestall or end government shutdowns in the past — and instead plod through individual appropriations bills loaded with provisions no Democrat would ever accept (e.g., deep domestic spending cuts, draconian border policies, anti-Ukraine measures, and abortion restrictions). It’s a recipe for a long shutdown, but it’s clear if McCarthy moves a muscle toward negotiating with Democrats (who have already passed a CR in the Senate), then kaboom! Here comes the motion to vacate.
Some observers think getting rid of McCarthy is an end in itself for the hard-liners — particularly Gaetz, who has a long-standing grudge against the Californian and opposed his original selection as Speaker to the bitter end — no matter what he does or doesn’t do. In theory, House Democrats could save McCarthy by lending a few “no” votes to him if the motion to vacate hits the floor, but they’ve made it clear the price for saving him would be high, including abandonment of the GOP’s Biden impeachment inquiry.
So strictly speaking, the impending shutdown isn’t “about nothing”; it’s about internal far-right factional politics that very few of the people about to be affected by the shutdown care about at all. Understandably, most Democrats from President Biden on down are focusing their efforts on making sure the public knows this isn’t about “big government” or “politicians” or “partisan polarization,” but about one party’s extremism and cannibalistic infighting. For now, there’s little anyone outside the GOP fever swamps can do about it other than watch the carnage.
Some observations on the Childers-Davis race that don’t seem to be getting much play from the relentlessly national focus of MSM coverage:
First, it’s not exactly true that this was a rock-ribbed Republican district. Until 1994 it was represented by that old seg Democratic lion Jamie Whitten; Roger Wicker won it in 1994 and held it since as much by the power of incumbency as by his party label. Secondly, as far as I can tell looking from Nashville, the voting patterns displayed some serious socio-political cleavages of the sort often missed by nonsouthern observers [Not you, of course, Ed!]. Davis is Mayor of Southaven, in De Soto County–the one county that he won really handily. De Soto is a booming middle-class suburb of Memphis, though of a lesser social stratum than tony easterly suburbs such as White Station or Germantown; it’s a product of white flight from Memphis [The suburb just north of the line is appropriately named Whitehaven], and as a result is racially pretty hard-edged. It’s hardly surprising, then, that Davis would have offered to grant political asylum, as it were, to the statues of Jeff Davis and Nate Forrest when Memphis was discussing removing them from a city park. But, perhaps more importantly for this election, the residents of De Soto are socio-economically poles apart from the rest of the district. The problems of the rural South–notably deindustrialization, which Childers addressed with an aggressive economic nationalism–are foreign to a population that’s basically tied to an urban economy, tends to take its prosperity for granted or as the reward for its own virtue, and tends to be much more hostile to government solutions than a rural and small-town region with a heritage of attachment to TVA. Outsiders [You know this, Ed] think southern Republicanism is just redneck racism shifted over bodily from the Democrats after passage of the VRA in 1965; but not only is the political story more complicated, but this stereotype misses the fact that modern southern Republicanism began in the suburbs [at least as soon as there *were* southern suburbs; in my native SC we were just beginning to see them in the 1960s]. Revisionist historians like Matt Lassiter and Joseph Crespino are beginning to rewrite this history. For present purposes, though, the important point is that the suburban character of the Republican base made it vulnerable to a challenge such as Childers’s–especially when coupled with the widespread unpopularity of Bush and [This is a bit of a surprise to me in this district] the Iraq War [but then it’s districts like this one that have borne the brunt of sacrifice]. Thus, while De Soto alone contains 20 percent of the district’s population [and growing], and Davis won it handily, he won virtually nowhere else.
The bottom line? Contrary to the Tom Schallers of the world, Democrats have never stopped being competitive in the South; with the right candidate and appeal, they can beat a Republican Party that’s so tied to a complacent base, and so wedded to the old strategies of tarring local Democrats with national [and black] associations, that it has no clue about how to counter a candidate who can’t credibly be tarred with the “Pelosi Democrat” label and who talks about issues that the Republicans ignore. Of course, the Schallers can’t really be too happy with this result, since their real complaint has never been with southern Republicans, but rather with southern *Democrats.* Childers will be one more Blue Dog, and those who want to run Blue Dogs out of the party are losers here as well. But if Democrats can neutralize the cultural issues and can exploit genuine local problems as they’ve done here [though, as a student of southern economic development, I’m not happy with Childers’s approach on policy grounds]–they’re in the game.