There’s really not much drama going on in Congress lately, but a manufactured crisis could shut down the federal government right in the middle of the general election season, as I explained at New York:
Kicking cans down the road is an essential skill in Congress, particularly when partisan control of the government is divided, as it is now. Routine decisions like keeping the federal government operating must await posturing over essential laws each party wants to enact but does not have the power to impose. And that’s why there seems to be a perpetual threat of a government shutdown — which is what happens if either house of Congress or the president refuses to sign off on spending authority — and why Washington typically lurches along from stopgap spending deal to stopgap spending deal.
The most recent stopgap spending deal expires on September 30, the last day of Fiscal Year 2024. There’s been some back-and-forth about the length of the next stopgap based on changing calculations of which party is likely to be in the ascendancy after the November election. But this normal bit of maneuvering suddenly turned fraught as Donald Trump bigfooted his way into the discussion on Truth Social not long before he debated Kamala Harris:
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET. THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO “STUFF” VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”
The backstory is that in April, when Speaker Mike Johnson was feeling some heat from the House Freedom Caucus over allegedly “caving” to Democrats in the last stopgap spending fight, the Louisianan scurried down to Mar-a-Lago to huddle with the Boss. Johnson announced he would do Trump’s bidding by introducing a bill to outlaw noncitizen voting, the phantom menace that is one of Trump’s favorite stolen-election fables. Those of us who understood that noncitizen voting (of which there is no actual evidence beyond a handful of votes among hundreds of millions) is already illegal shrugged it off as a MAGA red-meat treat.
But Johnson forged ahead with a House vote to approve the so-called SAVE Act. After the Senate ignored it, he included it in the first draft of his new stopgap bill. Everyone, and I do mean everyone, figured it would be dropped when negotiations got serious. But then Trump made his latest intervention and then, worse yet, Johnson couldn’t get the votes to pass his stopgap and get the ping-pong game with Democrats going (many right-wing House members won’t vote for any stopgap spending bill, and others are demanding big domestic spending cuts that don’t pass the smell test). So Johnson is back to square one, as the New York Times reports:
“Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday abruptly canceled a vote on his initial plan to avert a government shutdown, as opposition to the six-month stopgap funding measure piled up in both parties.
“It was a bruising setback for Mr. Johnson coming only a few weeks before a Sept. 30 deadline Congress faces to fund the government or face a shutdown.”
So now what? In the intense heat of an election year in which both the House and the White House are poised between the two parties, the leader of the GOP ticket has ordered Johnson to hold his breath until he turns blue — or more to the point, until the government is shut down — unless something happens that is as likely as Johnson suddenly coming out for abortion rights. Indeed, far from ramming the deeply offensive and impractical SAVE Act down the throats of Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden, he can’t even get the stopgap spending measure that includes it out of his own chamber. In the past, Democrats have loaned him a few votes to help him out of a jam, but they won’t do it unless he drops the SAVE Act. And if he drops the SAVE Act, Trump’s friends in the House will happily drop him the first chance they get (maybe right away, or maybe after the election). On the other hand, if he obeys Trump and refuses to move any spending bill, there’s a good chance a few Republicans will defect and back a Democratic measure to avoid an unusually pointless and politically damaging government shutdown. That, too, would expose Johnson as feckless and disposable.
Ever since Johnson succeeded Kevin McCarthy, Washington observers have alternated between treating him as some sort of backwoods parliamentary genius who fools people with his apparent befuddlement and as a Mr. Magoo who stumbles forward blindly and survives by luck and the fact that House Republicans have no better prospects for wielding the gavel. We’ll soon see which Mike Johnson emerges from the current morass. Another major incident of GOP fecklessness and disarray could help Democrats flip the House, but it’s a shame people may not be able to do their jobs in the interim.
After reading both articles a couple of points:
1. DURING elections is no time to discipline politicians. That time is either BEFORE or AFTER elections.
2. During THIS election Democratic voters are looking to get rid of the dominant Republican mis-rulers. They are not keen on calls to exact revenge on Democrats.
In 2009 it’s going to be a different ball-game if Obama wins. At that point progressives are immediately going to start developing a rather LARGE list of policy differences with Obama.
There’s going to be problems with his desire to ramp up the Afghanistan war, that’s not going to go well and U.S. casualty rates are likely to soar. The more Afghanis feel that someone is trying to establish the rule of Kabul over them the more they will fight. They fought the Soviet installed regime, they fought the Taliban, they are fighting Karzai and the northern tribes that replaced the Taliban now. It’s only going to get worse the more we try to exert control.
This has the potential to be like JFK and Vietnam.
Then Iraq is still going to be a severe problem. Just because McCain and the media are trumpeting that “we’ve won! The surge worked!” doesn’t make it true as pointed out on this site.
There’s going to be the problem of “residual troops.” What Obama wants and what progressives want (total evacuation of Iraq and leaving the country to the Iraqis without intereference) are night and day. Obama is talking about keeping hundreds of thousands of Americans (military advisers, economists, security personnel, experts of all stripes, spooks and CIA operatives, etc.) and lots of bases, including our Fortress Embassy and probably the Green Zone as well — all under U.S. control, even if there is some fig-leaf “transfer” of autonomy over to the Iraqis.
The Iraqis don’t want any of this. It’s a replay of Vietnam, with a dash of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as also mentioned on this site.
There will be plenty of domestic problems as well.
The 70 vote defection on FISA ought to make something clear. The real lack is a progressive lobbying effort in Washington that controls money and clout. Many of these people aren’t “Bush Dogs” at all, they are run of the mill Democrats who just aren’t feeling any pressure from the left so they don’t vote for liberal causes.
Its a nice effort to develop this, but we’d be much better off targeting Democrats in blue districts who don’t vote with us, than Bush Dogs in Rep +5 districts.
It took conservatives 15 years before they got Ronald Reagan elected. In the mean time how many “betrayals” by Rockyfeller Republicans did they have to endure?
Noam Chomsky has called Nixon the “last liberal president” for his creation of EPA and various environmental laws, his espousal of “treatment first” drug policy, etc. He was in a liberal era and couldn’t tilt nearly as far to the right as Bush can now, after Neo-con crusaders have been planting seeds for 20-30 years.
Obama might, if we are successful, be the “last conservative president.”
This is going to take a long time.