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.
Let me add, for a bit of fun but also to point to something quite serious and relevant here.
Richard Hofstadter in “Anti-intellectualism in American Life” details the contrast in American mythology between the “intellectual” and the “practical man”. This is a very old dichotomy but it deeply marks the American psyche still.
A particularly illuminating example can be found in the Walt Disney version of Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Note the contrasting physicality of the two males, the easy fright to which Ichabod is susceptible, and the bookishness of Ichabod contrasted with the practical resourcefulness of Brom. Ichabod is, of course, chased out of town (presumably, he goes back east)and Brom gets the girl. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDrnPqQtpxw&feature=PlayList&p=5C1DB69D66041476&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=5
James
Thanks kindly for the response.
“Wooden”, yes. But calmly self-certain and fatherly (if stern) might be another way to understand Cheney’s presentation today. Few on the right presently can pull that off with credibility. Certainly not Jindal, nor Cantor, nor Limbaugh, nor even McCain. Gingrich probably gets closest but then he speaks and things kind of go to hell.
We know this framing, of course, as the right has beat citizens over the head with it for decades. See Kristol’s blog today where he contrasts Obama as “a young Senator” to Cheney as “a grown up”, “a statesman”, “a chief executive”. Fatherly protector versus flighty, immature, feminine liberals. And today, as always, this comes packaged with the projection of dire, deadly threats in waiting. As Drew Westen and others have advised, this “activates peoples’ fear of mortality which inherently pushes them to the right.”
We assumed we were done with this amoral, authoritarian character but whatever combination of personal pathologies and need to dominate others whirl about within him, it seems that the unique circumstances of the present time are going to keep him in our lives. But he’s not a stupid man and he knows how to play this game. We ought not to submisunderestimate him, I think.
Now that the preliminary media coverage is in, I unfortunatly suspect that you are right in thinking that Cheney succeeded in providing the Republicans with a far better spokesman than Limbaugh. His delivery was wooden but he staked out a “strong on defense” position that is significantly more popular than are the Republicans as a party.
Gentlemen
My take here is not so unambiguously positive.
It seems to me that Cheney’s ascension into the spotlight is achieving a strategic positive for the Republicans at this point. My impression is that the ‘face’ of the party has changed significantly (and purposefully) over the last couple of months. I don’t think we’ll see Limbaugh challenging Obama to a debate again (or otherwise attempting to lift his profile past the red meat/radio sphere) and I suspect that is because the smarter people in the party hierarchy have grasped that the leadership vacuum that pushed Limbaugh forward could not continue without devastating consequences for the party’s future electoral chances. I don’t have figures on the frequency of media appearances by Fleischer, Perino, Rove and others from the Bush administration but my impression is that this frequency increased at the time Carville and Begala were working to elevate Limbaugh’s status.
Or, to say this with brevity, I think the party biggies understood that the only Republicans on the horizon with the media manipulation skills and institutional connections to facilitate such manipulation is the Bush administration crowd. And that Cheney is one of the few people who might be able to pull off the “leader” role presently.
In asian martial arts, where there are specific techniques taught for dealing with multiple opponents, one fundamental set of instructions is a series of pivots and twists to insure that one never faces more then a single opponent at at time.
The rule is “never battle ten opponents at once – battle opponents one by one ten times.
Yesterday, Obama faced ten opponents. Today he faced one. fine footwork indeed.