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.
I suppose this means that the reflexive hatred of New York, and New York City in particular, is re-establishing itself as a well of ill-will for the right wing to draw upon in other parts of the country.
I had hoped, after the outpouring of sympathy following 9/11 from all parts of the United States (students in Mississippi actually raised money to buy the city a fire engine, which brings tears to my eyes even as I type it), that this ugly attitude might be a thing of the past.
People actually apologized at the time for calling the city “godless” and vilifying it so unthinkingly. Now “New York” is a dirty name again for for political mobilization in the red states, and for GOP fundraising? It’s a resonant red state insult for a judicial appointee, like “known thespian”?
We are till the primary target for terrorism (that has been proven yet again, recently). The notion that anybody with a geographical connection to New York is somehow shielded from life’s dangers and complexities and daily realities is a grim joke.
Please, America, if you think New Yorkers are your enemies; if you imagine that we have nothing in common with you culturally, spiritually and intellectually; and if our foreign enemies feel exactly the same way, then stop sending more of our federal taxes to less-populated states than you give back, and let us use those dollars to defend ourselves.
If Elena Kagan’s not a true American, and Sonia Sotomayor isn’t a true American, then what the hell do all of you care if we New Yorkers — true Americans none of us — take a dirty bomb for your sins? From where I sit, this is no “cocoon.” Cocoons are supposed to be safe.
This is one America, like it or not. As much as we in New York may despise people in other states who campaign on the promise to get the teaching of evolution out of the schools, it never occurs to us to think of those people as non-Americans.
You think New Yorkers are arrogant? We think it’s the people who set themselves up as judges of others’ American-ness (and pretend that any Democrat elected must be an alien, or the Anti-Christ, or the beneficiary of a vote fraud conspiracy of continental proportions) who are arrogant.
It ceased being “respectable” to de-Americanize New Yorkers on a beautiful September day nine years ago. For shame!