A noisy dog has stopped barking with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to withdraw from the Democratic nominating contest and run as an independent. I took a look at this development at New York:

Much of the limited buzz about nuisance candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropping out of the Democratic presidential contest and launching an attempted general-election independent run has focused on the question of whom the conspiracy theorist might help or hurt in a general election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. That’s understandable, in part because of the likelihood of another extremely close two-major-party race in November 2024 and in part because of Kennedy’s combination of high name ID and a potentially bipartisan well of support (or, as he likes to put it, a “horseshoe” coalition of left and right “populists” whose distrust of pretty much every institution makes them credulous customers for the cranky stuff he’s peddling). There’s also a rush of donations to RFK Jr. now that he’s rid himself of the light yoke of party loyalty.

The truth is we don’t have a good way of assessing a Kennedy independent candidacy until we see if he has the money and moxie to get on the ballot in competitive states. It won’t be easy, now that the adulatory treatment he has been getting from conservative media as a burr under Biden’s saddle may come to an abrupt end.

But we do know the absence of the Kennedy name on Democratic primary ballots next year is an unambiguous boon to the incumbent. With only the lightly regarded Marianne Williamson (polling at under 4 percent nationally in the RealClearPolitics averages) facing Biden (unless you take pundit Cenk Uygur’s newly announced candidacy seriously, which I don’t), he can run as the all but unanimous Democratic favorite who need not campaign for the nomination or even look or sound defensive about refusing to debate intraparty opponents. Even though his Democratic support has dropped since he was polling at around 20 percent in the spring and has been stagnant since the summer, he was still regularly hitting double digits in the polls and couldn’t be entirely ignored (he was, after all, doing about as well as the much-ballyhooed Republican Ron DeSantis). By contrast, Williamson is an asterisk, comparable less to the incumbent than to “Some Dude” perennial candidates.

Gone with RFK Jr.’s Democratic candidacy, moreover, is any fear of an embarrassingly poor showing in New Hampshire, whose rogue primary he could not enter and that media folk might find themselves unable to ignore (particularly with conservative media inflating every Kennedy vote into a repudiation of the incumbent). The Biden write-in effort that New Hampshire Democratic leaders have been quietly undertaking to overwhelm RFK Jr. in the Granite State should have even less trouble swamping Williamson.

Kennedy also takes with him, via his departure from his ancestral party, any lingering affection of Democrats for him in tribute to his famous relatives (I speak as someone who idolized his father and is pained to see his name profaned so vividly). What’s left is a veteran scandalmonger and misinformation peddler who belongs to no party because no party really wants him. Biden and Democrats are well rid of him.

The deal went down on this some time ago, but it’s still worth noting the official demise of the First-in-the-Nation Iowa Democratic Caucuses, as I did at New York:

The death rattle of the hallowed First-in-the-Nation Iowa Democratic Caucuses took a while to subside. But now it’s done. Yes, Iowa Democrats will still get together in precinct gatherings on January 15, the same day when Iowa Republicans caucus to formally launch the 2024 Republican nominating contest. But thanks to a national party mandate insisted upon by President Joe Biden, there will be no presidential preference balloting at the Democratic caucuses. A separate, mail-in ballot process will culminate in the announcement of the results on March 5, Super Tuesday, safely outside the “early state” window Iowa once dominated, and in the midst of a cascade of votes that will confirm Biden’s nomination.

Iowa’s defenestration from the early-state window was caused by three interrelated factors that came together to overcome the first-in-the-nation tradition. First, Democrats have moved decisively to outlaw caucuses as a method for awarding national-convention delegates, compared to more open and inclusive primaries. Second, Iowa was deemed far too unrepresentative of the country demographically to maintain such a highly influential position on the nominating calendar. And third, the last Democratic Caucuses in 2020 were a huge mess with the state party unable to report the results on Caucus Night (though arguably national party mandates helped make that happen). You could add as a fourth, decisive factor: Biden’s poor performance in Iowa en route to his nomination and election; certainly the White House owed the state no favors.

As Politico reports, Iowa Democrats hope their cooperation in what is after all an uncontested nomination contest in 2024 will give them a chance at reentering the early-state window in the future, albeit not likely in its old premier position. And as the Des Moines Register notes, the state party’s surrender eliminates a collateral threat to Iowa Republicans who might have faced a calendar challenge from New Hampshire if Iowa Democrats conducted something that looked like a primary before the Granite State’s event (which by state law must occur first).

Now the only apparent troublemakers left in the presidential nominating arena are New Hampshire’s Democrats, who have no choice but to follow state law and conduct a presidential primary on January 23; the DNC has demanded New Hampshire give way to the vastly more diverse South Carolina as the first primary state and vote instead on February 6, the same day as Nevada’s primary. The Republicans who control New Hampshire’s legislature have refused to play ball, leaving their Democratic counterparts to hold a rogue event that will cost New Hampshire at least half its delegation to the Democratic convention in Chicago next year, while creating the possibility of an embarrassing upset of President Biden, who won’t participate in a primary that defies his own calendar rules.

Most recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has significantly reduced the risk of that happening by indicating he plans to withdraw from an allegedly “rigged” Democratic nominating contest to run as an independent, leaving Marianne Williamson as Biden’s only foe with any significant support. To be safe, New Hampshire’s Democratic leaders are planning a Biden write-in effort.

No matter what happens in New Hampshire, the whole show will begin in Iowa on January 15 strictly on the GOP side of the partisan divide. Republicans, after all, aren’t that hung up on diversity and are still okay with caucuses and highly unrepresentative delegate award systems. Meanwhile, sad Iowa Democrats may well feel their caucus traditions on January 15 like a missing limb.

Watching the latest GOP madness from the House, I wondered why Republicans weren’t smart enough to stay narrowly focused on economic issues where they currently hold a big advantage with actual conditions likely to worsen it. I thought about it and posted this explanation at New York:

Even as the horrendous dysfunction afflicting House Republicans dominates the headlines, polls continue to show the GOP in a good position to maintain and extend its power in 2024. In the RealClearPolitics polling averages, Republicans lead in the generic congressional ballot (basically a measure of which party voters want to control the U.S. House) by a point (44.4 percent to 43.4 percent). And their wildly erratic and indictment-prone presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, similarly leads Joe Biden in 2024 general-election trial heats by an average of 45.5 percent to 44.4 percent.

There are multiple reasons offered for this anomaly of the crazy-person party holding a lead, ranging from the president’s age to some sort of national malaise. But the most obvious reason from the data we have is that solid majorities of Americans are unhappy about the economy and blame Biden for it. A new Marquette Law School national poll shows Trump being preferred to Biden on handling the economy by an astonishing 52 percent to 28 percent margin. It’s hardly an unusual finding. Here’s what ABC’s Gary Langer said after the latest ABC/Washington Post survey came out:

“Forty-four percent of Americans in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’ve gotten worse off financially under Biden’s presidency, the most for any president in ABC/Post polls since 1986. Just 37% approve of his job performance, while 56% disapprove. Still fewer approve of Biden’s performance on the economy, 30%.”

And that’s with most major economic metrics looking relatively sunny. If the economy takes the negative turn next year many forecasters expect, what then? How much Trump craziness might swing voters tolerate to get back that sensational Trump economy they remember (or imagine)?

Looking at the situation from a different angle, how much are Republicans unnecessarily hurting themselves by both tolerating Trump’s high jinks and displaying their own in the U.S. House? Why don’t they exhibit some self-discipline by getting onto the obvious winning message and chirping like cicadas: Economy! Economy! Economy! I’m quite certain there are Republicans in boardrooms and country clubs all over America wondering just that.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, it’s important to acknowledge a couple of factors that lead Republicans to be less than entirely mono-vocal, aside from their varying ideological and geographical backgrounds. There are some issues, notably the situation along the southern border, and — in some parts of the country — violent-crime rates, that benefit them so much that ignoring them would represent political malpractice. The Marquette Law School poll cited above showed Trump leading Biden on “border security” by exactly the same margin as his advantage on the economy. Plus, of course, it’s a signature issue for Trump and the MAGA movement he created. There are other issues, notably abortion, that are more important to key Republican activists than all the economic indicators past, present, or future. Trump is probably straining their patience by urging the GOP to downplay its unpopular views on abortion policy.

But the key thing to understand in processing wild Republican rhetoric on issues like congressional appropriations is that they and their supporters deeply believe the country’s economic problems are almost exclusively caused by excessive public spending and government overreach. Risking a debt default to rein in deficit spending strikes most Democrats and nonpartisan observers as playing an insanely dangerous game with the economy. Plenty of Republicans can’t imagine anything more dangerous and irresponsible than trillion-dollar budget deficits and unlimited public borrowing. For people who think that way, forcing a government shutdown is an absolute no-brainer. It has to be done again and again until the spending and borrowing stops.

To be sure, the wild extremism of so much Republican rhetoric on government spending is fed by non-economic concerns about objects of all that spending. According to some conservatives, Democrats are bankrupting the country and tanking the economy in order to finance radical assaults on freedom like COVID shutdowns, vicious assaults on Christians and their institutions, a vendetta against fossil fuels and those who use them or depend on them for jobs, and the partisan weaponization of law enforcement to prosecute conservatives and liberate looters and killers. Many of them also seem to think Biden is determined to spend the U.S. to death in order to save Ukraine as payback for bribes. Donald Trump seems to regard government spending as strictly designed to keep him from returning to the White House. But it’s also telling that complicity in deficit spending is one of the rare issues on which otherwise craven Republicans like Nikki Haley are willing to criticize the 45th president.

While it’s impossible to sort out all the different evils with which Republicans associate “big government” and “runaway spending,” there’s no question that when they rage about these things they believe they are addressing the same economic concerns that their voters, as well as swing voters, want them to deal with urgently. Keep that in mind as you watch House Republicans choose a new Speaker against a backdrop of fresh promises to radically pare back federal spending.

 

 

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.

If like me you are cursed with the determination to follow the ins and outs of congressional procedures and party tactics, you might be interested in my item at New York looking ahead to the price Democrats will demand if Kevin McCarthy comes to them for help after engineering an avoidable government shutdown.

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 on October 1. 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.

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.