Budget Follies: The Endgame

Today on TAP: Expect the government to shut down, McCarthy to lose his Speakership, and some renegade Republicans to eventually support a discharge petition.

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There’s an old saying that when the other guy is destroying himself, the best tactic is to stand back and let it happen. That’s certainly the case with the House Republican refusal to fund the government.

Yesterday, six members of the tiny nihilist caucus in the House once again blocked even floor consideration of a rule to allow debate to proceed on funding the Pentagon. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, humiliated for the second time in a week, sent the House home for the weekend.

Even if the Republican ultras relent, this will be only the beginning of a long series of extortionate demands that Democrats can’t accept, including cuts of 70 to 80 percent in domestic spending. McCarthy’s failure to get his own caucus to deliver on the budget agreement that McCarthy negotiated with President Biden last May in exchange for extending the debt ceiling, is one more example of Republican bad faith, factional disarray, and McCarthy’s dwindling power.

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It’s only a matter of time before McCarthy is dumped as Speaker. Democrats should welcome that. His successor will be even weaker because the far-right Freedom Caucus can’t keep doing in Speakers. One of the sillier suggestions is that the Democrats should vote with McCarthy to save his Speakership in exchange for some kind of budget deal (that McCarthy can’t deliver), as Steven Pearlstein proposed in a recent Washington Post column.

The endgame is almost surely a government shutdown once the current fiscal year ends in just eight days on September 30. Government shutdowns have invariably backfired on Republicans. This one is likely to backfire even more disastrously, since it is a product not just of the usual GOP demands for deeper cuts but of nihilism and dysfunction within the Republican caucus vividly on public display.

The one exception to the rule that you stand back when the other side is destroying itself is the role of President Biden. It would be a huge mistake to insert himself into the negotiation process again, because no reasonable compromise is negotiable. But Biden could be using his pulpit to explain just what harms will ensue to ordinary families if the far right succeeds in shutting down the government again. This will require Biden to put aside his habitual preference for bipartisanship and to stand up for the Democrats as the normal and sane party that actually tries to serve the people, in contrast with Republican loonies.

Before last May’s artificial debt ceiling crisis ended with a budget deal, there was talk of using the parliamentary device of a discharge petition. The Speaker ordinarily controls what comes to the House floor, but an exception can occur when a majority of members file a discharge petition.

If the government is shut down because of McCarthy’s alliance with the most extremist members of the House, my guess is that the somewhat larger group of 18 GOP members from districts that Biden carried in 2020 will have had enough. Several of them could well vote with Democrats to get a reasonable budget deal on the House floor. (They will get primaried by MAGA Republicans whether or not they do this.)

This could be the beginning of a cross-party majority alliance of Democrats and non-lunatic House Republicans that could even vote to elect a RINO Republican as Speaker.

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