Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) speaks with reporters at the U.S. Capitol, September 18, 2023, in Washington.
Congress is hurtling toward an October 1 government shutdown, after agreeing to overall spending levels for next year’s budget just four months ago in the debt ceiling deal. That agreement was immediately broken by all sides, and so the current fight is just a replay of these disputes, conveniently without the full faith and credit of the U.S. government at risk.
In that narrow, relative sense, what Congress is doing now is practically responsible. But that’s only true until you look under the hood at what they’re spending their time doing, just a couple weeks out from the drop-dead date.
So far, the House has passed one of the 12 annual spending bills needed to complete appropriations; the Senate has passed zero. It’s obvious a continuing resolution to fund the government is needed, to buy more time for an agreement. House and Senate leaders announced that weeks ago.
Inherent in the term “continuing” resolution is that it continues the spending from the status quo. That’s understood by and good enough for probably 80 to 90 percent of the House and Senate, if not more. It’s only not good enough for the small faction of Freedom Caucus conservatives, who lost the debt ceiling fight and want to exact revenge.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) believes that his position is dependent on the Freedom Caucus not throwing him out of office like they did the last two Republican leaders. So the first thing he did when the House returned from summer break—only three weeks from the deadline—was to unilaterally initiate an impeachment investigation against Joe Biden. This was done entirely to cozy up to the obstinate hard right. But even before McCarthy made the announcement, they all said this would not mollify them at all. So predictably, when asked how an impeachment inquiry would affect their demands on spending, Freedom Caucus member Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) said, “Zero. Zero. They’re totally unrelated.”
Only in Washington would you respond to a set of demands with an unrelated demand and expect that to work: It’s like a manager responding to workers wanting to see the air-conditioning fixed at the office by bringing in a pinball machine. But some parasitic worm endemic to Capitol Hill gets into the brains of the leadership, seizes control of the relevant neurons, and commands the Speaker to try these absurd gambits.
McCarthy then had to shelve a defense appropriations bill because there were not enough votes available on his right and none to his left. He says that will get a vote this week, win or lose. Can I get odds on that?
After that, McCarthy did an about-face and played tough guy, daring Freedom Caucus members in a closed-door meeting to use the “motion to vacate” to force a floor vote on the Speaker. “If you want to file a motion to vacate, then file the fucking motion,” he said defiantly. Later, asked by reporters if he said that, McCarthy gave a soliloquy about impeachment, clearly frustrated that his brilliant, meaningless tactic didn’t work. Like I said, Washington brain worms.
In short, the Republican right demands major concessions in return for getting to demand more major concessions in one month.
Unfortunately, they are spreading. The Freedom Caucus and the Main Street Republicans, who are nominally more moderate and forgiving, reached a deal “to avert a shutdown,” as The New York Times puts it. Except there’s no way that this deal would avert anything. Rather than a continuing resolution, it would cut programs overall by 1 percent. However, because the Pentagon, veterans’ programs, and disaster relief are exempted, the actual cut to programs affected is about 8 percent, and only for the month of October. On top of that, it would include border legislation that the entire House Democratic caucus voted against in May. (Hilariously, this excludes an E-Verify system that was bundled into that bill, presumably because the Main Street Republicans’ corporate donors actually like exploiting immigrant labor.)
In short, the Republican right demands major concessions in return for getting to demand more major concessions in one month. No Democrat will vote for this CR, and Democrats control the Senate and the White House. Nor should they vote for it: Cutting 8 percent of the government workforce from most programs for a single month while deliberations continue on the final outcome is about the worst way to appropriate a budget you can think of.
But pushing through a doomed CR fits with Washington brain’s greatest shared fiction: Passing a spending bill, even one with no chance whatsoever of passage, gives a party “leverage” in future negotiations. Why this is believed is unfathomable. Who cares if you can get 218 votes for something that can’t become law? Everybody knows what the two sides’ demands are: One side wants less spending and the other side more. You don’t need an irrelevant vote to “prove” that position. It’s precisely the type of “our unity is our strength” pabulum that nearly all Republicans automatically reject. But because everyone bitten by the Washington brain worms believes this, it’s kind of true, at least within the narrow confines of Capitol Hill.
Unfortunately for Republicans, this irrelevancy may also be irrelevant. The Freedom Caucus didn’t let the ink dry on this “agreement” before calling it “a gift to Joe Biden.” Cutting discretionary programs by “only” 8 percent is seen as a deep betrayal by virtually the entire far right. Since Democrats won’t support this CR, that means it has no shot of passing. Maybe there will be changes to make it even more unpalatable and impossible to become law before a final vote. It’s hard to believe that Republicans in swing districts will go along with a bill that is tailor-made for campaign ads about them voting to gut essential programs. But so-called moderate Republicans have become such lapdogs that anything is possible.
Think about how abstract we’ve now gotten. Republicans are arguing with each other over how much funding to cut in a one-month stopgap continuing resolution—not the budget itself—when even cutting by one dollar means all House Democrats, all Democrats who control the Senate, and the president will be opposed. None of this takes into account the rest of the packed congressional calendar: supplemental spending for disaster relief, the numerous funding programs that face a deadline of September 30, and the hot-button issue of Ukraine. With days to go until a shutdown, the past two weeks in the House have been spent on fine-tuning a bill that only handles discretionary spending for 31 days of the year, and is guaranteed to be dead on arrival.
Meanwhile, everyone and their brother knows the continuing resolution bill that will get the necessary votes: just a plain old clean continuing resolution. McCarthy doesn’t want to do it because of the potential for revolt from the hard-right faction. He knows—and has explicitly said—that Republicans will lose a government shutdown showdown. But for all his bravado, he’s just an incredibly weak leader. And so he’s playing out these Washington brain strategies that work nowhere on Earth other than Capitol Hill, and probably not even there either.
I say “probably” because there’s a tiny chance that Democrats blink and offer concessions to avoid a shutdown. That would be Washington brain in action too. Democrats have repeatedly won prior shutdown fights by simply rejecting far-right demands. In this case, they already made compromises in the debt ceiling agreement, hammering out topline spending numbers that were lower than many in the party wanted. So all they have to do is sit still. But the worms do sometimes crawl in, telling Democrats that they have to be the adults in a room of toddlers. I don’t expect it, but maybe that’s optimistic.
The old joke was that the biggest oxymoron in Washington was “military intelligence.” I now think it’s “congressional strategy.” The most likely outcome of this charade is the one that has been available every day since the debt limit agreement was signed. We’ll probably have to furlough a bunch of government employees unnecessarily until we get to it.
