Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) speaks alongside other House Freedom Caucus members and caucus allies during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, September 12, 2023.
America is staring down the barrel of yet another Republican-imposed government shutdown—the 21st in history. As my colleague David Dayen writes, this wasn’t supposed to happen. The debt ceiling deal from a few months ago included an agreement on what the budget should look like next year.
But the Freedom Caucus—a couple dozen of the most extremist right-wing House Republicans—has forced the GOP to renege on the deal. The reason, it seems, is that they are incoherently mad at President Biden and the Democratic Party. They can’t agree on what specifically they want, whether it’s defunding the prosecution of Donald Trump, or extracting even more cuts from federal agencies, or a personal baby seal club for every Republican voter, or what. A purely messaging budget resolution that would have funded the government for just one month in exchange for deep spending cuts just went down in flames. But one thing is clear: The Freedom Caucus is extremely mad.
Luckily, President Biden has the right idea: letting House Republicans twist in the wind. Now, I thought it was the wrong move to negotiate with Republicans over the debt ceiling, though Biden ended up getting a much more favorable deal than I had expected. But since that deal was done, how else to approach a party that can’t hold up its own end of a bargain?
In the past, the Democrats have been less willing to stand up for themselves. Back in 2011, for instance, President Obama decided to try to negotiate a deficit reduction deal by offering up hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Social Security and Medicare in return for Republicans raising the debt ceiling. Those cuts were thankfully avoided only because the Freedom Caucus refused to countenance even a token tax increase on the rich.
Or consider a stipulation of the House GOP budget resolution that just went down in flames due to the caucus’s mad rage: the creation of a bipartisan commission to come up with suggestions to cut the budget deficit. The real purpose of a commission like this is to try to shove through large cuts to Social Security and Medicare to make budget headroom for tax cuts for the rich, which is so unpopular that it could never be passed through the ordinary legislative process. We know this thanks to the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction commission, created by an executive order from none other than President Obama back in February 2010. The commission produced a report whose very first recommendation was, sure enough, a large tax cut for the rich (though it did not get support from all the commission members).
These days, by contrast, the Biden administration calls such an idea a “death panel” for Social Security. The Democrats really have wised up on this question.
A sensible party in the GOP’s position—holding one half of one branch of government—would cut some deals roughly in line with its degree of leverage.
As an aside, it is quite remarkable how argument-proof this demand for starving grandma is to all available evidence, at least on the right. The endless growth in Medicare spending, which is by far the largest driver of projections showing massive deficit increases over the long term, has actually leveled off over the last decade or so—saving about $3.6 trillion since 2011 relative to the prior spending trajectory. As The New York Times reports, nobody is quite sure why it happened. But Republicans don’t seem to have even noticed. For them, starving grandma is an end in itself.
Structurally speaking, the basic problem here is that the U.S. constitutional structure requires compromise during times of divided government, but a critical mass of Republicans are simply too crazy to negotiate. Whereas in a parliamentary system, the majority has the full run of government, and hence there is no need to get opposition buy-in for anything, in our archaic system, we do. So when one party goes nuts, the government tends to get shut down all the time.
A sensible party in the GOP’s position—holding one half of one branch of government—would cut some deals roughly in line with its degree of leverage, and then try to win the next election to get a chance at implementing its full agenda. That’s how Nancy Pelosi ran things as Speaker, and indeed something like this view is probably what the median House Republican thinks, though not out loud. After all, both Senate Democrats and President Biden will have to sign off on any budget deal. But the Freedom Caucus is composed of “loud, dumb members,” to quote Alex Pareene, who are “egged on by a media apparatus that has trained its audience to demand the impossible and punish the sell-outs who can’t deliver.”
It follows that Biden actually getting involved in talks with House Republicans not only would reward bad behavior, it might actually harm the chances of the GOP getting a grip and sticking to the past agreement. People like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) think Biden is Moloch incarnate, and they will reflexively oppose anything he supports regardless of what it may be. As one former Republican aide told Politico: “You just have to let the House have its temper tantrums, have its fits, prove that it’s incapable of doing anything before you can step in and offer a path out of it.”
To be sure, Biden still might try to get involved. He seems to find it hard to resist doing so, but for now, he’s on the right track. And if Democrats ever again have full control of government, they should change the budgetary process so that, should Congress fail to pass a budget, the government keeps running according to its existing funding until Congress can. This is actually how it worked before Jimmy Carter’s attorney general invented the idea of a government shutdown. With American politics this dysfunctional, we need a budgetary autopilot.
