Eric Gay/AP Photo
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) speaks while standing with Republican members of Congress, January 3, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.
In the last 30 years, Republicans have never won a government shutdown fight. From Newt Gingrich throwing a tantrum after not getting a ride on Air Force One, to Ted Cruz reading Green Eggs and Ham on the Senate floor as part of a symbolic, futile filibuster against Obamacare, to Donald Trump fake-dramatically walking out of negotiations with Nancy Pelosi, Republicans consistently end up flipping out, taking all the blame for shutting down the government, and agreeing to stand down while achieving nothing. There’s a pretty long history of this, and in different contexts. Whether Republicans control Congress or the White House, they always seem to lose out on these particular staring matches.
So of course, they’re determined to try again.
The reason is that it’s an election year, and Republicans have once again decided that their path to victory goes right through the U.S.-Mexico border. Inflation and the economy were effective complaints in 2023, but they are starting to recede. Transgender rights have been a disastrously unproductive wedge issue for Republicans. But immigration is the one area where they’ve put Joe Biden on the back foot, and judging from House Speaker Mike Johnson’s (R-LA) field trip with a bunch of conservatives to Eagle Pass, Texas, on Wednesday, the GOP is now transferring that momentum to the shutdown fight.
I don’t know why that should work any better than the other gambits. House Republicans could get extremely draconian changes to migration policy just by accepting the deal being worked out in exchange for military aid for Ukraine and Israel (though with the White House continuing to sell Israel weapons, it doesn’t feel like supplemental aid is needed). But instead, they’re moving toward using federal workers as pawns to get even more, a tactic that has failed every time it’s been tried.
Maybe this can be explained by the words of Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) to CNN during the field trip: “I’m not willing to do too damn much right now to help a Democrat and to help Joe Biden’s approval rating.” In other words, a deal that Democrats can accept, even a deal that bends pretty far in the direction of a restrictionist border policy, is a deal House Republicans are unwilling to contemplate. In order to keep the border issue alive in 2024, they’d rather blow up the Senate negotiations. They see this as a win even if they lose on government funding, because it keeps immigration and the general aura of crisis on the front pages.
I predicted last month that these White House–Senate border policy talks would go nowhere, because House Republicans were already signaling pretty loudly that they didn’t want anything to do with them. Two weeks ago, Johnson sent Biden a letter saying that he should use executive authority to shut down the border, implicitly rejecting the possibility that Congress would agree to legislate changes.
The executive actions proposed—effectively ending humanitarian parole, reinstating the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers, deporting or detaining anyone caught between ports of entry, increasing expedited removal and completing the border wall—are essentially what’s in H.R. 2, the House Republican border bill that passed along party lines last year. That is the baseline of what the House will accept. But after the field trip to Texas (where nobody saw very many migrants, for what it’s worth), that has now become the baseline for passing government funding. Numerous committee chairs are now saying that no funding bills should pass without the entire Republican immigration agenda attached.
It’s an election year, and Republicans have once again decided that their path to victory goes right through the U.S.-Mexico border.
It is amusing that Republicans have moved this into the government funding arena, because practically speaking, money is actually what’s needed to alleviate the problem. But that’s not what the GOP leadership believes. “This is not about sending more money down here. It’s about changing the policy,” Johnson said on Wednesday. On the merits, Johnson is completely wrong. To solve the very real backlogs and dysfunction at the border, you actually have to hire asylum officers, no matter how much policymakers lie to themselves and decide that if they just look a little bit tougher, they can stop the flow of migrants seeking a better life. So Republicans are pushing immigration into a government funding fight, while refusing to use government funding to deal with immigration.
There are two separate budget deadlines, one on January 19 and another on February 2. H.R. 2 will apparently be the price for both of them, at least in the House. That’s not going to be acceptable to either Senate Democrats or the president. The Senate–White House talks, such that they are, have dropped the restrictions on parole, which is a policy where migrants from four countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) are allowed into the U.S. on a temporary basis. This makes any resolution, even if there is one, almost certainly unacceptable to House Republicans.
That’s what we call an impasse. And at this point, you have to say that House Republicans want the impasse. Shutting the government down over an esoteric fight involving a sequestration trigger in the debt limit deal seems pointless. But shutting the government down over a purported migration crisis is very on brand. More important, it keeps the spotlight on the border, where Republicans want it. They plainly want more dysfunction and chaos at the border. This is being done against the backdrop of the Republican presidential primary, and presumptive nominee Donald Trump making “Joe Biden’s border disaster” the number one issue.
That doesn’t mean this strategy will be successful in backing down Democrats on government funding. Once a shutdown happens, the dynamic becomes Republicans canceling popular programs for ideological ends, and Democrats know how to make something like that work for them. But winning that fight doesn’t seem to be the point for Republicans. They want an issue in the election. Remember that quote from Rep. Nehls; no House Republican wants anything border-related to pass.
Picking a fight that shuts the government down over immigration policy means that the images on cable news for the next month will be of migrant crossings. That’s also the point of attempting to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, which will kick into high gear this year. It keeps alive an issue with internal dissent among Democrats. The imagery matters more than the policy.
After a few weeks, you could see a full-year continuing resolution that avoids the sequestration cuts, and no resolution on migration policy—or maybe some face-saving executive order that will fail without a surge of funding to deal with the capacity problems. But the damage will have been done. We’ll have spent a month talking about what Republicans want to talk about, hyping up an invasion of the country, a poisoning of the blood. I’d suggest that nobody is obligated to take this bait, but I think we all know that everybody will.
