If you obsessively follow the twists and turns of congressional back-channel discussions, there are rare moments when progress toward the kind of deal that could head off an extended federal-government shutdown at the end of this month appears like sunlight momentarily breaking through pervasive clouds. Then the clouds invariably return, and the basic dynamics that make a shutdown all but certain haven’t changed.
The vast majority of House Republicans are demanding deep domestic spending cuts, draconian immigration policies, and an end to assistance for Ukraine — among other problematic positions — that are decisively unacceptable to Senate Democrats (and even some Senate Republicans) and the White House as part of a short-term stopgap measure to put off a shutdown by a month. Yet this self-isolation by Kevin McCarthy’s troops isn’t enough so far to placate a small five-to-ten-member group of hard-liners who crave a shutdown and have the means (a motion to vacate the chair) and probably the bad intent to depose McCarthy as Speaker if he moves even an inch toward a compromise that could keep Washington functioning.
McCarthy can do nothing at all until he gets a grip on the entirety of his conference (or at least all but a few of them) given his tiny four-seat House majority. So his tack has been to keep making concessions to the hard-liners so as to pass some kind of stopgap spending bill. But that just takes him further away from an actual deal that Joe Biden can sign.
Even as House Republicans emerged from a long meeting on Wednesday night optimistic that they could pass a stopgap bill and proceed one step toward the inevitable collision with Democrats, McCarthy’s old buddy Donald J. Trump handed him an anvil with a Truth Social post that will stiffen the spines of the holdouts:
Republicans in Congress can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government that refuses to close the Border, and treats half the Country as Enemies of the State. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!
Aside from his habitual cheerleading for chaos, Trump is clearly identifying with the House hard-liners still angry at McCarthy for “caving” on a debt-limit deal earlier this year.
McCarthy’s quandary isn’t just limited to rounding up votes for a doomed stopgap bill. He’s already agreed to a long-standing conservative demand to get away from the comprehensive “omnibus” spending bills used so often in the recent past to fund the federal government, and will have to move a host of individual appropriations bills (beginning with a stalled defense bill; as of this writing a motion to bring it to the floor has failed for the second time) each of which could create new intra-Republican divisions and make final deals with Democrats more difficult. And at any moment, he could become vulnerable to a motion to vacate the chair, which might abruptly eject him from the Speakership if only a handful of Republicans support it. McCarthy nemesis Matt Gaetz has been openly hankering for an opportunity to do just that (he or one of his allies even left — accidentally or deliberately — a draft motion to depose McCarthy in a House restroom this week).
All of these antics have left Democrats torn between popping popcorn and enjoying the show and trying to figure out how to either avoid or at least mitigate a shutdown. Publicly and privately, Democrats keep pointing out that every lurch to the right on spending levels McCarthy takes moves him ever further into noncompliance with an agreement he reached with Biden as part of the debt-limit deal. They’re not inclined to help him out by abandoning their own position, as Politico reports:
Within the White House, aides have settled on a hard-line strategy aimed at pressuring McCarthy to stick to a spending deal he struck with Biden back in May rather than attempt to patch together a new bipartisan bill. “We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” said a White House official granted anonymity to discuss the private calculations. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”
House Democrats may have an even trickier decision to make: If a motion to vacate the chair is offered, do they stand aside and watch McCarthy crash, or save his bacon? That remains unclear.
As House Republicans flail, we will continue to hear talk of some centrist proposal (likely emanating from the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus) to bypass McCarthy and pass at least a stopgap spending bill with votes from virtually all Democrats and a handful of Republicans. But the Republicans necessary to pull off that stunt are loath to abandon McCarthy to a certain political death and don’t particularly want to go into a crucial election year with a totally divided party. There’s also no guarantee such a politically expensive deal would be accepted by the Senate and the White House.
It’s all quite the mess, though arguably it has been inevitable ever since McCarthy sold off all his freedom of maneuver in order to become Speaker after 15 ballots in January. It’s fitting that Trump may play a role in ensuring that Congress literally becomes a swamp of dangerous dysfunction as he plans to return to Washington and sweep it all away.
