Shutdown 2023

[goldenvalley]

Looks like no deal unless something happens in the next 36 hours.  What has the House been doing since the debt ceiling deal?  Not much apparently so here we are.  

Roughly 10 Republicans have dug in on their opposition to any short-term funding deal, blocking the House majority from delivering a bill chock full of their legislative priorities to the Democratic-led Senate in hopes of negotiating a more conservative solution to avoid a government shutdown.

Combined, these hard-right holdouts represent about 2 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 100 percent of the votes halting plans of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to keep the government open. Variations of the group have thwarted McCarthy at every turn during the months-long fiscal fights, turning their distaste for how the House functions and McCarthy’s leadership into a multimedia sideshow of bullhorns, pithy tweets, declarations on the House floor and live streams from the gym.

Some of these folks say they oppose the use of continuing resolutions and absolutely will not vote for one.  Some don't want to fund Ukraine, some want money for border security.  Some want "regular order" the passage of 12 appropriations bills but then load the few proposed with culture war components.  

I'm not sure why McCarthy doesn't go forward with what he proposed last week or the Senate's version. He could get Democrats to vote for the latter at least, but he'd rather let these 10 gum up the works.

[goldenvalley]

Shut down is averted for now, but look for another threat of it around Thanksgiving.  Seems like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo had it right:

...The big picture: House Republicans first demanded huge spending cuts. They then decided to shift to demanding miscellaneous border related abuses to get their prized shutdown. In fact they could never agree what to demand. That was the whole issue of not being able to pass anything. In the end they agreed to give up all their demands and settled for giving Vladimir Putin a big sloppy kiss in the form of killing any new aid to Ukraine in this continuing resolution. This was the sweetener that made the capitulation possible. It’s a telling but unsurprising signal. For the Trumpist Right today, Ukrainians are just Democrats with a funny alphabet. Doing Putin a solid provided enough psychic satisfaction to make this happen.

This keeps the government funded for 45 more days – in essence, until Thanksgiving.

One point Kate Riga made during our most recent podcast has stuck with me: the hangup thoughout was that McCarthy wouldn’t put any continuing resolution up for a vote that required Democratic votes. But the fact that McCarthy wouldn’t rely on Democratic votes to prevent a shutdown was sort of beside the point since he would certainly need them to end a shutdown, to reopen the government. It was really just a question of when he was going to pull that trigger. He decided to do it now.

I heard one talking head say really what Gaetz and company wanted was a shutdown...nothing else really, just bragging rights to say they shut down the government which leads to interviews on right wing media and scarfing up small dollar donations from people who think shutting the government only hurts people who work in Washington DC (and who cares about them anyway?).  Seems about right to me.

[goldenvalley]

Here is Margie explaining it: