With about a dozen House conservatives in full revolt against House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), the Democrats have suddenly become the majority party in the House. The nihilists, who are acting as if they want no government at all, have frozen the business of the House, hoping to shut down the government.
Of course, they aren’t going to get what they want. The spending cuts they want are far too deep and would never be approved by the Democratic Senate. They don’t care. As long as they can thump their chests and pretend their posturing matters, they’re happy.
Congress needs to pass a short-term Continuing Resolution (CR) before September 30 to keep the government fully operating. House Republicans have not been able to cobble together a spending package without a bunch of “poison pills” that the nihilists wanted in the CR. McCarthy needs to find at least five Democrats — probably more — to get any CR passed.
To get those votes, McCarthy is going to have to ask the Democratic Party in the House for help. Not only is this humiliating, but it will also trigger a motion to “vacate the chair” — a procedural vote to end McCarthy’s speakership and hold another election for Speaker.
The Republicans in the House have abandoned their majority and must now rely on the minority party to accomplish anything. And the Democrats are going to try and extract a steep price for their cooperation. As it turns out, too steep.
The number two Democratic leader in the House, Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), laid out the Democrats’ ransom demands.
The concessions they want would begin with the Speaker going back to the spending-level deal he made with Biden to get the debt limit passed. McCarthy was forced to abandon the deal in favor of the much deeper cuts that the Freedom Caucus wanted.
Clark wasn’t pleased with the Republican double-cross.
We respected the deal that the president made with Speaker McCarthy. And they signed that deal. And 314 of us voted — in an almost equal bipartisan fashion — to support it. And the ink was barely dry when Kevin McCarthy was back trying to placate the extremists in his conference. And he is just telling the American people what matters is him retaining his speakership and they don’t. And so when people come and say, Are Democrats going to help?, it is beyond frustrating.
That might have been possible with a fair majority of Republicans. But it’s what else she says the Democrats want that would be a deal killer.
We want to get disaster aid out. We want to continue our support for Ukraine. And we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry.
Obviously, ending the impeachment inquiry is a non-starter. So it should go without saying that a government shutdown — a long one — is now in the cards. McCarthy has committed to a plan by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) to pass all 12 single appropriations bills, keeping the government shut down until that job is completed.
The last time the House passed all 12 appropriations bills was 1996.
The premise of the Gaetz plan is to kill what he calls governing by CR. It assumes a government shutdown is inevitable. And instead of using a hard-right CR as the House’s opening move in negotiations with the Senate, the (lengthy) floor debates on the House GOP-crafted appropriations bills will serve that purpose.
That’s because Gaetz and his friends are going to stick so many poison pills — abortion, transgender issues, the GOP border bill — into those single appropriations bills that they’ll be mistaken for a pharmacy. This will doom those bills in the Senate meaning that even after passing 12 appropriations bills, Congress will be no closer to lifting the shutdown as they were before it started.
Gaetz is not the village idiot, although sometimes he plays the part. He knows that his ploy isn’t going to work any more than passing a CR. But in chaos is power. And Gaetz thinks that eventually, his antics will lead to the GOP caucus handing him the speakership out of sheer frustration.
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