Breakdowns and Shutdowns

U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson faced his first test, and he apparently failed.

He wanted a vote on a continuing resolution to avoid a shutdown and keep government spending at current levels for the time being, with no additional aid to Israel and Ukraine, to allow Congress to negotiate a more permanent budget deal.  But members of his own fellow Republicans - mostly from the MAGA wing - voted against it, as they want to see immediate and drastic cuts in domestic spending.  Johnson needed help from the Democrats to pass such a resolution, and Democrats, recognizing the need for a continuing resolution, helped it pass.

Johnson tried a typical Republican party trick of offering a proposal he figured the Democrats wouldn't support, thus allowing the government to shut down, but with several Republicans in the House already opposed to this strategy, he allowed the resolution to pass.  The Senate has indicated that it will pass it as well.

Government shutdowns have been part and parcel of politics in Washington since 1981, when President Reagan vetoed a continuing resolution to keep the government open while both houses of Congress were negotiating in good faith to come up wit ha budget.  That had been standard procedure before the 1980s, but Reagan wanted to use the threat of the government running out of money to force cuts he felt were necessary.  The ploy only caused chaos, and chaos eventually became a Republican tool.  For the most part, though, Republicans rarely pay a political price for causing government shutdowns.  Although the public largely blamed Republicans for the 2013 government shutdown, the party was rewarded with control of the Senate and an expanded majority in the House the following year. 

So if you think Democrats should have let the GOP allow the government to shut down so that the Democrats would have a political issue to run on in 2024, think again.  A shutdown is the last thing Democrats or the country needs right now.  

Hitting The Ceiling

Well, the debt ceiling has been temporarily raised through early December, so a crisis has been avoided . . . for now. And the anger Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer showed toward Senate Republicans for delaying it for as long as they did was all too obvious.

After Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell allowed the vote on the debt ceiling to go through, Schumer excoriated the GOP for letting the crisis go so far.  It was the right speech at the wrong time.  It was too sensitive a moment for such a speech.  All he did was anger McConnell and made him much less likely to step in when the debt ceiling needs to be raised again.  Jesus didn't weep.  But Joe Manchin did.

"Poisoning the well" is too mild a metaphor for what just went down this past week.

The Democrats will likely have to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which will mean that they will have to set a specific number that the Republicans will force them to defend in a midterm election campaign that will focus on too much government spending.  This may be a neutral issue if the Democrats can pass President Biden's "Build Back Better" program - but that's a big "if" . . . and time is running out.

And a continuing resolution has to be passed to fund the government at the same time the debt ceiling has to be raised again.

I'm not optimistic.

Shut Down, Volume Two

It looks like the federal government has avoided a shutdown for at least two weeks. House Republicans passed a continuing resolution that cuts $4 billion in federal spending through March 18, and Senate Democrats - despite the Senate's misgivings about cuts in social programs that affect vulnerable people like children and the poor - feel compelled to pass it as well and send it to President Obama for his signature, since many of the cuts in the resolution are cuts the White House favored anyway. Obama would prefer to avoid a repeat of the 1995 government shutdown. By forcing the Democratic Senate to accept these cuts, the Republican House has achieved what many in the media are calling a victory.

Senate Democrats think they can win the next round of negotiations for a budget for the rest of the fiscal year, but their hope seems to rely on very wishful thinking. Some moderate Democratic senators representing states that currently lean Republican - Pennsylvania's Robert Casey, Jr., Missouri's Claire McCaskill - want to support more cuts, dividing the majority caucus in the upper house while the Republican majority in the lower house are more united. And congressional watcher Norm Ornstein reports that the idea of a new budget deal hammered out in a fortnight remains very slim. "The odds are minuscule that the Tea Party-driven freshmen would accept the equivalent of 15 or 20 cents on the dollar from their pledge to cut $100 billion this year," Ornstein says of newly elected House Republicans, "without first pushing for a confrontation. They did not come here to cave barely three months into their terms."

Several Democrats have suggested that the wind will be more at their backs once Americans see how draconian some of these cuts are, but I suspect that the wind at their backs will be their own. The arguments that such cuts would cripple an improving but still weak economy, valid as they are, are politically irrelevant. These cuts mostly affect poor people. The Tea Party, which calls for deep cuts in everything except defense (gotta protect ourselves from the British!), appeals to Middle Americans. Middle Americans, by and large, hate poor people, as some of the Tea Party demonstrations in the health care debate proved. So I imagine that cuts to aid for the poor and the less fortunate will prevail. To quote Bob Dole, where's the outrage?

Some of it was in the House. Seven House Republicans - including Rodney Frelinghuysen, my congressman - fought to protect federal funding for Planned Parenthood. (The others were Judy Biggert of Illinois, Mary Bono Mack of California [Sonny Bono's widow], Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Charles Bass of New Hampshire, and freshmen Robert Dold of Illinois and Richard Hanna of New York.) I'm proud of Frelinghuysen for that. But the efforts of these seven representatives have put them in an unenviable situation, as the House Republican majority has injected social conservatism in the debate of fiscal responsibility, forcing them to walk a fine line between voting their consciences and reducing government spending.

We need cuts in agriculture subsidies, as Rand Paul has suggested. We need cuts in highway spending; mass transit moves more people for less cost. We need deep cuts in "defense" spending. And, we also need to do something about entitlement programs to keep them solvent. But most especially, we need so tax the rich. To generate more money for the federal government, we need to follow legendary bank robber Willie Sutton's advice and go where the money is.