You're not going to believe this, but the next government shutdown deadline is just a week away and Republicans are fighting with each other. Two weeks ago, they all agreed that a three-week spending bill was just the ticket—three weeks was the magical number to be both an urgent enough deadline and enough time to figure out a spending solution and, on a separate track, negotiate immigration. And then they all went off to do . . . something about a memo, maybe? Whatever it was, it wasn't figuring out how to stop fighting with each other and just do their fucking jobs.
With Congress now staring down its fifth short-term spending bill since September, frustration is spreading across the House Republican Conference, particularly as negotiations have stalled over raising stiff budget caps and providing relief to so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows is threatening to withhold votes for another funding bill without more concessions on immigration. The North Carolina Republican told reporters this week that members of his hard-line caucus couldn’t vote for the bill until Speaker Paul Ryan makes good on his promise to push a more conservative immigration plan. […]
Defense hawks are also refusing to commit to another stopgap without a long-term spending agreement. They complain that the Pentagon has now spent more than one-third of the fiscal year under temporary funding, risking harm to service members.
The weekend-long shutdown two weeks ago did absolutely nothing to change the dynamic among Republicans—the Freedom Caucus is still agitating for whatever horrors Trump and his white supremacist adviser Stephen Miller can concoct, and the defense hawks are still screaming about breaking the sequester cap for defense, but ceding nothing else. And they're pissed off that leadership is talking about yet another stop-gap bill to buy enough time to come to agreement on deals that just doesn't exist.
House Democrats continue to hold together—no help on another stop-gap bill until spending caps and immigration are figured out. Senate Democrats are being pretty quiet this time around, after having folded so disastrously over immigration two weeks ago and seem content at this point to step back and just let the Republicans beat themselves up.
No one is really in charge—House Speaker Paul Ryan surely isn't in control of anything and Mitch McConnell is back in his shell and Trump doesn't want to be bothered with anything so mundane as government.