We’re three days away from a potential government shutdown, and it appears that Senate Republicans have decided that now is the time to declare war on Democrats and, well, the government. First, we saw Sen. Rick Scott, the Florida Republican in charge of the committee that is trying to elect more Republicans capriciously block a simple fix to a popular, bipartisan bill to do something everyone wants—help the Post Office.
Meanwhile, Republicans are pushing an incredibly racist crack-pot (or maybe that’s crack pipe) Fox News-inspired conspiracy theories to gum up that government funding bill. Seriously. This is now a real, fake, and very racist issue holding up the continuing resolution (CR) to fund the government after Friday, midnight.
It’s not just that fake fight from Republicans, though. They’re also threatening a shutdown over those vaccine mandates the Supreme Court didn’t throw out last month. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who really doesn’t want a government shutdown but is completely okay with making this as difficult as possible—and using as much floor time as possible—says, “as is often the case, we’ll process a few amendments before doing a short term CR. I think it’ll all be worked out, there’s no danger of a government shutdown.”
But after those bullshit amendments on bullshit issues. But what that also means is that he wants to go right down to the wire of Friday, midnight with this bill because doing amendments means that the House—which is now recessed after having successfully passed the bill last week—will have to figure out a procedure to come back and pass the Senate version.
That’s not all, though. With a Russian invasion of Ukraine potentially imminent, a weeks-long effort to come up with a sanctions bill has fizzled, as Republicans have been holding out and dragging the process out. That means they’ve come down to the wire, and Democrats have pretty much decided it’s going to be too late to get a bill done.
“Russia is so close to moving that really if we tried to do anything now, by the time it worked through all the processes, it’s probably too late,” said Sen. Joni Ernst, an Iowa Republican. As if they hadn’t been working on this for weeks. As if they hadn’t had ample time to figure this out. As if Republicans weren’t purposefully creating the appearance that the Congress was not unified with the Biden administration on responding to Russian aggression. Because, once again, they are happy to use Russia to harm the Democrats. They’ve apparently decided the answer will be a nonbinding “sense of the Senate” resolution, a sternly worded letter to Putin.
And in more racist Republican senators news, they are blockading a bloc of Federal Reserve board nominees, with McConnell’s blessing. Republicans boycotted the confirmation vote of the bloc of five nominees for the Fed on Tuesday, including making acting Chair Jerome Powell’s position permanent, denying a quorum for the committee, and preventing it from voting. That’s despite the fact that ranking member Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, had agreed to the timing of these votes three weeks ago.
One of those nominees is Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economics professor who, if confirmed, would become the first-ever Black woman to serve on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. Cook has a well-respected body of work, economic research into the wider impacts of racism and sexism. “New research shows that while the immediate targets of racism are unquestionably hurt the most, discrimination inflicts a staggering cost on the entire economy, reducing the wealth and income of millions of people, including many who do not customarily view themselves as victims,” she wrote in a 2020 op-ed for The New York Times. “We are robbing countless people of higher standards of living and well-being when we allow racial discrimination to flourish from generation to generation.”
That research has led Republicans on the Banking Committee to declare her “fundamentally not qualified” for her “extreme left-wing political advocacy.” Her work, one declared, is
“more like social science than […] economics and monetary policy.” That, Darrick Hamilton, a professor of economics and urban policy at the New School in New York, is both “racist and sexist.” Cook “checks all the boxes that a traditional Fed board member would have, but does a lot more that is innovative and useful,” he said. “The status quo has served the interest of an elite that has no desire to reorient power. And politically, the anxiety around race is being used as a strategic football,” Hamilton told The Washington Post.
Speaking of sexism, the blockade is ostensibly against Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury who has done work on the economic impacts of climate change. She has urged financial regulators to use their tools to respond to risks posed by climate change and has been nominated as the Fed’s next vice chair for supervision, one of the most powerful bank regulators in the world. So of course the fossil fuel industry has been fighting her nomination and tasking Republicans with blocking it.
McConnell is calling these nominees “highly controversial […]—extremely controversial—who repeatedly expressed the view that the Fed should be involved in things that are not the Fed’s responsibility.” They are not highly controversial. They have the support of dozens of prominent economists and former officials from the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, including former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Bush White House CEA Chair Glenn Hubbard, and plus much of the banking industry. While Republicans are screaming about inflation, they’re blocking the key set of officials who need to be in place to deal with it.
But it’s not just this committee, and it looks like Republicans are gearing up to use this tactic more broadly.
It’s becoming clearer by the day—Republicans aren’t going to let Biden and the Democrats have any easy or straightforward wins between now and the midterms, and Democrats have going to have to get just as ruthless in return.
That will include changing the Senate’s rules on processing nominations. That’s not like going nuclear on passing legislation, but a change to the rules of the Senate to allow nominees with majority support to get a vote on the floor. That, however, is likely going have to wait until New Mexico Senator Ben Ray Luján returns in a few weeks after he’s recovered from his stroke. This is a change that Democratic Sens. Manchin and Sinema are less likely to oppose since they’ve both been pretty consistent on nominees and the president’s authority to appoint them.