The government shuts down Nov. 17 at midnight unless Congress acts in the next 11 days to pass a short-term funding bill, or a continuing resolution. As of Monday, it looks like the Republican House has no intention of working on that this week: There is no CR on the schedule.
If Punchbowl News is to be believed, Speaker Mike Johnson hasn’t brought his leadership team together to hash out options with the conference, and the “GOP whip operation is not currently in action at all.” If Johnson is to be believed, working on a CR is his focus. "We worked through the weekend on a stopgap measure," Johnson said on Fox News Sunday.
The House GOP will hold an all-conference, closed-door meeting Tuesday, but Punchbowl’s sources in the leadership’s office “told us that they don’t expect much of an answer on the path forward until after that gathering.” The House is basically where it was in September, with no agreement even within the GOP conference on how to proceed to keep the government open. This time, however, the guy in charge is a Freedom Caucus ally and the least experienced speaker in 140 years.
Instead of working on a CR this week, Johnson is following the plan former Speaker Kevin McCarthy was following before all hell broke loose and he was deposed: passing individual appropriations bills in order to prove ... something. McCarthy seemed to be trying to save himself by showing his detractors that he was committed to deep spending cuts, and that he could force the Senate to negotiate those deep cuts. Johnson seems to be carrying on with the plan.
The problem with that strategy is that it’s no more popular under Johnson than it was under McCarthy. Each of the funding bills up for consideration this week has opposition: The transportation bill makes deep rail cuts in New York and California members’ districts; the justice bill is extremely MAGA, with deep cuts for the FBI; the agriculture bill slashes farm subsidies too much and has an extreme anti-abortion provision.
"We recognize that we may not get all the appropriations bills done by this deadline of Nov. 17 but we're going to continue in good faith,” Johnson said Sunday, in very bad faith. He might be a newbie, but he knows that the appropriations bills can’t be done by the shutdown deadline, because there is no way anything that the House passes will be passed by the Senate, and that getting those bills done is going to take days, if not weeks, of negotiations between the chambers.
Compounding the uncertainty, Johnson is still talking about doing a “laddered CR,” an idea that no one has ever heard of, except Freedom Caucus Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who thought it up. The idea is to create a cascading series of shutdown threats, with different agencies funded for varying lengths of time. That, too, will never fly with the Senate.
What Johnson could be planning is to wait until the very last minute to pass a CR, and then blame either Democrats in the House or the Senate for the bill’s failure and the resulting shutdown. That was basically McCarthy’s plan in September. House Democrats defeated his ploy of holding a vote with no notice, using smart procedural moves to buy themselves enough time to consider the bill. They then voted for it and saved the day, ironically sealing McCarthy’s fate. Rep. Matt Gaetz used that excuse—that McCarthy passed a funding bill with Democrats—as the impetus for ousting McCarthy.
Johnson has a little more leeway than McCarthy did in negotiating in his own conference. The Freedom Caucus loves him, so they’ll be more forgiving when he has to bow to the inevitable and pass something that Democrats in the House and Senate will accept. Either that or he sticks with the maniacs and doesn’t pass anything, letting the government shut down. That does seem to be their ultimate annual goal.
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