House Set To Fund Government Without Stupid 'Grandma Can't Vote' Bill, Dems To Rescue Again

Now we can face this all again in December, when Rs are big mad about the election.

What won’t be happening today.

The House of Representatives is set to pass a temporary funding bill today that will keep the US government running until December 20, avoiding a government shutdown right before the election and instead shifting the chaos to right before Christmas, when no one will be inconvenienced. The current federal budget expires September 30, meaning that without either a full budget or a temporary funding measure (aka a “continuing resolution,” or CR), large parts of the government would have been shuttered at 12:01 AM next Tuesday.

As you may recall, House Speaker Mike Johnson had last week insisted that bill absolutely had to include a voter-suppression measure that Donald Trump dearly wanted, but that version of the bill didn’t have full Republican support and would have been dead on arrival in the Senate, because Democrats don’t care for voter suppression. Once Johnson removed that poison pill, Democrats then agreed to sign on to the three-month funding measure. In addition to funding the government at current levels, the legislation adds $231 million to the Secret Service budget to help the agency keep people from trying to kill presidential candidates, which is suddenly much in vogue, even without becoming a trend on TikTok.

The discarded voting measure, called the “SAVE Act,” would have required every voter to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote. Trump and other rightwing bigots said was needed to prevent non-citizens from stealing elections, although it’s already a felony for noncitizens to register or to vote. Noncitizen registrations are extremely rare, usually the result of an error. And noncitizen voting is even rarer; in the Heritage Foundation’s records of illegal voting, there have been only 68 cases of noncitizens casting a ballot since the early 1980s. That’s out of billions of ballots in all the elections in those four decades.

In reality, as a Brennan Center study shows, such a requirement would create a huge paperwork burden on American citizens who don’t have easy access to documents like birth or marriage records — about 21.3 million of us would need more than a day to obtain the records, or copies of them, and nearly four million can’t get them at all because the records were lost or destroyed. So that stupid bill is dead for now, at least, and now Johnson can blame mean Democrats for killing it and then helping him avoid a shutdown that would have been terrible for Republicans in an election year.

Keeping the government running was the last assignment Congress had to finish before its big pre-election recess, so once that’s done, members will all head home to campaign, go on CNN or Fox News, or have shady meetings with local backers named “Oleg.” After both houses adjourn later this week, they won’t be back until after the November 5 election.

Johnson said that allowing a shutdown before the election would have been “political malpractice,” so OK, he would let Democrats rescue him yet again. He told reporters Tuesday that it was all a sports metaphor, explaining, “We came a little short of the goal line, so we have to go with the last available play,” although as far as we know there really isn’t an option in football to ask the other team if it would please carry the ball into its own end zone.

The Washington Post helpfully notes (gift link) that this is now “the seventh time in the past year that the House GOP majority will rely on Democratic support to pass a bill to fund the government.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was actually quite generous, then, when he said in a floor speech yesterday that “This feels like the third or fourth time this Congress that House Republicans have had to learn the same elementary lesson: In a narrowly divided government, partisan bully tactics and appealing to the extreme just does not work, plain and simple.”

Once Congress returns to work in November, Johnson says Republicans’ top goal will be passing 12 annual appropriations bill to fund the government for fiscal 2025, which we’ll believe when we see it. As the Post points out, that might not be enough time to get the job done, since it would require agreement from both House and Senate negotiators, so the other options would be yet another CR, which would kick funding the government to the next Congress, whose composition will be known by then. Yet another option would be an omnibus spending bill that funds the entire government through next September, but Republicans hate those and Johnson said Tuesday he will not, absolutely will not, allow an omnibus bill to pass in the House, no way:

“We have broken the Christmas omni, and I have no intention of going back to that terrible tradition,” he said. “There won’t be a Christmas omnibus.”

Johnson’s display of resolve is no doubt as firm as his determination to pass that voter-fuckery bill Trump wanted, or his other vows to never negotiate with Democrats.

But maybe if Democrats win control of the House, lame-duck Republicans really will be motivated to use their remaining time in power to make necessary compromises with Democrats to fully fund the government, because that way at least some GOP priorities would be in the budget. Yes, that could certainly happen, mmm-hmm. Or the rightwing creeps in the Freedom Caucus may use the remaining 2024 session to try to ratfuck the election results and pass an impeachment resolution against Kamala Harris, you never know.

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What Stupid Bullsh*t Will Republicans Shut Down Government Over THIS Time?

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[NBC News / WaPo (gift link) / Brennan Center]

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