Spending Groundhog Sees Shadow, So Six More Weeks Of Government Being Open!
Then we get to do this whole rigamarole again, yay.
Yr Wonkette never feels so much like Sisyphus as we do at “Congress has to pass spending bills” time. Which, given the ridiculously inept and dysfunctional ways our esteemed national legislature works (for lack of a better word) in this polarized era, seems to come along about every other week.
The reason for our Sisyphean angst? Because every time we’ve written about this subject in the last decade and a half when Republicans have controlled at least one chamber of Congress plays out exactly the same. The GOP congresscritters spend weeks yelling at each other because some of the less insane members don’t actually want to, say, zero out funding for multiple Cabinet departments. Meanwhile, the Marjorie Taylor Greene wing, comprising dozens and dozens of Guatemalan insanity peppers, threatens to hold its collective breath until they all pass out unless the spending bills include language making extra, extra super-duper IN ALL CAPS sure that not one penny of federal spending goes to Planned Parenthood or feeding hungry children or some other Dickens-on-meth priority they have vomited up from their blackened souls.
Meanwhile the Democrats stand off to the side and wait for all the toddlers to tire themselves out before they reach the inescapable conclusion that no spending bill that can earn the president’s signature will pass without Democratic votes. Then Republican leadership cuts some deal with Democrats to keep the government funded for a couple of months while they allegedly negotiate long-term spending bills, and then those negotiations prove fruitless and we get to do this whole insulting minstrel dance routine all over again.
So it was this week. The government was going to run out of funding at midnight on Friday. Everyone did the dance. Then both houses of Congress passed a short-term spending bill with bipartisan votes. Very bipartisan in the House’s case:
While the bill passed with 314 votes, most of those votes — 207 — came from the House Democratic minority. Republicans, meanwhile, were evenly split, with 107 GOP members voting for the measure, and 106 voting against it.
Put another way, to prevent a government shutdown, House Republican leaders grudgingly embraced the obvious solution they wanted to avoid: They relied on Democrats to govern.
Oh boy, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson understood that a shutdown would hurt the GOP more than the Democrats and acted accordingly. This is an unprecedented act. Except for all the times John Boehner had to accept it. And Paul Ryan had to accept it. Even old Milquetoast Kevin McCarthy had to accept it, and that guy was so craven he’d have let the House Freedom Caucus pass a resolution demanding that the sun now has to rise in the West just so they wouldn’t boot him out of the Speaker’s chair.
Shoot, this wasn’t even the first time in his short reign that Johnson had to pass a spending bill with Democratic votes, though that time he tried to make it a little harder.
Needless to say, this has caused all sorts of agita amongst Republicans. Particularly where abortion is concerned.
From POLITICO:
Conservatives cheered the recent rise of Johnson, a longtime abortion opponent, and said they trusted him to deliver wins on abortion that proved elusive under his predecessor. But the Louisiana Republican has met intense pushback from swing district Republicans in his conference and from the Democratic-controlled Senate, which has vowed to block attempts to roll back abortion access. That leaves little room for Johnson to craft a deal that doesn’t alienate at least some members of his caucus and isn’t dead on arrival in the upper chamber.
Ever since the conservative-dominated Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, American voters have made it very clear, over and over and over again, that they are angry about the yeeting of abortion rights into the sun, and they will punish (with votes!) at every level of government the Republicans who agitated for the Dobbs decision, or cheered it when it was handed down, or voted to elevate a bunch of mouth-breathing anti-abortion Neanderthals to SCOTUS in the first place. And since Americans have elections almost as often as the Congress has to pass spending bills, there has been and will be a lot of ballot box punishment for Republicans.
PREVIOUSLY!
The whole standoff has also led to some hilarious Kubler-Ross-level stages of grief from various conservatives:
“You’re not going to get everything that you want when you have divided government,” [Rep. Bob Good, R-VA] said. “But the House majority ought to count for something. We should get at least half of what we want, shouldn’t we?”
There you go, Bob. You’ve gotten past anger and are well into the bargaining stage. Depression is in sight. Then, maybe after you read a few polls or pick up a newspaper, acceptance.
Or maybe a staff member could remind Good that the Republicans only had a majority of four seats at the beginning of this Congress. Now, thanks to resignations, retirements, the defenestration of George Santos, and two members being out for at least another month due to health issues, the majority is down to one.
Given that Marjorie Taylor Green is threatening a motion to vacate the chair to kick Johnson out of the Speaker’s office over the spending bill (though she says it’s because she’s mad he left in aid to Ukraine, not because he isn’t loudly telling the president NO MORE ‘BORTIONS), passing conservative priorities with only Republican votes is obviously going to require a level of discipline among the rank-and-file that even the Prussian army would find challenging.
MORE PREVIOUSLY!
There was also this Heritage Foundation flunky, who is still at “anger” on the Kubler-Ross scale because his priority of ending abortion conflicts with the priority of most GOP legislators to get re-elected, and he hasn’t come to terms with it yet:
He added that Congress should say to the executive branch: “If you want money to do what you’re supposed to do, which is serve our veterans or provide health care, etc., then you do it without the taint of abortion.”
Sure. Then say hello to Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who will be way less open to Heritage Foundation proposals than Mike Johnson would be.
The spending bill both houses managed to pass this week only goes until the first week of March, so we get to write this entire post all over again in a mere six weeks or so, hooray and lolsob.
[MaddowBlog / POLITICO]
Wonkette also has spending obligations, though mostly for booze and abortions.
***“But the House majority ought to count for something. We should get at least half of what we want, shouldn’t we?”***
No, Bob, you idiot -- your Freedom Caucus does not stand for the whole party just because you've battered the rest of the House Republicans into submission. In reality, you're fifteen delusional extortionists, so if you get more than 2.5% of what you want, you should count your fucking blessings.
If Democrats get both houses of Congress, they should make this automatic: funding just continues at current levels if a budget is not passed on time.
Then yeet the debt ceiling into the sun, pass a reproductive rights act, expand the supreme court, pass a new voter's rights act, pass a dreamer law, immigration law reforms, get rid of the Trump tax cuts and get billionaires paying taxes again, end child labor (something I never thought we'd have to do again), and a hundred other things.