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Tag: additional funding

  • The Republicans Have No Majority

    The Republicans Have No Majority

    Mike Johnson now knows what Kevin McCarthy was dealing with.

    At the new speaker’s behest, House Republicans today relied on Democratic votes to avert a government shutdown by passing legislation that contains neither budget cuts nor conservative policy priorities. The bill was a near replica of the funding measure that McCarthy pushed through the House earlier this fall—a supposed surrender to Democrats that prompted hard-liners in his party to toss him from the speakership.

    Johnson is unlikely to suffer the same fate, at least not yet. But today’s vote laid bare a reality that’s become ever more apparent over the past year: Republicans may hold more seats than Democrats, but they don’t control the House.

    Under McCarthy and now Johnson, Republicans have been unable to pass just about any important legislation without significant help from Democrats. The three most consequential votes this year have been the spring budget deal that prevented a catastrophic U.S. debt default, September’s stopgap spending bill that averted a shutdown, and today’s proposal that keeps the government funded through early 2024. More Democrats than Republicans have voted for all three measures.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy finally defies the right

    GOP leaders have struggled to pass their own proposals on spending bills, leaving the party empty-handed in negotiations with the Democratic-led Senate and the Biden administration. Like McCarthy before him, Johnson pledged that Republicans would advance individual appropriations bills to counter the Senate’s plans to combine them into legislative packages that are too big for lawmakers to adequately review. But in the past week, he’s been forced to scrap votes on two of these proposals because of Republican opposition.

    McCarthy surrendered to Democrats in late September after his members refused to pass a temporary spending bill containing deep cuts and provisions to lock down the southern border. When it was his turn, Johnson didn’t even bother to try a conservative approach. On Saturday, he unveiled a bill that maintains current spending levels—enacted by Democratic majorities in 2022—for another two months. He did not include additional funding for either Israel or Ukraine, nor did he include any policy provisions that might turn off Democrats. Johnson’s only wrinkle was to create two different deadlines for the next funding extension; funding for some departments will run out on January 19, while money for the rest of the government, including the Defense Department, will continue for another two weeks after that.

    The Louisiana Republican said that the dual deadlines would spare Congress from having to consider a trillion-dollar omnibus spending package right before Christmas, as it has done repeatedly over the past several years. “That is no way to run a railroad,” Johnson said this morning on CNBC. “This innovation prevents that from happening, and I think we’ll have bipartisan agreement that that is a better way to do it.”

    Johnson’s decision to avoid a partisan shutdown fight seemed to catch Democrats off guard. The White House initially slammed his proposal, but once party leaders on Capitol Hill realized that the spending bill contained no poison pills, they warmed to it. Democratic support became necessary once it was clear that Republicans would not be able to pass the measure on their own. Conservatives couldn’t even agree to allow a floor vote on the proposal, forcing Johnson to bring it up using a procedure that ultimately required the bill to receive a two-thirds majority to pass.

    Republican hard-liners have been no more willing to compromise under Johnson than they were under McCarthy. The conservative House Freedom Caucus, which initially suggested the two-deadline approach, ultimately opposed the bill anyway. “It contains no spending reductions, no border security, and not a single meaningful win for the American People,” the group said in a statement. “While we remain committed to working with Speaker Johnson, we need bold change.”

    Buried in that final expression of support for Johnson was the first hint of a warning. Conservatives have given the untested speaker some leeway in his opening weeks. Even McCarthy received something of a grace period; when the speaker negotiated a debt-ceiling deal with President Joe Biden, conservatives voted against the bill but didn’t try to overthrow him. Hard-liners haven’t threatened to remove Johnson, but that could change if he keeps relying on Democratic votes. When McCarthy caved to Democrats on spending for the second time, he lost his job a few days later.

    The former speaker and his allies warned his GOP critics that his replacement would find themselves in the same position: managing a majority that isn’t large enough to exert its will. “I’m one of the archconservatives,” Johnson told reporters before the vote, trying to defend himself. “I want to cut spending right now, and I would have liked to put policy riders on this. But when you have a three-vote majority, as we do right now, we don’t have the votes to be able to advance that.”

    Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’

    Johnson has now used up one of his free passes. The question is how many more he’ll get. In the coming weeks, the speaker will have to navigate a series of fiscal fights over funding for Israel, Ukraine, and the southern border. The bill that the House passed today buys Congress another two months to hash out its differences over spending, but it doesn’t resolve them. Johnson vowed not to agree to any more “short-term” extensions of federal funding, increasing the risk of a shutdown early next year. The speaker will also have to decide whether to press forward with an impeachment of Biden that could please conservatives but turn off Republicans in swing districts.

    In the meantime, frustrated lawmakers from both parties are racing to leave Congress. Since McCarthy’s ouster, nine members, five of them Republicans, have announced their plans to resign or forgo reelection. Many more are likely to do so before the end of the year. After fewer than two terms in the House, GOP Representative Pat Fallon of Texas even considered returning to his old seat in the state legislature, which Republicans have long dominated, before changing his mind today. The frustration extended to other corners of the House GOP. “We got nothing,” another Texas Republican, Representative Chip Roy, lamented to reporters yesterday.  He shouldn’t have been surprised. At the moment, Republicans in the House have a majority in name only.

    Russell Berman

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  • Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

    Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

    Yesterday was not a good day for House Republicans or for their struggling leader, Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In the morning, McCarthy was forced to scrap a procedural vote on a GOP proposal to avert a government shutdown that will commence at the end of this month if Congress doesn’t act. In the afternoon, a handful of conservatives tanked McCarthy’s bid to advance legislation funding the Pentagon.

    The failure of the proposal to prevent a shutdown was the more ominous defeat, both for Republicans and for the country. Yet even if McCarthy manages to pass a version of this, it will almost certainly be an exercise in futility. For starters, it would fund the government for a mere 30 additional days. And its basic provisions—cutting spending by 8 percent for all but the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments, restarting construction of the southern border wall, cutting off pathways for asylum seekers—will likely be stripped out by Senate Democrats.

    Despite the GOP’s evident dysfunction, Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota was in a chipper mood when he called me from the Capitol. The McCarthy ally was scurrying between meetings in an effort to help resolve the latest crisis threatening the speaker. “We’re a long way from landing the plane, but there are really productive conversations going on,” Armstrong told me. If the plane represents, in Armstrong’s metaphor, a functioning federal government, then House Republicans are still hovering at about 30,000 feet, with the runway coming rapidly into view.

    Watch: The Republicans threatening to shut down the government

    The Democrats who run the Senate aren’t involved in the “productive conversations” Armstrong was referencing. If they were, McCarthy might already have lost his job. Before he can negotiate with the Democrats, the speaker must broker a peace among the warring factions of his own party, who cannot even agree on an opening offer. Groups representing the conservative Freedom Caucus and the more pragmatic Main Street Caucus announced a deal on Sunday to support the 30-day extension, with spending cuts and border restrictions attached. But almost immediately, hard-liners rejected the proposal as insufficiently austere. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, several of these Republicans are threatening to oust McCarthy if he caves to Democrats on spending, and a few of them are openly itching for a government shutdown.

    Any five Republicans can torpedo proposals that don’t have Democratic support—as five GOP lawmakers did yesterday in blocking the defense bill—and any five could topple McCarthy by voting along with Democrats for a procedural tool known as a motion to vacate the chair. This has effectively made him a hostage of his caucus, with precious little room to maneuver.

    Even the relatively optimistic Armstrong acknowledged the difficulty of McCarthy’s position. “It’s a pretty untenable argument to say you don’t have enough Republican votes to pass anything and you can’t negotiate with Democrats on anything,” Armstrong told me.

    McCarthy has tried many times to shake off threats to his speakership, alternately daring members like Gaetz to make a bid to oust him and pointing out that with such a narrow majority, any other Republican replacement would find themselves in the same unenviable position. I asked Armstrong whether McCarthy should simply ignore the hard-liners in his conference and strike a deal with Democrats to keep the government open, come what may. “I’m not sure he should yet,” he said.

    House Republicans have received hardly any backing from their brethren in the Senate, who have shown no appetite for a shutdown fight and have been more willing to uphold the budget deal that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden in the spring. By bowing to conservative demands for deeper spending cuts, the speaker is reneging on the same agreement, which allowed Congress to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a catastrophic default. “I’m not a fan of government shutdowns,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters yesterday. “I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They have never produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans.”

    For now, McCarthy allies such as Armstrong are adamant that this spending battle must result in a change in administration policy. They have zeroed in on the border, seeing an opportunity to force Biden’s hand and take advantage of an issue on which even some Democrats, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have been critical of the president. “If we can’t use this fight to deal with the single most pressing national-security issue and humanitarian issue of our time, then shame on us,” Armstrong said.

    Read: Kevin McCarthy is a hostage

    Yet House Republicans have found themselves isolated, and bickering over legislation that—like most of their proposals this year—stands no chance of becoming law. A bipartisan majority in the Senate is likely to simply return a temporary spending bill to the House without the conservative priorities, perhaps with additional funding to aid Ukraine in its war with Russia. What then? I asked Armstrong. “I would shut it down,” he replied.

    Democrats in the House, meanwhile, have watched the unfolding GOP drama with a mix of schadenfreude and growing horror. The Republican infighting could help Democrats win back a House majority next year. But a shutdown would not reflect well on either party, and voters could end up blaming Biden as well as the GOP for the fallout. Hundreds of thousands of federal workers would be furloughed, and millions of Americans might have to wait longer for Social Security checks and other needed benefits. “The rest of the world looks at us like we’re incompetent and dysfunctional,” Representative Gerry Connolly, a Democrat whose Northern Virginia district includes thousands of federal workers, told me. “How do you explain to our European allies that we can’t fund our government?”

    Connolly is in his eighth term and, like America’s allies, has seen this brinkmanship play out several times before. He told me that whereas earlier in the month he thought Congress had a 50–50 chance of keeping the government open, he now puts the odds of a shutdown at 90 percent. “Sometimes you feel like we’re going to avert this cliff, and then there are times that you go, ‘No, we’re going off this cliff,’” Connolly said. “This one feels like we’re going off the cliff.”

    Russell Berman

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