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Tag: shutdown fight

  • Commentary: In shutdown fight, this Nevada Democrat stands (almost) alone. And she’s fine with that

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    As the partial government shutdown grinds on, with no end in sight, Catherine Cortez Masto stands ready to end it right now.

    The lawyerly senator from Nevada is one of just two Democrats to repeatedly vote with Republicans and Maine’s independent senator, Angus King, to have the federal government up and running.

    She’s not only bucking her Senate colleagues with her contrarian stance, but also placing herself squarely at odds with the animating impulse of her party’s political base: Stop Trump! Give no quarter! Now is the time! This is the fight!

    Cortez Masto evinces not a flicker of doubt.

    “I have been very consistent about the cost of a shutdown and the impact to Americans and the fact that I believe we need to work in a bipartisan way to find solutions to what we’re seeing right now, which is this looming healthcare crisis,” Cortez Masto said from Washington.

    “And I think we can do that by keeping the government open. I don’t think we should do it by swapping the pain of one group of Americans for another.”

    Unlike the Democrats’ other defector, Pennsylvania’s quirky Sen. John Fetterman, Cortez Masto hasn’t developed a reputation for partisan heresy, or antagonized party peers by playing footsie with President Trump and the MAGA movement.

    Despite her temporary alliance with the GOP, she’s unstinting in her criticism of the president and the Republican stance on healthcare, the issue at the heart of the shutdown fight.

    “Of course we need to stand up to Trump’s attacks on our families and our country,” she said. “I’ve been one of the most vocal opponents of Trump’s disastrous trade and tariff policies.”

    Her split with fellow Democrats, she suggested, is not over ends but rather means.

    It’s entirely possible, Cortez Masto insisted, to keep the government open for business and, at the same time, work through the parties’ differences over healthcare, including, most imminently, the end of subsidies that have kept insurance costs from skyrocketing.

    It comes down to negotiation, trust and compromise, which in Cortez Masto’s view, is still possible — even in these rabidly partisan times.

    “That’s what Congress is built on,” she said. “Congress is built on compromise, working together across the aisle to get stuff done. I still believe in it.”

    Although she noted — with considerable understatement — “there are those in the administration and some of my colleagues” who disagree.

    Not to mention a great many Democratic activists who believe anything short of jailing Trump and dispatching the entire GOP-run Congress to a far-off desert island amounts to cowardly capitulation.

    Nevada, where Cortez Masto was born and bred, is a state that was Republican red for a very long time before turning blue-ish for a while, starting under Barack Obama in 2008. It went back to red-ish under Trump in 2024.

    Cortez Masto, a former state attorney general, was first elected to the Senate in 2016, replacing the onetime Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, after the Democrat retired.

    Six years later, when she sought reelection, Cortez Masto was widely considered Democrats’ most endangered incumbent. She was not nearly as powerful or prominent as Reid had been. Inflation was raging, and Nevada was still suffering an economic hangover from the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Her opponent was a middling Republican, Adam Laxalt, a failed gubernatorial candidate and one of the architects of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. He also seemed to harbor a soft spot for the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters.

    Still, Cortez Masto barely beat him, winning by fewer than 10,000 votes out of more than 1 million cast. In retrospect, the result could be seen as a harbinger of Trump’s success in carrying the state after twice losing Nevada.

    Cortez Masto next faces reelection in 2028, which is politically ages away. By then, the shutdown will be long forgotten. (And presumably long over.)

    Her focus, she said, is the here and now and, especially, the shutdown’s economic effect at a time Nevada is already feeling the negative consequences of Trump’s trade and immigration policies. Las Vegas, which runs on tourism, has experienced a notable slump, and Cortez Masto suggested the shutdown only makes things worse.

    That, however, hasn’t deterred Nevada’s other U.S. senator, Jacky Rosen, who has repeatedly voted alongside nearly every other Democrat to keep the government shuttered until Republicans give in.

    “Nevadans sent me here to fight for them,” Rosen said in a speech on the Senate floor. “Not to cave.”

    Asked about the fissure, Cortez Masto responded evenly and with diplomacy. “She’s a good friend.… Our goal is to fight for Nevada and we are doing it,” she said. “We both are doing it in different ways.”

    So, negotiation. Bipartisanship. Compromise.

    What makes Cortez Masto think Trump, who’s run roughshod over Congress and the courts, can be trusted to honor any deal Democrats cut with Republicans to reopen the government and address the healthcare crisis she sees?

    “Well, that’s the rub, right? We know what he’s doing,” she replied. He’s “flouting the law when it comes to … taking the role of legislators and appropriating funds at his own whim…. So, of course, no, you can’t trust him.

    “But he is there. What you got to figure out is how you work together with Republican colleagues to get something done.”

    Cortez Masto noted, dryly, that Congress is, in fact, a separate branch of government with its own power and authority. Republicans have ceded both to Trump and if they really want to solve problems, she said, and do more than the president’s bidding, they “need to come out and do bipartisan legislation to push back on this administration.”

    “We’ve got to govern,” Cortez Masto said. “We’ve got to work together.”

    Wouldn’t that be something.

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    Mark Z. Barabak

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  • Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

    Kevin McCarthy Finally Defies the Right

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    The speaker made a last-minute reversal to avert a government shutdown. It could cost him his job.

    Anna Moneymaker / Getty

    Updated at 9:02 p.m. ET on September 30, 2023

    For weeks, Speaker Kevin McCarthy seemed to face an impossible choice as he haggled over spending bills with his party’s most hard-line members: He could keep the government open, or he could keep his job. At every turn, McCarthy’s behavior suggested that he favored the latter option. He continued accepting the demands of far-right Republicans to deepen spending cuts and dig in against the Democrats, making a shutdown at tonight’s midnight deadline all but a certainty.

    Read: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open

    With just hours to go, however, the speaker abruptly changed course, defying his conservative tormentors and partnering with Democrats to avert a shutdown. The House this afternoon overwhelmingly approved a temporary extension of federal funding. The Senate passed the bill in the evening, putting off a shutdown for at least 45 days and buying both parties more time to negotiate spending for the next fiscal year.

    The question now is whether McCarthy’s pivot will end his nine-month tenure as speaker. By folding—for now—on the shutdown fight, he is effectively daring Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and other hard-line Republicans to make good on their threats to depose him. “If somebody wants to remove [me] because I want to be the adult in the room, go ahead and try,” McCarthy told reporters before the vote. “But I think this country is too important.”

    The stopgap bill includes disaster-relief money sought by both parties, but McCarthy refused to add $6 billion in Ukraine aid that the Biden administration and a bipartisan majority of senators wanted. The Senate had been on the verge of passing its own extension that included the Ukraine money, but after the House vote it was expected to accept McCarthy’s proposal instead. Whether House Republicans agree to include Ukraine assistance in the next major spending bill is unclear, but Democrats and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are likely to make an aggressive push for it.

    McCarthy’s surprising about-face set off a wild few hours in the Capitol. Democrats were caught off guard and stalled for time to read the new bill, unsure if Republicans were trying to sneak conservative policy priorities into the legislation without anyone noticing. (In the end, only a single Democrat voted against it.) Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a second-term Democrat, caused the evacuation of an entire House office building when he pulled a fire alarm just before the vote, in what Republicans said was a deliberate—and possibly criminal—effort to delay the proceedings. (Bowman’s chief of staff said that the representative “did not realize he would trigger a building alarm as he was rushing to make an urgent vote. The Congressman regrets any confusion.”)

    Annie Lowrey: How to end government shutdowns, forever

    On the right, the criticism of McCarthy was predictable and immediate. “Should he remain Speaker of the House?” one of his Republican opponents, Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, tweeted after the vote, seemingly rhetorically. Yet to more moderate Republicans, the speaker’s decision was a long time coming. McCarthy’s months-long kowtowing to the right had frustrated more pragmatic and politically vulnerable House Republicans, a few of whom threatened to join Democratic efforts to avert, or end, a shutdown. But many Republicans are even more furious at Gaetz and his allies. “Why live in fear of these guys? If they want to have the fight, have the fight,” former Representative Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, a moderate who served in the House with McCarthy for 12 years, told me. “I don’t understand why you would appease people who are doing nothing but trying to hurt and humiliate you.”

    This morning, the speaker finally came to the same conclusion. His move to relent on a shutdown only kicks the stalemate over federal spending to another day. Now it’s up to House Republicans to decide if McCarthy gets to stick around to resolve it.

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    Russell Berman

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  • Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

    Why Republicans Can’t Keep the Government Open

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    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.”

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    Russell Berman

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