You Know Biden Will Throw Him A Lifeline
Things are changing rapidly in regard to the Republican-engineered government shutdown; not the basics, just the strategies and humiliation for Kevin McCarthy. The basics are simple: Trump wants a shut down so the ensuing chaos and dysfunction gets blamed on Biden. And Trump’s patsies in Congress and delivering by blocking everything McCarthy appears to be doing to fend it off. Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Jeff Stein, Marianna Sotomayor and Moriah Balingit reported “McCarthy has embraced steep reductions to the U.S. safety net in an attempt to appease far-right Republican demands for lower spending. If McCarthy can win over conservatives and pass legislation funding the government, Republicans hope to have greater leverage in negotiations with the Democratic-controlled Senate and White House.” Among the draconian cuts the Republicans want to make include “cutting housing subsidies for the poor by 33 percent as soaring rents drive a national affordability crisis, forcing more than 1 million women and children onto the waitlist of a nutritional assistance program for poor mothers with young children [and] reducing federal spending on home heating assistance for low-income families by more than 70 percent with energy prices high heading into the winter months.”
McCarthy isn’t thinking about what he’s going to be doing to these peoples’ lives, just how this gives him another chance to save his miserable and pointless job as speak. The horror of this is that Trump’s and Gaetz’s Shut It Down Caucus doesn’t care what McCarthy offers; they just want to shut down the government and cause as much pain as possible.
Stein, Sotomayor and Balingit noted that “As McCarthy has seen his efforts to fund the government derailed by repeated revolts, he has toyed with larger spending cuts in hopes of passing something through the chamber to minimize the extent to which Republicans are blamed for a potential shutdown. In June, Biden and McCarthy agreed to avert a debt limit crisis with a deal that kept government funding at nearly flat levels for the next fiscal year. That amounted to a spending cut when accounting for inflation. Lawmakers also agreed to pull back tens of billions of dollars that Democrats had approved for expanding the Internal Revenue Service. However, [neo-fascists] have regarded the spending agreement as a starting point for negotiations, and they spent the summer pushing for much lower funding levels. The hard-right lawmakers angry about the debt ceiling deal froze the House for a week in June by blocking procedural votes on noncontroversial legislation. McCarthy conceded to their demands and directed the House Appropriations Committee to prepare the 12 spending bills that fund the government for the 2024 fiscal year at the 2022 spending levels, well below what Biden and McCarthy had agreed on. And despite protests from the White House, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee advanced legislation in July that would cut spending by roughly 9.5 percent on average.”
It certainly showed Biden that McCarthy has no control over his conference and is unable to deliver on his promises. That hasn’t prevented McCarthy to ask Biden, yesterday, to meet with him again, presumably to see what it will cost to get Democrats the votes he’ll need to make up for the Trump and Gaetz Shut It Down Caucus.
The GOP plans are ugly even before McCarthy’s latest round of cuts— an 80% cut to funding for public schools that serve students in poverty-stricken areas, for example. And the House Freedom Caucus has been whining that these cuts aren’t enough. So now the Senators are trying to be the grownups in the room. Yesterday Andrew Desiderio, John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman reported that the latest strategy over on that end of the Capitol is to prepare a clean 45 day CR that leaves aside Ukraine funding, the goal being to give McCarthy something he “can reasonably put on the floor to avert an Oct. 1 shutdown. However, this plan would require House Democratic votes for passage. That risks a rebellion from McCarthy’s right flank, which has voiced staunch opposition to a clean CR. It’s tough to overstate the jam McCarthy would be in here. The Senate’s CR would almost certainly pass with a large bipartisan majority. But putting this measure on the House floor could easily push conservative hardliners into trying to oust McCarthy. This may look like a lifeline for McCarthy— and, under normal circumstances, it would be. But some in his conference [the Trump-Gaetz Shut Down Caucus] will see putting this proposal on the floor as a betrayal.”
The problem is that literally nothing will satisfy this people— at least nothing short of halting all the Trump prosecutions every court— if even that, which is impossible anyway
Yesterday, McCarthy and his leadership team faced a key procedural vote for a four-bill appropriations package, including Defense, Homeland Security, Agriculture, and State’s foreign operations. They expected to pass it and then vote on the CR. And Marjorie Traitor Greene was the only Republican to vote against it. Now what? It sure isn't going to prevent a shut down.
The media’s big preoccupation: Will McCarthy save his speakership or keep the government open, since it seems unlikely he can do both. Scott Wong and Sahil Kapur reported if he doesn’t team up with at least some Democrats, the government will but down at 12:01 Sunday morning. But if he does team up with Democrats to keep it open, the Gaetz Shut It Down Caucus will oust him. “He has a career-altering decision to make,” explained one House Republican lawmaker.
Asked if he was prepared to team up with Democrats to keep the lights on, McCarthy suggested he’s not quite ready to go there yet: “I believe we have a majority here, and we can work together to solve this. It might take us a little longer, but this is important. We want to make sure we can end the wasteful spending that the Democrats have put forth.”
With just five days before a shutdown, McCarthy frantically worked through the long Yom Kippur holiday weekend on a new GOP strategy, after two previous attempts to move a key military appropriations bill were blocked by conservatives on the floor.
…McCarthy, in short, faces a stark dilemma: shut down the government and keep it closed, or risk losing his speakership— the pinnacle of a teo-decade career in elected politics— by striking a deal that Democrats can support.
…On Monday, the speaker made clear he didn’t want a shutdown but acknowledged the political reality: Because of the GOP’s razor-thin majority, just a handful of conservatives have the power to bring the floor to a standstill. And they have the backing of former President Donald Trump.
“You have to keep the government open. If people want to close the government, it only makes them weaker. Why would they want to stop paying the troops or stop paying the border agents or the Coast Guard? I don’t understand how that makes you stronger. I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make,” McCarthy told reporters.
But he added: “There’s always a handful of people who can stop anything. That same handful stopped us earlier in the year from doing anything on the floor.”
Greene, despite emerging as a central McCarthy ally this year, slammed the new McCarthy approach, saying it includes $300 billion in Ukraine aid that she opposes.
“The rule is the first step of advancing the blood money in Congress,” the Georgia Republican said in a blistering statement, referring to the four-funding-bill package. “Voting yes on the rule means more money for Ukraine. It’s that simple. No one who wants peace should vote yes on the rule to advance the bills. That’s why I’m a HARD NO on the rules package and a blank check for Ukraine!”
Gaetz, of Florida, has been the most outspoken in opposition to a short-term funding bill, publicly threatening to file a motion to vacate if McCarthy brings any CR to the floor. And Gaetz has vowed that he and a handful of other hard-right conservatives will oppose a CR no matter what.
“I’m giving a eulogy to the CR right now,” Gaetz told reporters last week. “I’m not voting for a continuing resolution, and a sufficient number of Republicans will never vote for a continuing resolution.”
If it comes to a motion to vacate, Democrats would have to decide whether to help oust the speaker or team up with McCarthy's GOP allies and bail him out. So far, Democrats from across the spectrum are staying mum on whether they’d save a GOP leader who supported Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and more recently launched an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.
Would Republicans even accept a Speaker whose gavel was saved by Democrats? Wong and Kapur ended their report by reminding their readers that on Sunday, Gaetz got into a fight with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo, blaiming the whole debacle on McCarthy “for failing to act on spending bills until the last minute. ‘We knew Sept. 30 was coming all year. And Kevin McCarthy has been dilatory. He’s been fiddling like Nero as Rome burns,’ Gaetz told the host, adding that the House is taking up individual appropriations bills now ‘because we are making them. They’re doing it with a political gun to their head,’ Gaetz said. ‘And you are welcome, America.’”
