Congress Is Hurtling Toward a Government Shutdown

Will the lights of the Capitol go out at long last? Intelligencer; Photo: Getty

Again and again during this accursed 2024 federal fiscal year, a gridlocked Congress has come close to, but then narrowly sidestepped, a government shutdown. Enactment of the first stopgap spending bill at the very beginning of FY 2024 led directly to the removal of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who defied hard-core conservatives by negotiating the stopgap measure with Democrats and relying on their votes to pass it. McCarthy’s successor, Mike Johnson, got a bit of a mulligan from his fellow MAGA devotees during his own first shutdown crisis in November, and he did manage to mix things up by dividing the necessary stopgap measures into two bills, making it look a bit less like just business as usual. And he more or less stumbled into an extension of these dual stopgap bills in January with a general understanding that it was the last time the can would be kicked down the road.

,

Unsurprisingly, given the deeply divided power centers of this Congress, all this extra time has not led to bipartisan agreement over the regular appropriations bills that are supposed to be individually enacted (though the last time it happened was in 1996) instead of being passed in batches or in one big “omnibus” bill, which conservatives claim to abhor even as they keep going along with the practice. So something has to give on March 1, when the first stopgap measure expires, and then on March 8, when funding for the rest of the federal government expires. According to Axios, a shutdown seems more likely than not:

,

Behind closed doors, House Republicans have shifted from optimistically cautious to expecting a government shutdown, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) will have to choose in coming weeks between a fight with Democrats that threatens a shutdown, or a deal with Democrats that threatens his job.

“People are predicting a shutdown even if it’s just for a few days,” a GOP lawmaker recently told Axios.

,

The House Freedom Caucus types who put the gavel in Johnson’s hands and control his fate have three distinct objectives in these funding fights. First, they want to avoid complicity in what they regard as “runaway federal spending,” which means they will virtually force Johnson to seek Democratic votes to pass anything. Second, they’re looking to obtain votes on policy “riders” that reflect their ideological views, particularly on hot-button issues like abortion and transgender rights. And third, they want to secure an actual reduction in nondefense spending. On this final point, there’s an approaching deadline that can give them a victory claim. Under the terms of the debt-limit deal McCarthy made with Senate Democrats last year, there will be an across-the-board one percent cut in appropriations if Congress is still relying on a “continuing resolution” rather than regular appropriations bills to fund the federal government beyond April. That could be a lot better for conservatives than any deal they could secure with other Republicans and with Democrats.

,

If these across-the-board cuts wind up becoming the goal for House conservatives, they could well force a shutdown in March that would be replaced with a year-long CR once the pressure for funding became intolerable. In the meantime, they would be free to posture over policy riders they know Democrats will reject in order to deflect the blame for inaction.

,

The question we cannot answer yet is whether Johnson would go along with a “shutdown followed by robo-cuts” strategy, even though it would make him look feckless while alarming the swing-district House Republicans who fear a government shutdown might cook their gooses in November. He may not have a lot of choice in the matter if House Freedom Caucus folk renew their threats to take away his gavel just as they did McCarthy’s, as Punchbowl News reports:

,

Johnson effectively has three choices right now to avoid a partial shutdown on March 1 — He can push for a stopgap bill to give appropriators more time to craft spending bills; he can put a full-year CR on the floor; or he can try to pass compromise bills with Democrats. Two of those options — a stopgap or compromise bills — could cost Johnson the speakership.

,

With Democrats very unlikely to back the full-year measure that would embrace across-the-board spending cuts, conservatives may force Johnson to wade into a shutdown that would eventually produce the results they want. These are people far less likely than Johnson to fear a shutdown, as they made clear in a recent meeting with the Speaker:

,

[Byron] Donalds, who was particularly animated in the meeting, told Johnson he doesn’t think Republicans would lose a shutdown fight with President Joe Biden because “Barack Obama actually had control over the bully pulpit. Joe Biden does not.”

,

So this time around, Johnson, the Mr. Magoo of the 118th Congress, may stumble into a government shutdown with his eyes wide shut.

,,