The House of Representatives passed a clean continuing resolution Tuesday with hefty bipartisan support, averting the shutdown that would have followed the expiration of the last stopgap, which cost former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) his job.
This vote has often been framed as Johnson’s first big test as speaker. That he got through it alive speaks more to the member exhaustion and “new kid in class” goodwill he was a beneficiary of than to any change in the dynamics that have made leading the Republican conference untenable.
The framing is being done, and Johnson comes out in second place way out there.
the weariness pervading the House. As Republican leadership mentioned many times in their morning press conference, the chamber has been in session for 10 weeks straight without recess.
We might weep for them, until we remember those 5-6 day weekends they’ve taken along the way.
“We did put him in the game in the fourth quarter when we’re down 35-nothing and so we can’t hold him to the same standards as the guy who got us to that 35-nothing deficit,” Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), one of McCarthy’s ousters, told reporters Tuesday. “However, we don’t expect him to come in and punt on third down, and that’s what we think he’s doing here.”
Please leave the lame and inapplicable sports metaphors to Senator Potatohead.
I don’t mind this from the NYT:
BREAKING NEWS
The House passed legislation to avert a government shutdown after Democrats rescued a temporary spending plan that many Republicans opposed.
“We did put him in the game in the fourth quarter when we’re down 35-nothing and so we can’t hold him to the same standards as the guy who got us to that 35-nothing deficit,” Rep. Bob Good (R-VA), one of McCarthy’s ousters, told reporters Tuesday. “However, we don’t expect him to come in and punt on third down, and that’s what we think he’s doing here.”
Better analogy is you’re punting in the parking lot after losing the game. If you weren’t blocking the exit, nobody would care how you rationalized your loss.
Johnson, for his part, insists that it’s a “very different situation” than the one that got McCarthy ousted, due to the “laddered” component of the CR. It’s part of his messaging campaign to convince the right wing that he got them a win with the two-step stopgap. They’d wanted many more rungs on the ladder to force a cascade of shutdown threats.
“This is a different situation — the innovation that we’ve created, this new vehicle, that Democrats initially said was so frightening, actually turns out to be something that will change the way we do this,” Johnson said at his Tuesday morning press conference, when asked if he was concerned about getting the McCarthy treatment.
Smacks of that probably apocryphal Native American “review” of Daylight Savings Time “Only [in DC] could they believe that cutting off the top of a blanket and re-attaching it to the bottom of the blanket increases the overall length of the blanket…”
I wish the Democrats would name and shame the members on their side of the aisle that were not in favor of eliminating the debt ceiling back when they controlled all three branches of government. This is a continual embarrassment and could one day prove to be disastrous to the country and/or the Democratic party.
Something tells me that there’s more to this than you claim.
Yes, the laddering innovation is quite, um, innovative. It totally changes everything: more shutdown threats in our future now. Congrats!
Except that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the debt ceiling. Eliminating the debt ceiling would still leave the government at risk of a shutdown if they don’t approve the budget or continuing resolutions.
Ah, thank you.
No matter the fancy two-step maneuver, the basics remain the same. And many Republicans made clear Tuesday that the honeymoon Johnson was benefitting from this week would not persist into January and February, when the stopgaps expire. Then, when these same dynamics persist and the right flank is arguing for a slate of dead-on-arrival policy priorities — with no major holidays to skip down for — the precarity of Johnson’s speakership may come into sharper focus.
GOPnik Krazy Klownshoe Kaukus: “We’d like to shift the whole shutdown fiasco to just before the 2024 campaign season kicks off, when a lot more people will be paying attention.”
Dems: “Oh pleease don’t throw me in that thar briar patch!”
The theory that if you can hold the national budget hostage long enough that Wallstreet will come begging for more of that.
“Instead of pulling off a single Band-Aid, I’d much rather slowly, excruciatingly, remove a whole half dozen. It’ll hurt less, because argle froth drool rave.”
My understanding was that there were two separate processes. One is the budget. The other is when the debt reaches a particular threshold, upon which Congress has to pass a resolution to raise the debt ceiling, even though budget has already passed. It is the last process that I wanted to see eliminated. Isn’t this what is being negotiated here. Let them fight over the budget, but lets not make another battleground when the debt reaches arbitrary levels.
Later edit: Thanks all for the clarification
I agree completely with eliminating the debt ceiling. But that has nothing to do with this, the debt limit won’t be hit until at least January 2025.
This shutdown threat is solely about funding the government. Congress needs to allocate money for all the various organizations and departments. They could do it through passing a proper budget and formally allocate money in detail. But they don’t have time to do that before the run out of funding on Friday, so instead they are passing a continuing resolution that keeps funding everything at the same rate that it has been. That continuing resolution has been broken into two parts by Johnson. One part expires Jan 19, 2024 the other expires Feb 2, 2024, so now we get to have two future shutdown crises for the price of one right after MLK day.
It is not.
The debt ceiling crisis was resolved, in the sense of kicked down the road, until 1 Jan 2025. Details here:
What is currently being (speaking charitably) discussed is the funding of the federal government for the fiscal year.
In other words, “how much money will we spend.”
The debt ceiling, which I completely agree is stupid and needs to be abolished, root and branch, is “how much of the debt we have already incurred will we honor.” It is not up for debate right now.
Really, the “guy who got us to that 35-nothing deficit” did so in large part because his own team blitzed him (including Rep. Good).
Kevin McCardboard: first quarterback ever to get sacked by his own offensive (brother, are they ever!) line.
The goobers do not have a fucking clue what it is they sre doing. They sre still in “burn it down” mode. Thry don’t thst ehst thry sre doing is burning down the GOP. They’ll find out…after Turkey Day