GOP Border Demands Drive New Government Shutdown Threat

A government shutdown in ten days? Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

For a good while there, congressional discussions on the spending front were proceeding on two separate tracks, both of them fraught with gridlock and peril. On one track was the general funding of the federal government for the current fiscal year, which has been limping along through stopgap agreements since October; conservatives have demanded both sharply lower non-defense spending and all sorts of right-wing policy riders on issues like abortion and the alleged “weaponization of law enforcement” by the Biden administration. This is the rat’s nest of disputes that brought down Speaker Kevin McCarthy and where a government shutdown remains possible when stopgap funding ends. But then there’s a separate track involving the president’s request for “supplemental” (i.e. non-budgeted) money to step up aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan while boosting border security spending. A deal on that has been stalled thanks to Republican demands for major changes in immigration and asylum policies.

Now the usual House Republican troublemakers in the House Freedom Caucus are insisting that the border battle jump tracks and become a factor in general spending talks, not just the supplemental spending talks. That means they are threatening not just to hold up aid to Ukraine and Israel but to shut down the government if Democrats don’t accede to their strident demands for the kind of border policies Donald Trump might like. HFC stalwart Chip Roy of Texas is leading the charge, as The Hill reports:

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) said conservatives need to withhold government funding to force the Biden administration to negotiate to meet the GOP’s border demands, with a potential partial shutdown just two weeks away.  

During his appearance on “The Sean Spicer Show” on Thursday, Roy called out President Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as being “lawless” and sounded off that, for conservatives, it is a “now or never” moment to secure the southern border …

“[W]e have to not do this for political purposes. We can’t just say, ‘Oh, we’ll win elections if we just fight, but we’ll figure it out next January.’ No, we have an obligation right now, to actually stop them. So we need to withhold funding and force Biden to the table. There’s no other choice. It’s now or never.”

What makes the shutdown threat very serious is that in the Senate negotiations in which a border deal has been under discussion for months now, the White House and Senate Democrats have dug in their heels in opposition to some of the “reforms” Republicans have demanded, most notably the abolition of the president’s power to “parole” on humanitarian grounds certain migrants who would otherwise be subject to exclusion or deportation. It also doesn’t help that House Republicans are moving toward impeaching the administration’s chief negotiator on border policies, Secretary Mayorkas. But the GOP hardliners almost seem eager to trigger the shutdown that most Republicans fear and loathe as a potential November millstone:

This new demand significantly places new land mines along the already difficult path to a spending deal that could keep the government open, particularly since the first of two stopgap spending bills (involving domestic federal agencies due to be funded in four separate appropriations bills) expires on January 19. Some of the same conservatives demanding potentially impossible border-policy concessions are also angry at an agreement Speaker Mike Johnson has reached with Democrats on “top line” (i.e. overall defense and non-defense) spending levels for a full-year appropriations bill; they don’t believe it cuts spending nearly enough. Translating the top-line agreement into four appropriations bills in ten days and getting general agreement on them was already going to be a heavy lift for Johnson; there’s even talk of another stopgap bill, though Republicans claim to hate them like sin. But if the new Speaker again end-runs those on his right flank by getting either full-year appropriations bills or another stopgap measure through the House with substantial Democratic votes, he may suffer the fate of his predecessor, who did the same thing and promptly lost his gavel.

Even if Johnson somehow avoids a partial government shutdown on January 19, he’ll have to dodge bullets again when the rest of the government’s funding (including the Pentagon’s) runs out on February 2.

It’s a hell of a situation for a dude new to congressional leadership whose street cred with the far right was his ticket to the speakership. Even if Democrats help him figure out a way to put together spending bills that can get through Congress, they are not going to cave to the likes of Chip Roy or Eli Crane on immigration policy. So it’s unclear how the government will stay completely and continuously open this year, given the death hold the HFC exerts over the GOP’s tiny margin of control in the chamber. These are people who believe the public hates government as much as they do. So shutting it down is always a good option.