It happened again. The U.S. government found itself on the brink of a shutdown, thanks to a standoff between House GOP leadership and the caucus’s hard-line MAGA faction. The odds of a shutdown looked high until Saturday, when Speaker Kevin McCarthy changed tactics and the House passed a “clean” stopgap spending bill which did not include any new aid for Ukraine, but funds the government at its current spending levels for another 45 days. It also includes $16 billion for federal disaster assistance, as had been requested by the White House. The Senate passed the continuing resolution about three hours before the 12:01 am Sunday deadline — which is when the federal government would have run out of funding and needed to start shutting down. Below are running updates, commentary, and analysis about this the latest developments as they unfold.
President Biden is expected to sign the bill. Nine Senate Republicans made up the only votes against the CR in the upper chamber:
As CNN explains:
The FAA is facing a double-barrel threat to its operations: not only the shutdown, but also the expiration of its authority including taxing and spending. A key FAA fund receives tax proceeds from flights and fuel, and that money is spent on FAA and airport improvements, including measures to avoid runway close-calls. The top Republican and Democrat on the House committee overseeing the FAA said the three-month extension will bridge the gap to a longer FAA reauthorization.
Some who favor the aid seem cautiously optimistic some funding can still be lined up separately. Reports Politico:
Some backers of Ukraine believe a bill allowing at least that transfer authority — which unlocks other buckets of U.S. cash for the war against Russia — could pass Congress as soon as next week, according to two people with knowledge of conversations between the House and Senate. The lack of transfer authority is a glaring omission from the spending bill abruptly passed by the House earlier Saturday. Speaker Kevin McCarthy was open to putting it in the House’s bill, according to three people familiar with the negotiations, but negotiators were unable to finalize language to put into the bill before it passed the lower chamber.
The U.S. Senate is set to vote on the 45-day funding bill by 6:30 p.m., after no more than two hours of debate. Meanwhile, House Democrats have been declaring victory on the outcome, and there are signs that President Biden will back the stopgap. Per the Washington Post:
A White House official signaled administration support for the House bill, highlighting that the legislation averts deep cuts to domestic programs and includes disaster relief. The official also said the administration expects House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to soon bring another bill to the floor to support Ukraine.
The House GOP has accused Bowman of attempting to delay a vote when he pulled a fire alarm inside the Cannon Office Building on Saturday morning, Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Bowman suggested it was an accident, and Bowman himself later told reporters that, “I thought the alarm would open the door.”
House Republicans are already calling for investigation into the incident, which Speaker Kevin McCarthy later compared to the January 6 Capitol Riot. Ben Jacobs has collected more responses from Republican lawmakers in his report on what happaned.
There also appears to have been some last-second attempted drama:
The House will stay in session after voting against a Democratic motion to adjourn. House Democrats had wanted to buy more time to read the new Republican CR — and they did so during the vote by writing their votes down by hand and submitting them individually.
It’s not clear how close the text is to what the House GOP put forward, but Senate Republicans apparently support the lower chamber’s CR. House Democrats are trying to get more time to read the House bill, emphasizing that they do not trust their GOP colleagues. Explained Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, “The notion that we should accept the word of the extreme American MAGA Republicans — who at every step of the way lie to the American people — in this Congress is ridiculous.
That’s what Speaker McCarthy just said to the New York Times’ Carl Hulse, when he asked him if he had the votes to pass the CR.
[Former speaker Nancy Pelosi], we’re told, has warned her colleagues — including Minority Leader HAKEEM JEFFRIES and some in his new leadership team — against rushing to bail out a man whom she argues can’t be trusted. Instead, she’s counseled, Democrats should let Republicans deal with the drama themselves. Pelosi’s position will not surprise veteran Hill watchers. She’s long had a frosty relationship with McCarthy, who once joked about hitting her in the head with her own speakership gavel. But Democrats say the ultimate decision about whether to engage will belong to Jeffries, who has yet to weigh in on the question of what Democrats should do if a motion to remove McCarthy is called. Customarily, the minority party acts to elect one of its own as speaker. But Democrats could sit on their hands in this case and deny GOP rebels the votes they need to follow through with an ouster.
With only hours to spare, the Speaker of the House brought a bill to keep the government funded at current levels for the next 45 days to the floor of the House on Saturday. The legislation includes funding for disaster relief but no aid for Ukraine, which has become a red line among hard right members of the Republican conference.
With the rushed process, the bill will be brought up under the suspension of the rules, which requires support of two-thirds of those voting and means McCarthy will require significant support from Democrats — especially as a number of Republicans have long pledged to vote against any continuing resolution as a matter of principle.
Don Bacon, a moderate from Nebraska, argued that a shutdown would hurt his constituents and that the only people who would benefit would be “the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and those who think it hurts Republicans.”
Bob Good of Virginia, a hardliner who was one of the 20 to repeatedly vote against McCarthy for Speaker in January, railed against what he viewed as a cave. “The speaker essentially said he’ll do anything to try to keep the government open, which means you have no leverage with the Democrats.”
In his view, the only thing McCarthy was willing to get angry about and fight for, was to keep his job. “Why doesn’t he get angry about the border?” asked Good. “Why doesn’t he get angry about the spending? Why doesn’t he get angry about Joe Biden? I have never seen that. Can we fight for something else besides just trying to be speaker at all cost?”
The question is whether McCarthy will be able to keep his job now that he’s brought this extension of government funding to the floor. Two of the red lines for his critics in his conference have been passing another continuing resolution and relying on Democrats to keep the government open. Both have now been crossed and McCarthy can only afford to lose four Republicans if a vote is held on whether he can continue as Speaker.
The House GOP’s bill, which would require a lot of Democratic support, would fund the government for 45 days at its current spending levels, and not include any new aid for Ukraine.
Per CNN earlier this morning, “one Democratic lawmaker told CNN, ‘I suspect Democrats would support a clean ‘CR’ to avoid a shutdown,’ it’s unclear if that reflects the majority of the Democratic caucus.”
The House GOP held a closed-door meeting on Saturday morning. CNN reports:
House Republicans may try to pass a stopgap funding bill via a suspension of the rules, according to GOP sources.
It’s a tactic to move the process along more quickly, but would require Democratic support. Such a measure requires a two-thirds majority and is typically used for non-controversial bills.
The idea is still under consideration and will be a point of discussion in this morning’s House GOP conference meeting, according to the source.
As of midnight Friday, it seems very likely that the federal government will be forced to shut down this weekend. House Republicans embarrassingly failed to pass their own short-term stopgap funding bill on Friday afternoon. House GOP leaders cancelled a two-week recess and have planned more votes for Saturday, but it’s not yet clear what they’ll even be voting on.
On Friday night, embattled Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said he would not support the bipartisan temporary spending bill already passed by the Senate. And as CNN notes, that was something he had to clarify after apparently confusing his fellow Republicans with earlier comments:
His late Friday night message comes after a two-hour conference meeting in the Capitol tonight, where McCarthy floated several different options — including putting the Senate bill on the floor or passing a short-term bill that excludes Ukraine money. But there is still no consensus on what — if anything — they will put on the House floor Saturday to avoid a government shutdown. At this point, McCarthy appears to be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
In the meantime, it’s easy to see what’s going to hit the fan come midnight Saturday.
Though the potential shutdown coincides with the return of student loan repayments, borrowers who are due to start remaking their payments in October will still need to do so.
“Even if House Republicans force a shutdown of the government, we still are required to resume collecting student loans this month,” U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal told NPR on Friday. That being said, NPR reports that a prolonged shutdown could put pressure on the federal student loan program in multiple ways — like making customer service even more frustrating than it already is, and if the shutdown goes on long enough, eventually disrupting the servicing and disbursement of loans.
As House GOP members left their meeting in a conference room deep in the bowels of the Capitol on Friday afternoon, there was a cascade of frustration from more establishment-oriented members of the conference. Dan Crenshaw of Texas expressed his frustration at the Republican holdouts who insisted that the House should have passed all 12 individual appropriations bills rather than trying to fund the government through a comprehensive continuing resolution: “There’s this woulda-could-shoulda that the appropriations process could have moved faster. It’s a fucking democracy. It’s hard. There’s no acknowledgement of that.”
Nicole Malliotakis, who represents Staten Island, complained in even more pointed terms: “It’s frustrating that 21 people who claim to be conservatives side with the socialist squad and the Democrats.”
In contrast, Matt Gaetz, one of the leaders of the efforts to stymie Kevin McCarthy, left the room close lipped, ignoring questions from a stampede of reporters.
Lauren Boebert was eventually coaxed into complaining about the disparate treatment of those who voted against a bill this week that included a provision limiting access to an abortion pill. “I would have loved to see as much criticism of those who voted against the ag bill as those who voted against the CR but that’s not going to happen,” she said with noticeable irritation.
Meanwhile, Republicans were inside the room discussing an effort to pass a brief stopgap measure that would keep the government open for a short period as they attempted to find a long-term solution. It was unclear whether this would be enough to satisfy the holdouts, who have insisted that all government funding should be done through individual appropriations bills.
When Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey was asked if there was anything that could satisfy the 21 Republicans who tanked the vote earlier today, he softly repeated, “I’m sure it can be worked out,” before insisting, “it has to be.” He didn’t sound entirely convinced.
As NBC News reports:
Twenty-one rebels, led by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a conservative bomb-thrower and a top Donald Trump ally, voted Friday afternoon to scuttle the 30-day funding bill, leaving Republicans without a game plan to avert a shutdown. The vote failed, 198-232.
Had the House passed this knuckle-dragger version of a CR, it would not have stopped a shutdown since it was miles away from the Senate position. But it showed there are 21 House Republicans willing to join Gaetz’s “No CR” faction, which is truly ominous.
I just published a new post responding to a quote from AEI economic policy director Michael Strain, who told the Washington Post that:
We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing. … The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.
As I explain in the post, we do know:
Many House Republicans, led by a band of right-wing hard-liners, want to impose their fiscal and policy views on the nation despite the GOP’s narrow majority in the House. Their chief asset, beyond fanaticism, is that the federal government can’t remain open past the end of the fiscal year without the concurrence of the House, and they don’t really mind an extended government shutdown, if only to preen and posture. They are being encouraged in this wildly irresponsible position by their leader and likely 2024 presidential nominee Donald Trump.
But the hard-liners’ real motive, it seems, is to use the dysfunction they’ve caused in the House to get rid of Speaker Kevin McCarthy for being dysfunctional.
You can read the rest here.
The number of employees expected to be furloughed by this shutdown would be nearly three times as many as were affected by the last one in the winter of 2018, the Washington Post reports:
The Biden administration would furlough 820,000 federal employees across the government if Congress cannot reach a spending deal by Sunday, according to estimates from the Office of Management and Budget, meaning they would be sent home without pay and forbidden to work. Another 680,000 civil servants would be required to report to work but not be paid, along with 2 million military service members, the budget office said. All of these groups would be paid once Congress passes a budget.
If you want to understand the roots of the government shutdown, go back to the rhetoric a lot of House Freedom Caucus types were using during the McCarthy speaker-election saga, which framed the House GOP as the exclusive representatives of “the American people.” The conceit seemed to be that the 2022 House races were a referendum on Biden and his crazy spending, meaning the House in this Congress had a popular mandate to blow it all up.
And now here they are, defying the huge House Democratic minority, both parties in the Senate, and, of course, the White House, as they demand gigantic domestic-spending cuts, no money for Ukraine, militarization of the border, etc., etc. — as though they are the only people who matter in the Capitol.
The Washington Post notes that the federal government started alerting its employees about the shutdown on Thursday:
Across the government, federal officials dusted off the intricate blueprints that help unwind and pare down the sprawling bureaucracy to only its most vital functions. They braced for disruptions that are likely to be significant, especially if the stalemate persists for weeks, potentially dragging down the fragile U.S. economy while complicating many of the services on which millions of Americans and businesses rely.
Some federal programs, including Social Security and mail delivery, would be unaffected because they are funded outside of the annual appropriations process on Capitol Hill. But many other government operations would be rendered inaccessible if funds expire as soon as this weekend — potentially resulting in closed parks and passport offices, and eventually, more worrisome interruptions affecting federal housing, food and health aid for the poor.
CNN reports that staff have been given a reminder that they can’t use their work phones:
Along with other government agencies, the White House sent a message to its staff with the critical logistical instructions for preparing for a shutdown if one occurs — including a mandatory directive to furloughed employees to turn off their work phones.
Staff have been asked to enter their personal contact information so they can get updates on their personal devices. If they are furloughed, they will not be allowed to access their government phones. If a shutdown occurs, an email sent Thursday and obtained by CNN said, they will be notified in a text to personal phones and an email to personal and government emails.
Intelligencer’s Matt Stieb has rounded up all the effects the shutdown would have if it happens, including the potential full closures:
National parks could potentially close — or at least close all their services — possibly causing millions of dollars of lost revenue for the tourist towns surrounding the majestic areas. Federal law enforcement from the FBI to Border Patrol and the DEA would work without pay. Federal courts are funded to remain open until October 13, after which civil litigation would be put on hold. However, the two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump would not be put on hiatus.
Read the rest of Matt’s post here.
This post has been updated.
