When Congress narrowly avoided a government shutdown nearly six weeks ago, members agreed to a temporary solution. The House and Senate approved a stopgap measure — known as a continuing resolution, or CR — that kept the government’s lights on, but only until mid-November.
The ostensible point was to give lawmakers time to negotiate a longer-term spending deal that would fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. And that might very well have happened, were it not for the fact that Republicans spent 22 days struggling to find a House speaker, leaving Democrats with no one to negotiate with.
All the while, the clock kept ticking, pushing Congress closer to the deadline it set in late September. Indeed, what was once on the horizon is now quickly approaching: Without a solution, the government will shut down a week from tomorrow.
Does House Speaker Mike Johnson have a plan to prevent a crisis? If so, the Louisiana Republican has kept it well hidden. NBC News reported:
After three weeks of chaos and paralysis over the speaker fight, House Republicans say there’s no appetite in their conference for lurching into another crisis: a government shutdown. But with the deadline just nine days away, Congress still hasn’t come up with a plan to keep the lights on in Washington. Though many lawmakers are upbeat about averting a shutdown, the mood runs counter to their lack of progress and the uncertainty of a new House speaker who is still finding his feet.
In case this isn’t obvious, when former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy prevented a shutdown on Sept. 30 by advancing a “clean” bill — it lacked far-right add-ons and priorities — some of his more radical members were furious. Three days later, McCarthy was stripped of his gavel.
The pressures on Johnson aren’t identical — no one is threatening to oust the new speaker, at least not yet — but it’s likely that the recent history is not lost on the Louisianan.
The trouble, of course, is that the House Republican conference is still the House Republican conference. McCarthy found it nearly impossible to corral them into approving spending packages, and while Johnson is still enjoying a honeymoon phase, his members have the same competing and contradictory priorities they had under his predecessor.
It’s against this backdrop that Politico reported roughly 48 hours ago that House Republicans “entered a closed-door conference meeting Tuesday morning hoping to find some consensus on a spending plan. Instead, they came out more confused.” Soon after, a New York Times report added that lawmakers had “found themselves back in the same predicament they confronted in September.”
The public will no doubt see a lot of finger-pointing in the coming days, which makes it all the more important to emphasize that Democratic officials aren’t making a series of demands. On the contrary, the party simply wants a clean bill that would prevent a shutdown and keep spending levels where they are now. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner last night, there is no Democratic “ransom note.”
With this in mind, NBC News’ report added, “Some conservatives say they won’t back a clean funding bill without conservative priorities, while other lawmakers are trying to attach aid for Israel or Ukraine to any CR that moves.”
Watch this space.
