Today Could be the Day

The bill was being amended by the House Rules Committee to include border provisions from Republicans’ major legislation passed earlier this year, such as a restart of border wall construction and tougher penalties for visa overstays.

The proposal also includes keeping government spending to a lower level while maintaining Veterans Affairs and military spending, which would result in dramatic cuts to social spending programs and other areas across the government. ,…

The White House Office of Management and Budget released a statement opposing the House’s short-term measure. The office said if the bill came to his desk, President Joe Biden will veto it.

“In a blatant violation of the funding agreement the speaker and the President reached just a few months ago, the bill endangers the vital programs Americans rely on by making reckless cuts to programs, regardless of the consequences for critical services from education to food safety to law enforcement to housing to public health,” the statement read.

“The Administration urges House Republicans to follow the Senate’s lead and engage in a bipartisan appropriations process that funds the Federal Government in a responsible manner, consistent with the bipartisan agreement earlier this year.”

 

House votes against stopgap bill in blow to McCarthy

The Guardian – just in

… McCarthy’s proposed stopgap measure, which would have funded the government for another month while enacting severe spending cuts on most federal agencies, failed in a vote of 198 to 232, as 21 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the legislation. …

(Was there any other goofy stuff in the bill, one wonders. Obviously, the Dems were not about to allow drastic cuts to most guv’mint departmental budgets. The cuts were noted on MSNBC last night. 50% to 75% was typical in most depts.)

“For the average American outside the Beltway, these hiatuses of governing are looked at as nothing new, unfortunately,” said G. William Hoagland, who spent 33 years in the federal government, most of it as a senior budget official for Senate Republicans.

Government shutdowns are a modern phenomenon, and a measure of how fractious the capital has become. While Congress occasionally failed to pass spending bills on time in the past, it did not result in wholesale closures until President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general ruled in 1980 and 1981 that without congressional appropriations, nonessential functions had to cease. That took place several times under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, but often for just a few hours or days or over a weekend, when it was hardly noticed.

The seismic change came in late 1995 and early 1996, when House Republicans set off back-to-back shutdowns during a budget fight with President Bill Clinton, resulting in a popular backlash that made such tactics politically radioactive for nearly 18 years. Since 2013, however, Presidents Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Biden, it seems likely, have all confronted the threat of multiday shutdowns, making them seem almost routine.

“That is a big part of the problem,” said former Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. “Dysfunction and chaos are now in the political bloodstream, and therefore folks aren’t calling or emailing D.C.” to register objections with their representatives. “They see this as part of normal, polarized, partisan politics in Washington.”

What made this prospective shutdown different from those that came before was that it was less a fight between Democrats and Republicans than a fight between Republicans and Republicans. Speaker Kevin McCarthy lost control of his narrow majority and was pressed toward a shutdown by a handful of hard-liners who defied him, forcing him to turn to Democrats to avoid it. 

In the days leading up to the Saturday midnight deadline, Mr. Biden’s White House tried to stir up public opposition to what it dubbed the “Extreme Republican Shutdown” by blitzing out a string of statements emphasizing the consequences: how it would cut off food assistance for impoverished parents, hinder efforts to fight fentanyl trafficking, delay disaster recovery and suspend paychecks for troops. 

Yet as absorbed as Washington was by the game of political chicken, there has not been much of a popular uprising or even much complaining from the elites on Wall Street, who normally worry that a government shutdown could damage the economy. The financial markets shrugged off the threat. The Dow Jones industrial average closed on Friday 1.3 percent down for the week, while the S&P 500 was down about half of that.

The only way that might change, according to political veterans, is if a shutdown lasted for a prolonged period of time, suspending food assistance for millions of low-income mothers and children, closing national parks, delaying air travel and forcing more than three million civilian and military government workers to go without pay. “It will take an extended shutdown, when people really begin to feel pain, to see the political blowback on the Republican House members that are playing this irresponsible game,” said Ms. McCaskill. …