It looks like there will be no government shutdown. Kevin McCarthy caved in at the last minute and submitted a "clean" 45-day continuing resolution in the House. Clean enough, anyway. Every Democrat but one voted for it and it passed by a huge margin, 335-91.
Now it goes to the Senate, where it should pass easily. All that's left is to figure out whether McCarthy can produce a few actual FY24 appropriations bills over the next 45 days.
Oh, and also whether McCarthy will still be Speaker of the House in 45 days. Stay tuned.
Will McQ figure out that this is the way to get bills passed? Will the House be left in chaos, speakerless, for the next 45+ days? How responsible for the debacle are the Democrats, notably Joe Biden, anyway?
Stay tuned for tomorrow's chilling installment!
Nothing for Ukraine.
There's aid in the pipeline for now.
Plus I think I read that the Defense appropriations bill (one of the 12) DID pass the House and it had Ukraine money so maybe that's the reason why the House Dems (and maybe the Senate Dems?) will go along? Ditto Biden. Guess we'll just have to see.
Shocked the threat of a motion to vacate if he did this wasn't enough to let the gov shutdown. Hahaha... maybe the 'reasonable' GOP (who ever they are nowadays) threatened to vacate if he DIDN'T let this pass.
Seemed to me that the nut job-right was going to move to vacate whatever McCarthy did, so he might as well go for the CR, which most of his caucus wants.
No appropriation bills have passed both houses so nope DOD will have a lapse in appropriations if President Biden does not sign the CR in the next two hours. I just finished up getting my agency towards it's year end close, yes it was stressful having to work late hours up to the last minute on a weekend yet facing a furlough on Monday. Taking time off next week to recover hahahaha.
"Nothing for Ukraine."
That sounds like not just McCarthy caved.
But I'll assume for now Dems know what they're doing and aid for Ukraine will continue if & when there's a final budget.
Support for Ukraine as a stand-alone matter has big support in both parties in both houses. It was a sticking point for the Crazies in the House and Rand "'Poodle-Do" Paul in the Senate, and as noted above there's enough money to last a while, so they just left it out of the 45-day CR under the assumption that, either as part of regular appropriations or as a stand-alone bill, it'll get a full year of funding.
Sends a huge signal that the GOP, for whatever reason, is making Ukraine aid a hill they want to die on.
The Republicans take their orders from Donald, Donald takes his orders from Vladimir. You gotta wonder if Vlad really has dirty pics of Donald. It would be unusual if an old KGB operative like Vlad didn’t.
I think he has plenty without the pee tapes, if there are such; maybe evidence that TFG was knowingly laundering money for Russian oligarchs, or maybe paying bribes to Russian officials to try to get his Moscow project approved? If Trump was doing any of that, it’s certain that Putin has the proof.
Not that that would hurt him with his cult, just add to his legal troubles.
I've always wondered what was up with that house that TFG sold to a Russian oligarch at double the asking price, after it had sat on the market unsold for several years, and then the oligarch never moved in. I've never heard an adequate -- or even inadequate -- explanation. (Like those folks on Fox, "just asking questions.")
Live boy or dead girl?
always a classic
I hate to say it but credit where credit is due. James Carville has very aptly described McCarthy’s Speakership: ‘When You Elect a Bowl Of Jell-O, What You Get Is a Bowl Of Jell-O’
There will be a motion to vacate, because, at this point, the best outcome for the Coercion Caucus is no Speaker at all. But there is not, and there will not be, any Republican who can get 218. The Coercion Caucus have vaulted into a trap where they cannot vote with the bulk of "their" party, on anything, without losing their audience. This (evidently) is what happens when you have a third party who are pretending not to be a third party -- a thing without historical analogy.
The only possible outcome, in the sense of a new status quo that could endure for months, would be for some symbolic number of Republicans -- say 20 -- to cross the aisle. If only the barest nominally-effective number did so -- whatever that number is right now; four? five? -- it would be as if they hadn't; it would just be another fart in a firestorm. If Jeffries knows his business (but today no one any longer knows their business), he is working towards getting those 20(-ish). That would be history; anything else is just the crackling of the fire.
And in the meantime, I'm guessing Jeffries is just working to pound in the wedges and widen the gaps within the Republican caucus. When your opponent is drowning, throw him an anvil, etc.
I'm not sure that even “moderate” Republicans would consider voting for a Democratic speaker. The most likely cross-party compromise--not likely but more likely than anything else--is that Democrats vote for McCarthy in exchange for a say in how the House is run. In particular, McCarthy would agree to allow bills supported by Democrats and a significant number of Republicans come to the floor for a vote.
Indeed there have already been public comments to that effect by some of the Dem leadership.
McCarthy reneged on his promise to continue funding at the level agreed to in the debt-ceiling negotiations, until he had run out of options. I think the Democrats will be reluctant to enter any agreement that depends on promises of future action by this Speaker.
I don't disagree. But then there's always the threat that the *Democrats* could make the motion to "vacate the chair", and unless McCarthy is sure that the Crazy Wing would come back to him in that circumstance, he might not want to risk it.
The only conceivable way would be to amend the current rules, especially around the motion to vacate, and at least split authorities on some committees as 5 Parrots suggests. Something like that is what Jayapal has been talking about as the price of progressive caucus acquiescence, and it's what the 50-50 senate did (though that's not so relevant).
I don't think anything like that is really in the cards, but the strongest chance would be when/if there's a much more serious blowup inside the R caucus, which could happen near the November deadline. Maybe sooner, but that depends on whether Gaetz follows through on the vacate threat or just continues to dangle it.
Personally I think it's no more than about 50-50 whether he does over the next week or so. McCarthy has betrayed them twice now, but they like threatening him so much that they might not want to give that up. He's more valuable to them as a perpetual hostage/betrayer they can't get rid of.
Remembering that "moderate" is a relative term, in this case relative to the R mainstream, there are a few moderate Rs in the House (more than five, I think). Any five of them, plus the Ds, could put a moderate R in the Speaker's chair, heavily tied with D strings.
The likeliest tradeoff for a few D votes for McCarthy is getting one or two committees chaired by D's.
That’s an apt characterization — a third party that’s pretending not to be one. I don’t doubt that Jeffries is negotiating intensely with the few Republicans who aren’t crazy and aren’t scared stiff of the crazies. I’m sceptical that enough of them would switch parties, or even declare Independent, to elect Jeffries. Might the coalition deal, should there be one, include the nation’s first nonmember Speaker? That might be something to which a slim majority could agree.
Nobody with ANY sense would take it.
Nobody with any sense should accept the position of Republican Speaker. The party infighting shortened the tenure of Boehner and Ryan, and likely will McCarthy’s. But an independent Speaker? I would assume that responsibility for party matters, and all the grief that comes with it, would devolve to the Majority Leader; but the Speaker would retain the power to set the agenda, assign bills to committees, etc. A Speaker elected by a coalition might actually have a bit easier time; opponents would have to assemble another coalition to vacate.
Now that I thought a bit more — there has been a ‘stealth’ third party since the late 19th century. They came to be known as Dixiecrats, and actually were an overt third party in 1948, when their candidate, Strom Thurmond, won four Southern states. Since then, as the national Democratic Party has taken stronger and stronger positions on civil rights, the Dixiecrats became the Southern-strategy success story for the Republican Party. And today, some of the Dixiecrats political/creedal descendants are a part of the Freedom Caucus.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose …
McCarthy caved?
I don't know, he managed to get the most important thing done, he's advancing harm to an entire nation, far away, that he can imagine he's not responsible for, and it puts him on Putin's good side demonstrating that some other guy isn't the only stooge in the room, --he's flexing his independence and manly fortitude, like the entertainment at a bachelorette party, and nothing he can be blamed for happened to the United States.
What's not to like?
He might be able to keep this up for a year or more.
The flip side is, he's a weak tool who's wholly dependent on the eeeevillll Democrats to get anything done because he can't even control his own caucus.
IDK that he caved.
I think it's more likely that he realized the far-right MAGA simply wanted to shut the government down regardless of costs, both political and $.
At that point, the weight of his losses, were he to stick with MAGA far-right demands, were greater than the costs of going bipartisan and the risk of losing his speakership.
About time; it’s been clear for weeks that the nutjob-right wants a shutdown, and it’s clear some of them wanted to take McCarthy out, whether he worked with Democrats or not.
I think it's safe to say a lot of what informs McCarthy's calculus—as is the case with virtually -all GOP members of Congress these days—is a primary challenge. He apparently has the votes if he relies on Democrats to keep the government funded. If that's the case he probably has the votes to keep his Speakership if it comes down to that (would Democrats really rather see Matt Gaetz or some other MAGA bomb-thrower in that role?).
But Democrats can't help him fend of a primary challenge.
I think we should stop using the word "cave" when a politician decides to turn their back on the extremists in their party and instead behave like governing actually matters. McCarthy decided, for whatever combination of reasons, that avoiding a shutdown is worth the risk of getting nailed by the bozo caucus. I bet he made a deal with the Democrats that 6 or so of them will vote for him to remain Speaker if it comes to a vote. Whatever the reasons, it's good that he decided to tell Gaetz & Company to fuck off.
That's what I came here to say.
So, yeah!
If that's the case why only six weeks?
I agree with you he's probably had quiet talks with Democrats about getting their support to fend of a Speakership challenge. But they can't help him with a primary challenge.
The guy raises millions upon millions. That's one of the reasons he's Speaker: he's their best fundraiser and he shares the wealth. I can't imagine a primary challenger getting any traction at all.
McCarthy is from California, where they run jungle primaries; the top two vote getters advance. Theoretically, Ds could help McCarthy in his primary.
McCarthy did finally break from the extremists, but only after he first caved to their demand that he by renege on the deal agreed to in the debt-ceiling negotiations.
Good point that I basically agree with, but I don't think he made any explicit deals with Dems, just knew they'd be yeses.
The interesting thing is that it happened very similarly to the May deal-- it seemed to come out of nowhere and was sprung on his caucus with almost no notice. And not just his caucus, but rather the whole House. If this is the MO he's decided on, he's far more wily and weaselly than he gets credit for. I certainly didn't think he'd do anything like this.
There may not be a motion to vacate, either. It's most effective as a threat. If it's tried and fails, it becomes much less fearsome. And as Josh Marshall argues, the chaos caucus needs McCarthy as their foil-- he's their very own inside-the-party Biden figure. In fact I'm wondering now just how much chaos they're really committed to creating. There's no limit if trump is the one calling the shots, but they may have their own ideas about that.