Live coverage: The government shutdown clock is ticking

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Joan McCarter

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy blinked Saturday morning, doing an about-face on government funding. He abandoned the hard-right provisions in his last government funding bill and offered a stripped-down version of the Senate’s proposed continuing resolution. The new CR includes 45 days of continued funding, but strips out Ukraine funding.

That all sounds fine, except that McCarthy dropped this bill on House Democrats and told them the vote would be held immediately, and Democrats have found multiple issues in the short bill during a delay they created by asking for the House to adjourn. Democrats continue to object to being jammed by McCarthy, and the House is now delaying a vote, with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries holding the floor using his “magic minute,” the unlimited debate time afforded to leadership. The Senate was supposed to have started work on its CR at 1 p.m. ET, but is also in a holding pattern, waiting to see what the House does.

As a matter of tactics, Senate and House Democrats should defeat this continuing resolution. McCarthy has already blinked, deciding a government shutdown is more damaging than a vote on his leadership. They should push their advantage.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 7:00:13 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Democrats just saved McCarthy’s butt, by the way. The vote was 335-91, with 209 Dems and 126 Republicans voting for it, 90 GOP noes. Now comes the fight over McCarthy’s speakership, and Democrats need to use this to get some concessions from him before they help. First, he has abide by the debt ceiling agreement on appropriations and a mechanism to avoid another shutdown fight next year. Second, no more impeachment crap.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:47:44 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

The emerging Dem narrative. It’s true as far as it goes, and the defeat of the draconian cuts and racist border policies the GOP pushed yesterday is significant. The Senate could still fight for Ukraine.

MAGA Republicans have surrendered. All extreme right-wing policies have been removed from the House spending bill. The American people have won.
— Hakeem Jeffries (@RepJeffries) September 30, 2023

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:43:50 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Smattering of applause on the floor as it hit the 2/3rds threshold of 290. So the question now is whether the Senate will prioritize Ukraine over having the rest of their weekend free, and swallow it. Judging by the response there so far, they’ll vote for their weekend. We’ll see if they have any objections to the other stuff the House stripped out from/snuck into their bill.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:35:03 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

And that’s that. This is bad news for Ukraine.

NEWS: Jeffries telling Dems to vote for the CR
— Heather Caygle (@heatherscope) September 30, 2023

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:33:32 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

McConnell reportedly pushed his conference to hold out for their bill, with Ukraine aid. He was overruled.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:31:15 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

The House is voting now on the new funding bill. It needs 2/3rds to pass. Expect the majority of Dems to hold out on voting until they see how many Republicans oppose it.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:25:57 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

One hangup here for everyone, a provision regarding member pay that looks like a really sneaky move by the GOP to get a raise.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:23:02 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Senate GOP is now saying they won’t vote for the CR they negotiated, because they want to give McCarthy a chance to get this through. Majority Leader Schumer is reportedly postponing the next procedural vote to see what happens in the House.

UPDATE: Saturday, Sep 30, 2023 · 6:19:01 PM +00:00 · Joan McCarter

Jeffries wrapped, after an impassioned speech. “You dropped this bill at the eleventh hour today and gave the American people minutes to evaluate it. That's unacceptable,” he told Republicans. General debate is now continuing. It’s under suspension of the rules, so it needs 2/3rds to pass. It’s not at all clear right now what the majority of Democrats will do.

Chaos reigns in House as hard-liners plot McCarthy ouster

Posted on September 29, 2023 by Joan McCarter

There can never be too much chaos for Rep. Matt Gaetz and his malignant cohorts. With this weekend’s government shutdown now seeming inevitable, the Florida Republican and some of his unnamed compatriots are plotting to try to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as early as next week, according to The Washington Post.

A shutdown isn’t enough disruption, nor is their trainwreck of an impeachment inquiry inquiry, so these hard-liners want to make the House an even more ridiculously dysfunctional place. There’s a real underpants-gnome vibe to the endeavor, with phase two of the plot—whom they’ll replace McCarthy with—currently a mystery. The only name seriously floated to the Post is Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, who told the Post, “I fully support Speaker McCarthy. He knows that and I know that. … I have zero interest in palace intrigue. End of discussion.”

The other question is whether they’re capable of pulling it off. The House procedure is called a “motion to vacate,” and it has been voted on only once in American history—and it failed. In 1910, Speaker Joseph Cannon survived the vote, though his leadership was weakened. Later, in 1997, rebels plotting against then-Speaker Newt Gingrich talked about using it, but they never filed the motion. The only other time the motion has been filed was in 2015, when then-Rep. Mark Meadows (yeah, that Mark Meadows) filed it against then-Speaker John Boehner, but it was never deployed. Boehner ultimately resigned.

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A successful motion to vacate is clearly not an easy thing to pull off. Is this the crew that will make history and be the first to succeed? It’s just possible that McCarthy and team are hapless enough that it could happen. But what the hard-liners should worry about are the potential consequences: empowered Democrats.

McCarthy has brushed off any suggestion of getting help from Democrats to save his speakership, and in turn, Democrats aren’t in a hurry to rush to his defense. "I cannot imagine him paying the price that it would take for us to bail him out," Rep. Jared Huffman of California told Axios.

That price would be steep. "We want to get disaster aid out, we want to continue our support for Ukraine, and we want them to end this sham of an impeachment inquiry," Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts told Politico last week. "If Kevin McCarthy chooses to ... get back to work for the American people, to do the right thing, we're going to be there to, you know, meet and compromise with him."

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is playing it very cool. He rejected “the notion that any of us would be dealing with inside parlor games when we’re trying to stop the extreme MAGA Republicans,” according to Axios. “I haven’t given it any thought,” he added.

McCarthy needs 217 votes out of his current 221-seat majority to save his speakership. (There are two vacancies in the House.) Presuming Gaetz can count, he won’t bring the motion to vacate unless he’s got four Republican members on his side willing to abandon McCarthy so the ploy can potentially succeed. However, Gaetz can’t and shouldn’t count on Democrats to help him—they can sit this one out by voting “present,” or they can vote to keep McCarthy.

That puts a lot of power into the hands of the 212 Democrats and the “Biden 18”—the freshmen Republicans in districts President Joe Biden won in 2020. If just four of them play their cards right—and cross the aisle on a vote—they could find themselves in a fairly comfortable position with Speaker Hakeem Jeffries. At the very least, they wouldn’t be blamed for the next government shutdown.

It’s a long shot that any of this ends with a Democratic speaker, but the only thing that’s predictable amid the chaos in the House is the unpredictable.

Here’s what the ‘pissing match’ between Gaetz and McCarthy costs

New day, same chaos: House GOP argues with itself in face of shutdown

Democrats could bail out flailing McCarthy, for a price

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Joan McCarter

It’s only a matter of time before tensions in the House Republican conference boil over into a physical brawl. For now, they’re just verbal fights, like Freedom Caucus guy Eli Crane of Arizona fundraising by calling his colleagues who don’t want to shut down the government “squishes,” and those other members taking exception to it.

Others have been threatening to help primary members like freshman Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who threatens them back, saying (according to CNN’s chyron) that they’re “stuck on stupid.”

GOP Rep. Mike Lawler on Republicans warning against working with Democrats: “Bring it. Give me a break. I’m in a district that Joe Biden won by 10 points...I was elected to be an adult, to be serious, to be sober and to govern." pic.twitter.com/KxcQv0mPGa
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 27, 2023

Some of these would-be moderates are threatening to work with Democrats. “If you got five to 10 holdouts, you’ve got to have a bipartisan bill, just by definition with a four-seat majority. So, I know we got to reach across the aisle and make this work,” Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said after a Wednesday conference meeting.

So far, House Democrats appear happy to watch the melee from the sidelines, not feeling any particular need to make life easier for Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who reneged on the budget deal he had agreed to with President Joe Biden. “Every Democrat on the [Appropriations] committee felt betrayed” by McCarthy, Rep. David Trone of Maryland said recently.

The Democrats have power, though McCarthy isn’t acknowledging that. He needs them to solve the shutdown impasse because he simply doesn’t have Republican votes to do it. After he surely gets their help rescuing the government, he’ll need help saving his own political skin and fighting off a hard-liner attempt to oust him.

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“The only person concerned about Kevin McCarthy keeping his job is Kevin McCarthy,” House Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts told Politico. “House Democrats are having one conversation: how to deliver for the American people. That means preventing a reckless shutdown and stopping devastating cuts to the programs they rely on.”

Once the nihilist Republicans get what they want and force a shutdown, what should Democrats extract from McCarthy—and from the so-called moderate Republicans who are looking for their help—to fix it? That’s precisely what Democratic leadership should be mulling right now. Especially if Republicans move to oust McCarthy.

Democrats should start with a big ask from those Republicans who want their help: a power-sharing agreement with Democrats that puts Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries in the speaker’s chair. After all, he consistently won more votes for speaker than McCarthy did through the 15-round vote marathon. The Republicans’ tiny margin of just five votes, and at least half a dozen ready to kick McCarthy out at any given moment, make McCarthy’s continued tenure iffy at best. Jeffries in the chair could give the majority of the Republican conference some occasional wins, something they won’t get from McCarthy.

There’s also the question of who else among the Republicans would want the job. The answer is no one. Jeffries is the obvious choice.

Assuming that Jeffries doesn’t want (or get) the job and that McCarthy comes to him for help in saving the government and keeping his speakership, what should Democrats demand then?

An end to the Biden impeachment farce.
McCarthy has to abide by the budget agreement he made with Biden to resolve the debt ceiling.
McCarthy fully funds disaster relief and provides aid to Ukraine.
McCarthy puts legislation in place to prevent another government shutdown next year on the floor.

Those should be the minimum demands. Doing those things would allow Congress and the government to operate at a functional level for the next year. It’s not too much to ask in a rational world. On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine McCarthy, still in thrall of the Freedom Caucus, stepping up to that level of basic competence.

Shutdown watch: McCarthy all but hands the gavel to Gaetz

House hard-liners brag about 'chaos' as government shutdown looms

House Republicans vow shutdown won’t stop impeachment inquiry

Posted on September 27, 2023 by Laura Clawson

House Republicans are on the brink of shutting down the government. The Senate is moving forward with a bipartisan continuing resolution to keep the government open into November, but House Republicans are busy with a "pissing match" between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and obstructionist Rep. Matt Gaetz. That doesn’t mean the House isn’t doing anything, though. No, Republicans are getting their bogus impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden moving, saying they see no reason it couldn’t continue through a government shutdown.

“We’re going to keep going,” House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer told CNN on Tuesday, saying that a shutdown wouldn’t affect the members or staff involved in the impeachment inquiry. That would be a great look for Republicans—showing voters that they weren’t focused on keeping the government open, and offering a constant reminder that members of Congress were still being paid while government workers weren’t.

Comer has a hearing scheduled for Thursday, which his office told Fox News “will examine the value of an impeachment inquiry.” Apparently, even Comer isn’t confident that he and his fellow Republicans have made that case to the public. The hearing will rehash the findings of Comer’s months of investigations—investigations that notably haven’t turned up any real evidence that Biden has engaged in corruption or profited from his son’s business dealings.

Like Comer, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan told CNN a government shutdown wouldn’t stop him. “Every week there’s a whole roster of folks” scheduled for committee interviews, he said.

The committee staff conducting the interviews wouldn’t be paid in the event of a shutdown, but could be deemed “essential” by Congress members and forced to work. A source told CNN, though, that there was still question about whether a court reporter, necessary for transcribing interviews, would be considered essential, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene noted that a shutdown could affect the ability of government agencies to respond to subpoenas. (Take note: Greene seems to be more clearheaded about the outcomes of a shutdown than Comer or Jordan.)

Going ahead with a baseless impeachment inquiry while shutting down the government out of sheer spite would be an impressive one-two punch, even by Republican standards. What could they possibly do that would more clearly display how far their priorities are from what voters want Congress to deliver?

Sign and send the petition: NO to MAGA impeachment. Focus on what matters.

Coming soon: A sham impeachment, brought to you by Fox News

Posted on September 24, 2023 by Dartagnan

Twenty-seven years ago, Fox News made its first appearance on American television screens. In October 1996, it would have seemed foolhardy to assume that this tacky corporate creature—an embarrassing facsimile of actual journalism, patently dedicated to serve as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party—would eventually metastasize into an impermeable, alternative universe for millions of Americans. Few would have guessed that within two decades we’d actually witness the core functions and operations of our government appropriated, coopted, and bastardized simply to promote that network's constant spigot of inflammatory lies and misinformation, even when the very lives of its own viewers were literally put at risk as a result.

That transformation reached its apotheosis during the COVID-19 pandemic, as Fox’s fountain of rank COVID denialism was duly parroted day after day, month after month, by elected Republicans. As the pandemic spread into the so-called “heartland” of America, the bacillus of Fox News proved itself as insidious as the virus itself, with its viewers absorbing and internalizing its preposterous science denial and anti-vaccination rhetoric. This doubtlessly led (as suggested by several studies conducted afterward) to the sickness and premature death of many Americans.

The saddest and most depressing aspect of all this, however, was that no one seemed surprised. By that time, Fox’s tentacles had already infiltrated nearly all of our nation’s institutions, transforming our entire political system with a malignancy that has proved impossible to eradicate. Even now, the remainder of our media seem unwilling to acknowledge the wholesale degradation Fox has inflicted on this nation, its discourse, its politics, and its institutions.

During his entire tenure, Donald Trump huddled with and spoke through his willing vessels at Fox News; the Republican Congress has conducted pointless, wasteful political show trials based on Fox-driven fantasies; and even the conservative federal judiciary began to blatantly regurgitate Fox’s hyperbolic, fact-challenged talking points in its legal opinions. Yet, despite its corrosive influence, the media continues to treat Fox News as simply another legitimate player in the information ecosystem, something to be envied, even emulated, occasionally criticized, but never truly called to account. The first rule about Fox News for the rest of the media, it seems, is that you don’t talk about Fox News.

Now it appears likely the American people are about to witness the consequences of that neglect, in the form of a wholly contrived, factually baseless presidential impeachment, with no purpose other than to satisfy Fox News’ hyperpartisan fever-dream agenda. It remains to be seen, what, if any, response the “reality-based” journalistic community is prepared to give to this coming travesty.

As explained by Matt Gertz, writing for Media Matters, the carnival barkers thinly disguised as journalists on Fox News have been pushing for an impeachment of President Joe Biden since before he was even elected.

The right-wing propaganda network’s stars have long demanded a Biden impeachment as both retaliation and political cover for Donald Trump’s various impeachments and criminal indictments. Since those Fox commentators wield more power within the GOP than most of its putative leaders do, a Biden impeachment inquiry has seemed inevitable, with the only question being what they’d end up backfilling as its rationale. And somehow, they’ve settled on taking a shot with the Hunter Biden minutiae they’ve all spent years feverishly rehashing (but that no one can parse without a PhD in Sean Hannity Studies).

As Gertz reminds us, Fox News “personalities” such as Mark Levin were agitating for the impeachment of the “next Democratic president” long before Biden even secured the nomination. Levin knew he didn’t need to articulate an actual reason for this drastic action to his audience; the plain fact that Trump himself was about to be impeached for acting on Fox News’ unfounded assertions that Biden had somehow corruptly influenced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor was reason enough. Because Trump’s impeachment was literally the result of a phony narrative that Fox News itself (with the assistance of right-wing dark money groups) had promoted and pushed, it obviously struck far too close to home.

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As Gertz himself reported in 2019:

Fox’s role -- and particularly that of Sean Hannity, the network star who also privately advises the president -- was central to every phase of the story. The network was the source of the president’s long-held animus toward Ukraine, the vector of Giuliani’s disinformation campaign, a common former employer of some key figures and a unifying factor of others, and the fountainhead of arguments that Trump and his House Republican allies have used to try to minimize the scandal.

And the impeachment talk at Fox continued to snowball from that point, again, in nearly every circumstance, stemming directly from “reporting” that originated in Fox’s own fetid swamp of fact-challenged propaganda. Fox had relentlessly pushed the Hunter Biden story throughout the run-up to the 2020 election, in a failed effort to help Trump win. But even as November 2020 approached, their hosts were carefully “setting a predicate,” as Gertz puts it, in the event Trump lost. Lisa “Kennedy” Montgomery floated in late October the prospect of an immediate Biden impeachment over the amorphous Hunter rabbit hole the network had been hawking for months. As Gertz reports, these sentiments were echoed by Fox showboats Jeanine Pirro and Greg Gutfeld only days before the 2020 election, and reemphasized by Hannity in December 2020—as Trump was allegedly scheming with his cohorts to overturn the election well after it became obvious he’d lost.

In fact, Hannity came up with a remarkable quote (particularly the last sentence).

“What are you going to do if -- you know, all these people that impeached Trump, how do you not impeach if it's Joe Biden one day? How do you not do it? It's a foreign -- it's a family foreign crime syndicate. Got an email provided to the FBI pointing out that Hunter hadn't paid taxes on some of the Burisma payments and that's just the tip of the iceberg, with -- now they're talking about money laundering as well. You know, pretty amazing stuff, I've got to tell you. Amazing times we're looking -- living in. They all have an agenda. You know, the difference between us and them is we're just honest about who we are.”

After Republicans eked out a narrow House majority in 2022, Hannity once again bloviated about impeachment, setting the stage for his most ardent fan, Trump, to begin turning the screws on members of the newly (and narrowly) Republican-led House. As reported by Kristen Holmes and Eric Bradner, writing for CNN, the screws have turned harder as the criminal indictments began to pile up for Trump.

Donald Trump has publicly and privately encouraged House Republicans’ push to impeach President Joe Biden ahead of their potential rematch in 2024, two sources close to the former president said.

Trump has kept close tabs on the matter, the sources said – including speaking by phone with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the House GOP conference chair, about the party’s impeachment strategy shortly after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced on Tuesday that he is calling on his committees to open a formal impeachment inquiry into Biden.

Gertz notices a pattern here:

The year that followed has been marked by three overlapping trends: repeated indictments of Trump on state and federal charges, fruitless congressional efforts to uncover damning evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s businesses, and demands from Fox for Republicans to retaliate against Democrats for the former, including by turning the latter into fodder for impeachment.

Fox’s Jesse Watters weighed in on June 9, the day Trump was hit with 37 felony counts in the Southern District of Florida, saying that the Republicans should welcome the “distraction” of impeachment. And on Aug. 2, Watters probably revealed more about the Republicans’ nakedly political purposes than he realized.

“[W]ithout the impeachment, you have back-to-back-to-back-to-back Trump trials. The media’s not going to cover anything else. Biden’s going to hide and Trump is going to be criminalized on TV. But if Republicans time this right and follow the evidence where it leads, impeachment is going to run counter to the Trump trials next year.”

Or as Gertz sums it up: ”Rather than picking [a presidential candidate] who isn’t looking at four state and federal trials on scores of charges, they want to tear down his opponent by ginning up a scandal and hoping that the mainstream press fails to make clear what they’re doing.”

The Republican Party’s impeachment efforts against Biden, egged on by Fox News, are without any legitimate basis. They are premised wholly upon a vendetta urged by Trump, who is facing actual, real criminal liability in several actual, real courts of law. The complete absence of any legal justification to pursue impeachment proceedings against this president has even been obliquely acknowledged by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy himself. In reality, what Republicans are pursuing—and what it seems that Americans are going to be forced to witness—is an impeachment by Fox News itself, fraudulently justified by the same lies and fact-free innuendo in which the network habitually traffics.

A network that didn’t consider it necessary to modulate its grievance-driven political rhetoric even when that rhetoric threatened to kill or sicken its own viewers obviously has no compunctions about subverting our constitutional system. Nor would it spare the slightest thought for the personal anguish it will inflict on Biden or his family, who have to watch as their (obviously troubled) son’s name is dragged through the mud by the Republican charlatans who will outdo themselves with pre-packaged, Fox-friendly soundbites. They know that’s what their base voters are conditioned to look for.

But the non-Fox-viewing American public doesn’t have to play along with this cheap and disgusting farce. They can be shown exactly what it is, if the rest of the media—the ones not in thrall to Rupert Lachlan Murdoch’s propaganda network—finally do their jobs. That means doing a lot more than “fact-checking” Republicans and their statements. Fox viewers will never, ever see those fact-checks (and if they did, they would disregard them). This impeachment will mostly be an exercise in Republicans preening for the cameras and making declarative speeches, which will be edited into tight soundbites and run alongside nothing but approving nods and supportive chatter from Fox’s talking heads. And while we can expect Democratic House members to do yeoman’s work exposing this travesty during the hearings themselves, none of their rebuttals will make Fox’s highlight reel.

“Fact-checking” is simply a cop-out. What the media should really do here is explain who is telling the lies, why the lies are being told, and what motivates the lies. Explain how each Republican is following a template laid down by the likes of Hannity and his ilk. Explain who pays for Hannity and his ilk to spread their manure, and where their true interests lie. Explain how every Republican lives in mortal fear of a primary challenger promoted by Trump. Explain how Trump’s situation has influenced this sham impeachment’s timing and presentation, the selection of witnesses, and the things those witnesses will say. Explain who’s not called as a witness by Republicans, and ask why.

Above all, the media must expose this travesty for what it is: a “distraction,” as Fox’s Watters so eloquently put it, from the “back-to-back-to-back-to-back” Trump trials, pending in real criminal courts, before real judges and real jurors, not a group of corrupted, political hacks terrified of getting on the wrong side of Donald Trump.

Biden, Schumer are doing what they have to do: Let McCarthy fail

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Joan McCarter

By the end of Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was having a very bad week. He failed on two critical votes that were supposed to serve as a challenge to the chief antagonists in his Republican conference. McCarthy declared defeat for the day, leaving before 5 PM, then dismissed the House early on Wednesday, with no clear plan for steering away from the impending government shutdown.

It’s a trajectory of McCarthy’s own making, and this time around, he’s not going to get help from President Joe Biden or Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to correct it. The White House has a good reason: The last time Biden bailed him out, McCarthy reneged on their deal. “We agreed to the budget deal and a deal is a deal — House GOP should abide by it,” a White House official told Politico. Their “chaos is making the case that they are responsible if there is a shutdown.”

The anonymous official is referring to the budget agreement that Biden and McCarthy reached to end the Republican debt limit hostage-taking earlier this year. Biden accepted cuts to next year’s budget in that agreement with McCarthy, who immediately capitulated to pressure from GOP extremists and reneged on the deal. The White House let him have a win on that one, in the spirit of good governance and saving the global economy, and McCarthy immediately tore up the agreement.

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So instead, the Biden administration is preparing for a shutdown and messaging on it, focusing on how disastrous the additional cuts that McCarthy is pushing would be. In a memo on Tuesday, the White House said, “The continuing resolution [Republicans] introduced this week makes indiscriminate cuts to programs that millions of hardworking Americans count on—violating the agreement the Speaker negotiated with President Biden and rejecting the bipartisan approach of the Senate.”

The White House estimates the results of those cuts becoming permanent would mean, among other things: cutting 800 Customs and Border Protection agents; eliminating 110,000 Head Start positions for children; 60,000 seniors losing access to food services like Meals on Wheels; and 300,000 households, including tens of thousands of veterans and seniors, losing housing vouchers and being put at risk of homelessness. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Focusing on McCarthy as an unreliable (not to mention incompetent) dealmaker is part of the calculus for Democrats in making sure that he and his fellow Republicans own the coming debacle. “I sympathize with the speaker,” Schumer said on the floor Wednesday. ”I know his task isn’t easy. He’s got a lot of very, very difficult members to deal with.” However, Schumer continued, being a leader means accepting a “responsibility to the American people. Real lives would be disrupted in a shutdown." The answer, Schumer said, “is right in front of Speaker McCarthy, and he knows it: bipartisanship.” That puts the onus on McCarthy to reach out to Democrats.

For Democrats, what makes this a different situation than the debt limit is that the stakes aren’t nearly as high with a shutdown as with debt default. As damaging as a shutdown will be, it almost surely won’t be catastrophic. The other consideration is that Republicans will likely be blamed for it, as they were in 1995-96, in 2013, and in 2018. There’s no way around that, since the hard-liners have been cheerleading for a shutdown for weeks.

Isolating McCarthy is the only way to get him—or a critical mass of Republicans who don’t want to take the blame for the fiasco—to come around to working with them.

Freedom Caucus: ‘We don't fear the government shutdown’

Senate Republicans now saying it's up to McCarthy to avoid a shutdown

What does shutdown 2023 look like?

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Joan McCarter

The House of Representatives blew up again Tuesday afternoon, when leadership had to pull back a procedural vote on their only existing proposal for averting a government shutdown at the end of next week. Compounding that failure, a handful of hard-liners voted against advancing the defense appropriations bill for a floor vote.

Those were two monumental losses for Speaker Kevin McCarthy. He has no control over his conference and no plan for combating the nihilism of the Freedom Caucus and its allies. They want the government to shut down, and are happy to advertise that fact.

Less government isn't a bad thing. pic.twitter.com/r8GdmDeocn
— Rep. Andy Ogles (@RepOgles) September 19, 2023

Since a shutdown appears to be inevitable, what does it mean for the nation?

Nothing good, other than a pissed off electorate potentially driving Republicans out of office in 2024.

There are more than 2.1 million federal employees, hundreds of thousands of whom would likely be furloughed without pay for the duration of a shutdown. As early as this week, federal agencies will start deciding which employees are “essential” and which will be put on ice for the duration.

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The White House outlined what that could mean for various operations of government in a memo Tuesday. That includes “all active-duty military personnel and many law enforcement officers” being forced to remain at work without being paid until a funding agreement is made. It would increase the “risk that FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is depleted and would complicate new emergency response efforts if additional catastrophic disasters occur.”

It would mean “10,000 children across the country would immediately lose access to Head Start.” The EPA would mostly stop inspecting drinking water facilities, hazardous waste sites, and chemical facilities. The Food and Drug Administration “could be forced to delay” food inspections. The Small Business Administration wouldn’t approve new loans.

While Medicare would be funded and people would still get their Social Security checks, new enrollees could see delays in getting their applications processed. People receiving food assistance—already threatened by Republican efforts to slash budgets—might have a struggle to get those benefits. Customer service for many of these programs would likely suffer without funding.

Economic analysts are warning that it looks like this stalemate could be a long one. Greg Valliere, chief U.S. policy strategist at AGF Investments, said he projects a “70% chance of a shutdown, perhaps a long one lasting into the winter.” Terry Haines, founder of Pangaea Policy, said this “won’t be at all like the one-off short ‘shutdowns’” that had minimal effect on markets, and believes it “will take months to resolve.”

That’s a worst-case scenario. But Goldman Sachs economists reckon that the nation’s gross domestic product growth would be reduced by about 0.2 percentage point each week it lasts, but would recover at a similar rate once the money was flowing again.

There are also the intangible effects of the damage to the government’s credibility at home and abroad when half of one of its three branches is melting down, burning the rest of the government along with it. The potential damage isn’t of quite the same magnitude as the debt limit fight the House extremists waged on the country earlier this year. That threatened to upend the global economy, which is why McCarthy and team eventually blinked.

This time around, they truly believe that “less government isn’t a bad thing” and that the government should be shut down, as Republican Rep. Andy Ogles tweeted. What Ogles isn’t telling us is that he’ll still be getting paid, with our tax dollars. The silver lining is that he’ll also be getting the blame.

Poll shows how misguided House Republicans are about a government shutdown

Senate Republicans now saying it's up to McCarthy to avoid a shutdown

House hard-liners brag about 'chaos' as government shutdown looms

Kerry talks with Drew Linzer, director of the online polling company Civiqs. Drew tells us what the polls say about voters’ feelings toward President Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and what the results would be if the two men were to, say … run against each other for president in 2024. Oh yeah, Drew polled to find out who thinks Donald Trump is guilty of the crimes he’s been indicted for, and whether or not he should see the inside of a jail cell.

Embedded Content

McCarthy’s Putinist arrogance on display in Ukraine aid negotiations

Posted on September 20, 2023 by Joan McCarter

This is the absolute height of Putinist arrogance from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy: He won’t commit to continue providing Ukraine aid ahead of a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy until he personally gets answers. “I have questions for him,” McCarthy told reporters. “What’s the accountability in the money we already gave? What is the plan for victory? I think that’s what the American people want to know.”

He’s demanding to know Ukraine’s strategic battle plans? Coming from the guy who can’t even lead his own party conference, that’s pathetic and embarrassing. McCarthy did follow up with a weak acknowledgement that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an “atrocity” and that “we want to make sure that ends,” but he added, “I want accountability for whatever the hardworking taxpayers spend their money on.”

Ukraine’s plan for victory is slogging this out until they have driven Russia out of their country and restored their territorial integrity. There can be no other plan. This is real war. And that plan is going to require assistance from the U.S. and allied nations. It’s going to require McCarthy putting on his big-boy pants and standing up to the likes of Putin-boosters like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. As of right now, he’s failed there, still refusing to attach Ukraine aid to the must-pass government funding bill the House is currently struggling over.

This is what real leadership looks like.

Zelensky looks on as Biden at the UN says "Russia alone bears responsibility for this war" and "Russia alone [stands] in the way of peace" "The US together with our allies and parters around the world will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine, he adds to applause pic.twitter.com/kqpJn8jFlJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 19, 2023

“The United States, together with our allies and partners around the world, will continue to stand with the brave people of Ukraine,” President Joe Biden declared at the U.N. Tuesday. That message—not to mention the status of the U.S. as a world leader—is being undermined by the circus that McCarthy is letting flourish in the House. That’s something Senate Republicans have to reckon with as well.

The entire Senate will be meeting with Zelenskyy on Thursday, whereas in the House only McCarthy, Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and a few other members are currently scheduled to meet with him. That Senate meeting is vital because there’s some wavering now among Republicans in that body, despite Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s unceasing support for aid and warnings against Republicans going “wobbly” on it.

The best outcome of the Zelenskyy Senate meeting is Republicans finally coming together to save Ukraine—and their party from themselves. Supporting a government funding bill, with Ukraine aid attached, and presenting it to the House as a done deal is the best way they can do that.

Sign and send the petition: NO to MAGA impeachment. Focus on what matters.

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Kerry and Markos talk about what is happening in Ukraine, what needs to be done, and why the fate of Ukraine is tied to democracy’s fate in 2024.

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Motion to vacate: Should Democrats help or laugh?

Posted on September 19, 2023 by Joan McCarter

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is in a Catch-22, and he has only himself to blame for it. He’s got until the end of next week to figure out how to keep the government from shutting down—and save his own political skin. So far, he has proven incapable of doing either and created a dynamic in which one of two things is inevitable: a shutdown or a vote calling for his ouster as speaker. At this point, it seems both are likely.

The solution for averting a shutdown is pretty simple: McCarthy has to accept the reality that the Senate and the White House are in Democratic hands, and there is no way that the demands the hard-liners are making on funding will be enacted. If he doesn’t find a compromise and get Democrats in the House to help him pass a stopgap funding bill by the end of next week, the government shuts down and Republicans will get the blame. Because he’s in charge (at least nominally), McCarthy will get the lion’s share of it.

If he does get Democratic help and manage to keep the nation from looking like a banana republic, the nihilists will try to oust him via Rep. Matt Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair. Someone wanted to make that threat abundantly clear, leaving a copy of that resolution in a restroom near the House chamber, where a reporter would be likely to find it—and did find it.

“The thing that would force the motion to vacate is if Kevin has to rely on Democrat votes to pass a CR,” Freedom Caucus Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told Punchbowl News Tuesday. “I don’t think it has legs until Kevin relies on Democrats.” On the other hand, he said, “I don’t see how we can pass the bill [a CR] without Democrat votes.”

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Wheeee!

Where does that leave Democrats? In a position to let McCarthy dangle.

Since the last time House Republicans took the nation to the brink of disaster on the debt ceiling, a group of conservative Democrats in the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus offered to help out by providing enough votes to protect McCarthy from a move to boot him.

That offer is off the table now, Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips told reporters, thanks to McCarthy’s capitulation to the worst people in his conference and his greenlighting a toxic impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden. There’s no condoning or rewarding that, even from the most conservative of Democrats.

As of now, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries is meeting with his various Democratic groups, including the Problem Solvers, and seeing what it is they want. But that will not include capitulating to Republicans. “Leader Jeffries has been very clear,” Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar reiterated Tuesday morning. “They have to get rid of these ideological riders [on appropriations,] they have to fund the government at existing … levels and we need to meet the needs of the Ukrainian people fighting for freedom and the urgent disasters that we have had across this country.”

That’s where Democrats are and that’s where they need to stay so that McCarthy comes to them. They need to leave him stranded and friendless unless and until they extract concessions, like a commitment to realistically fund the government and put any impeachment nonsense on the back burner. McCarthy has a lot more to lose than Democrats do.

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What do you do if you're associated with one of the biggest election fraud scandals in recent memory? If you're Republican Mark Harris, you try running for office again! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," we revisit the absolutely wild story of Harris' 2018 campaign for Congress, when one of his consultants orchestrated a conspiracy to illegally collect blank absentee ballots from voters and then had his team fill them out before "casting" them. Officials wound up tossing the results of this almost-stolen election, but now Harris is back with a new bid for the House—and he won't shut up about his last race, even blaming Democrats for the debacle.

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Republicans ‘in the middle of a civil war’ as shutdown looms

Posted on September 18, 2023 by Joan McCarter

Who could have predicted it? The trial balloon a handful of House Freedom Caucus members floated with a few “establishment” Main Street Caucus members was shot down Sunday before it even started to rise.

The proposal consisted of a one-month continuing resolution that would keep the government funded through Oct. 31 but slash spending on nearly everything but defense, veterans programs, and disaster relief by more than 8% for the next month. The proposal also featured elements of a racist border funding/policy bill that passed the House in May. Every element of this—the cuts, the racist border bill, and the short time frame—would no doubt have been rejected by the Senate, even if it could pass the House.

However, it won’t pass the House because enough of the hardest hardliners have said no, and there’s no way Democrats would vote for it.

Florida man Rep. Matt Gaetz immediately rejected it. “I will not support this 167 page surrender to Joe Biden,” he said. Freedom Caucus Reps. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, Matt Rosendale of Montana, Eli Crane of Arizona, and others piled on. That included Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s good pal Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. That’s more than enough to bring the bill down.

According to The Washington Post, House leadership nevertheless has a “goal of uniting all flanks of the conference to support passing the deal.” McCarthy was a bit befuddled by it all Monday morning. "If you're not willing to pass appropriations bills and you're not willing to pass a continuing resolution to allow you to pass the rest of the appropriations bills and you don't want an omnibus, I don't quite know what you want,” he told reporters, summing up all the things the extremists have said they won’t do.

He reportedly did give a hint about how he might try to force his conference together on this: terrorists on the border! He has asked for a classified briefing on the issue. While the Department of Homeland Security has reported that the number of people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list that border agents encountered has increased in the past several months, the key part of that is that border agents stopped them from crossing.

McCarthy intended to bring this proposal to the floor in tandem with the defense appropriations bill the extremists derailed last week. “I gave them an opportunity this weekend to try to work through this, and we’ll bring it to the floor win or lose,” McCarthy said on Fox News’ Sunday morning.

That’s likely to be a “lose” if he tries to ram the bills through together. Democrats will almost surely not help. Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl that the House Republicans are "in the middle of a civil war.”

"It's unfortunate,” he added. “But as House Democrats, we're going to continue to try to find common ground with the other side of the aisle. … Hopefully the House Republicans will come along so that we can work to make sure we are funding the government."

The House Republican conference, and thus the whole House, remains in chaos, with just 12 days left for McCarthy to figure out how not to shut the government down.

Sign and send the petition: Pass a clean funding bill. No GOP hostage taking.

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