There They Go Again - The "Can't Govern Caucus" Rides Again!
Republican control of the US House means a perpetual budget game of "kick the can."
The good news is America’s national government won’t shut down on September 30.
The bad news is we are right back in the soup with another potential federal government shut down in just three months, on December 20. Just in time for Christmas.
The ridiculous news? We face a new possible government shut down deadline on December 20 because of the very legislation everyone is now applauding for helping us dodge the just avoided government shut down.
Is there even a donut shop in America that would operate this way? Of course not. Republicans in Congress, however, are just fine with it - so much so that brinksmanship and real threats to shut down the government have become the routine Republican tool of choice when it comes to enacting a federal budget.
Republican dysfunction in the US House of Representatives - again and still - is the reason your federal government is lurching from one short term, stop gap, emergency budget (known as a Continuing Resolution (CR) in “congressional-speak”) to the next.
In this most recent case, interference by Donald Trump, the ex-president, 34 times convicted felon and private citizen also helped ensure that no new complete fiscal year budget was enacted by the end of the current fiscal year and that Republicans were once again threatening yet another government shutdown.
Republicans hold the majority in the House, but cannot field a majority to get much of anything done, especially its most basic responsibility, passing a budget on time.
There’s a reason I call House Republicans the “Can’t Govern Caucus.”
The House of Representatives that Republicans now control is the most inept and incompetent US House I’ve seen in nearly 50 years in Washington, DC.
The House Republican Caucus does little of positive consequence for the American people. In-fighting and attacking Democrats are far more their game.
When something positive does manage to make it out of the US House, it rarely has to do with anything the Republican majority has done. Rather, it’s Democrats, who are the minority in the House, who band together with a handful of Republicans to defeat the Republican extremists, rescue the Republican House Speaker, and get the job done.
The extreme ideological division among House Republicans is not a new development. It has been simmering for years if not decades, at varying degrees, but reached its boiling point in this Congress.
The most obvious example of the “Can’t Govern Caucus’ dysfunction was the continuing saga of Republicans trying to elect and keep a Speaker of the House in this Congress. Normally electing a Speaker is a routine vote. For this Congress, it took days and a truck load of wild, ill-advised promises, and 15 ballots for Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to finally secure the Speakership.
Even after all that, McCarthy couldn’t keep the job. The Republican extremists drove him out of it after less than a year.
Replacing McCarthy proved to be a case of “same song, second verse.”
The House was leaderless, without a Speaker for three weeks. The public’s business in the House ground to a halt, as internal Republican politics and divisions became the focus as Republicans struggled to elect a new Speaker.
After multiple failed candidacies by others, Republicans eventually came up with the little known and relatively inexperienced Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA). His strength was, not his readiness for the job, but the fact that he hadn’t been in the House long enough or been prominent enough to acquire any political enemies yet.
He was finally elected - unanimously - but now similarly faces constant speculation about how long he can remain Speaker, and thinly veiled, grumbled threats about replacing hm.
The continuing and historically unprecedented dysfunction of House Republicans makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the House’s “Can’t Govern Caucus” to get much, if anything, done.
You’ll note, few House Republicans, including those running for re-election in Iowa, are doing so in campaigns that tout their own record of accomplishment. They don’t have any. So they blather on about how they are “fighting for” this or that, and show up at ground breaking ceremonies for federal projects funded by President Joe Biden’s economic recovery program - which most of them voted against.
Trump’s interference is also not new, though the particular incident that sparked the potential shut down is new.
Trump is the guy who tanked the bi-partisan border security bill in February. Republicans and Democrats in Congress wrote it together, and were ready to pass it, but hadn’t voted on it yet. President Biden was ready to sign it if and when it reached his desk.
Then Trump, who holds no position in the federal government - well maybe perpetual defendant against felony indictments by impartial jcitizen juries - told Republicans to dump it essentially because he wanted to run a campaign against border security problems, not solve them.
And so congressional Republicans killed the bi-partisan plan that was on the verge of enactment just as Trump directed them.
Both Iowa Senators - Republicans Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) voted to do Trump’s bidding in a crucial procedural vote in the Senate in February that effectively tanked the proposal.
Trump’s new interference that sparked the potential of a government shut down was to insist that Republicans include a provision in the CR that would have required anyone registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship, even though voting by non-citizens is a non-existent problem that has influenced the out come of exactly zero federal election contests.
The only likely outcome in the real world of a provision like that would be to deter millions of fully qualified voters - citizens - from voting because they don’t have documents that their prove citizenship and are unable to obtain them, for a variety of reasons, and certainly not within the window required to register and vote in this election which is just over a month away.
Which is exactly in line with Republican vote suppression strategies.
That version of the CR also would have kicked the budget can down the road six months instead of three. Less pressure, perhaps, but nothing to brag about when the budget was supposed to have been enacted and the ink dried by September 30.
The Democratic majority Speaker Johnson needs to pass virtually anything of value in the House rejected the voter suppression language Trump and then House Republicans insisted on, and voted against the CR containing it.
The version of the CR that did pass in the House left out the voter suppression provision, and cut the “can kicking” time period down to just three months, meaning that Congress will need to vote again to avoid a government shut down after the elections (less pressure and less accountability). Less than a week before Christmas, too, which on the “accountability” scale also means fewer Americans will be watching or paying attention.
All Iowa congressional representatives voted on September 18 for the CR that included the vote suppression provision and “kicked the can” down to road to March 2025 as the new deadline for enacting Fiscal 2025 spending levels without the threat of a government shutdown.
Fiscal Year 2025, BTW, begins on October 1, 2024. They wanted to set a new deadline for adopting spending levels for the 2025 Fiscal Year a full SIX MONTHS into that fiscal year.
With the exception of Rep. Randy Feenstra, all of Iowa’s representatives voted for the CR version that averted the September 30 shutdown by removing the vote suppression language, and moving the missed deadline for enacting Fiscal 2025 spending levels to December 20 from September 30.
Feenstra’s vote would have allowed the potential September 30 government shutdown to happen.
By the way the “Can’t Govern Caucus” in the House still hasn’t passed a new Farm Bill to replace the five year 2018 Farm Bill which expired on September 30, 2023.
Yes. 2023.
It, too, was punted to 2024, with great promises of “We’ll get to it then, for sure.”
They didn’t get to it. Early, mid year, or before that next fiscal year came and went.
The federal farm program, over a year after it should have been updated, modernized and re-written is still limping along with its provisions enacted in 2018
The Farm Bill remains undone, but House Republicans insist they’ll get to it after the election, too. Of course they do.
I don’t know, though.
If they expected to include things farmers are going to like, don’t you think they would be rushing to enact it before farmers start voting. Sounds like another way to avoid accountability for changes farmers won’t like to me. Especially when it takes them two years past its expiration date to muster up the courage to actually vote on it, and then, only after the election when the next one is more than two years away.
Not to mention it’s one more dirty trick to play on farmers who are still hoping, after more than a year after they had a right to expect that they could begin, to do some long term planning for their farming operations.
Taking into account changes in the federal farm program is a big part of that planning. As things now stand, they can only see three months ahead.
The weather forecaster on TV delivers a longer term outlook than that.
This is no way to run a government.
Great column and lots to parse. Regarding the voter suppression/citizenship efforts, I wonder how many Republicans get locked out of voting? And how many candidates lose to a a Democrat instead?
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