“Puberty For Grownups”

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) after a bill to fund the Pentagon failed to advance. Photo courtesy of CBS

Warning signs are now flashing bright red for the House GOP. For the second time in four months—and only the third time in modern congressional legislative history—the party in charge failed to advance one of its own bills for consideration, with a so-called “rules” vote failing in the House 212-214.

I’m going to take us a bit in the weeds on legislative procedure here, so bear with me. Two key terms to keep in mind: 

• A “continuing resolution” or “CR” for the budget is a bill that “continues” funding for the government while the budget is hammered out. It can come with conditions attached or not.

• A “rule” is a basic resolution which must be first passed by the House before there can be a vote on a bill. It sets out the terms of debate for the bill, such as how much time will be allowed for debate and whether amendments can be offered.

Per tradition, the party out of power (here, the Democrats) vote against any rule resolution, forcing the majority to hold together to move the bill forward for a House floor vote. 

But this time, five House GOP members bucked leadership and joined the Democrats to send the rule down to defeat. This was particularly galling given that the bill at issue is one to fund the Pentagon, a traditionally easy vote for the GOP to get behind.

This left Speaker McCarthy scrambling. He pulled a second planned vote on a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open while budget negotiations continue this fall, finally admitting that he lacked the votes to push it through. 

The condemnation was swift from his own party members. Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-IN) called McCarthy “weak.” McCarthy’s main nemesis, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), said he was “lying like a dead dog” and left a copy of a motion to vacate the chair in a Capitol bathroom on Tuesday, perhaps intentionally. Even the less extreme wing of the party opened fire, with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) saying McCarthy needs to “take ownership” of the position he had put the party in.  

Asked about the possibility of a government shutdown, GOP Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-GA) quipped to reporters at a Politico event, “[T]his appears to be nothing more than puberty for grownups. Everybody’s emotional and nobody’s making good decisions.”

So where does this leave things, with just ten days remaining before a government shutdown after September 30? McCarthy’s options are narrowing, and ultimately we may simply see a repeat of his capitulation from earlier this year to Biden’s budget. I’ll walk us through why that is.

Continuing revolution

Over the weekend, McCarthy had invited two factions, the so-called “Main Street” Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), to meet and hammer out the terms of a continuing resolution to keep the government open while the House worked to pass 11 out of the 12 remaining appropriation bills on its plate. 

This was a rather remarkable turn, with McCarthy essentially inviting the relatively small HFC in to “govern” instead of taking shots from the side. His thinking was likely, if you can force HFC’s leadership to roll up their sleeves, they will get their own members in line to support the result.

This didn’t work. As I wrote about earlier, the CR that emerged was quickly shot down by some 16 GOP hardliners who took issue with many aspects of it, chief among them being the lack of a “top line” budget number. The deal from earlier this year set a top line budget of $1.59 trillion for discretionary spending—meaning everything but mandatory payments like Social Security, interest payments on the debt and Medicare, which together make up around two-thirds of the budget. Many GOP hardliners want to keep negotiating that deal and offer a top line figure that is some $120 billion below that earlier agreed upon amount, which would mean a devastating amount of cuts to key social programs.

The Freedom Caucus’s resistance to their own leaders’ compromise CR led to Tuesday’s second embarrassing setback, with McCarthy yanking the proposed CR from a vote to move it forward. Had he not done so, it would have likely become the third bill that his own majority could not push through with their majority votes.

The Problem Solvers add a wrinkle

As the CR compromise fell apart, another group’s proposal began to look more enticing. The Problem Solvers is a bipartisan group of 64 Republican and Democratic House members, with 32 on each side. 

Late Wednesday, the group announced a framework for a bill to provide funds to avert a shutdown.

The plan is fairly straightforward. It would give Congress until January 11 to pass the 12 appropriations bills to fund the government through September 30, 2024. The funding would be set at the $1.59 trillion level agreed to between President Biden and Speaker McCarthy earlier in the year as part of the deal to avert a catastrophic default.

It would also grant Biden’s request for another round of emergency funding for Ukraine and new money for disaster relief across several U.S. communities. To address the debt crisis, it would set up a new commission to stabilize long-term deficits and debt.

While this sounds great and eminently reasonable, there’s one big problem with it: It relies upon Democratic support to pass. And that creates another problem for McCarthy.

McCarthy’s right flank has already threatened to oust him. They would deploy the motion to vacate rule that McCarthy had agreed to as a condition for their support for his speakership. That rule allows any single member, such as Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), to file the motion. Assuming, per tradition, that all Democrats vote in favor to vacate, only four GOP members would need to join them for McCarthy to be out. 

Democrats might have been in a more charitable mood to help McCarthy had he not already capitulated to the far-right wing of his party by announcing impeachment hearings against Joe Biden, set to begin two days before the government shuts down. To keep the Democrats from voting yes on the motion to vacate, McCarthy would have to offer them concessions, which likely would include calling off the impeachment dogs.

A shutdown looms

The Problem Solvers’ proposal appears to have swayed some of the breakaway hardline members back toward McCarthy’s side. Two of the five who voted against the Pentagon funding rules bill have now agreed to switch their votes so that at least that bill can proceed.

Meanwhile, McCarthy has fallen back on a new bill to temporarily fund the government through October. But it’s really just an old bill. It has a top line budget of $1.471 trillion—the same amount that was in the failed House “Limit, Save, Grow” bill that had frozen discretionary spending at 2022 levels. It also includes a border “crackdown” measure that extremists really want in it to show they are “serious” about addressing the issue.

Two big problems here.

First, there are currently at least seven House members who are a hard “no” on this new proposal. They really just want the government to shut down and for the House to act like an economic hostage taker once again. If the new proposed CR fails, that would leave only the Problem Solvers’ solution to consider. McCarthy’s best hope is to come out strongly against it but watch it come out of committee anyway and pass. (For you political nerds wondering how such a bill would come out of the GOP-dominated Rules Committee, it apparently would rely upon a “shell” bill that has been lying around for some time and could be amended then “discharged” through a special and rarely used process.)

Second, even if the CR somehow squeaks through, it will never pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. This is the same bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer once derisively labeled “DOA” (for “Default on America”). Why in the world would the Senate revert to a bill with a top-line number that was already rejected as part of the budget agreement reached earlier? The House CR would go exactly nowhere because of this, and McCarthy knows it, meaning it’s just another showpiece in advance of a government shutdown.

That means, ultimately, that to reopen the government after the looming shutdown, McCarthy will have to craft yet another compromise bill that gains the support of the Senate. And the only kind of bill likely to do so is one that maintains the hard-fought, top line number from earlier this year. And that means, yes, a bill with strong bipartisan support, as the Problem Solvers have long recognized.

If McCarthy reaches across the aisle to get it done, as he likely must, it could be the last opportunity for people like Rep. Gaetz or Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) to make good on their threats to depose him. But will they do so? 

CNN’s Manu Raju caught up to the two on Wednesday. Should McCarthy seek Democratic help on the stop-gap CR, Roy warned it would “not be a good move” while Gaetz warned directly that McCarthy would be out of a job “promptly.”