The GOP Is Ungovernable. So Now What?

But will Mike Johnson risk his Speakership to keep the government open?

Speaker Mike Johnson. Photo: Al Drago, Bloomberg via Getty Images

Now that the Republicans finally and unanimously elected their new Speaker, they can begin running the House again. Right?

Welp. The unity they showed in electing Mike Johnson has already collapsed. With a government shutdown looming on Friday, they once again need to kick the budget can down the road through a “Continuing Resolution” or “CR.”

But remember what happened with the last CR? Kevin McCarthy had to rely on Democratic votes to gain an extension till November 17th. But because it lacked steep cuts to government programs—which would have made it DOA in the Senate—extremists went ballistic and voted McCarthy out as Speaker.

Now Mike Johnson has the ball, and he’s fumbling badly. He tried to push two spending bills through his own party, and both failed to even make it to the floor. 

If the GOP can’t manage a party-line vote on basic spending bills, how will they manage a new CR? We’re now exactly back to where we were weeks ago: facing a government shutdown and in need of a clean extension, but with a Speaker with far less experience than McCarthy.

Let’s break down what’s broken down in the GOP and look at some possible scenarios in the coming week. But first, a quick refresher on some very recent House GOP history.

Kevin McCarthy tried, failed and was ousted.

Right before Kevin McCarthy threw in the towel and agreed to a bill to fund the government to avoid a shutdown—one that garnered more Democratic votes than Republican ones—there were some early test balloons, all of which popped early.

Back in mid-September, I wrote about the early warning signs for McCarthy.

A simple rules bill for defense spending had to be withdrawn because his party could not agree on whether and how to attach unrelated amendments. (The extremists want to wage their culture war on abortion and trans rights during the budget battle via amendments to the appropriations bills, which is not a great look.)

Then McCarthy let the extremists and the more moderate Republicans hash out a CR behind closed doors, one that they knew the Senate would reject. But even that one couldn’t get the support of enough of the party to pass, so it never came up for a vote.

The failure by McCarthy to even bring to the floor a bill to pay for our nation’s defense or a CR agreed to by the biggest factions in his own party—all because extremists kept wanting to attach poison pills to them—was a very bad sign for his own political future. As I noted back then,

McCarthy is nearly out of time. With just two working weeks left before the government runs out of money on October 1, it’s looking increasingly likely that the GOP will be unable to vote through any clean appropriations bill, let alone a dozen, or agree upon a continuing resolution to fund the government while the budget gets hammered out. 

That will leave McCarthy with few good options. If he caves to demands of the right, the budget will remain dead in the water because the Senate will never agree to it, and the government will shut down. House Republicans likely will bear most of the blame for that, as they have many times before apparently without learning their lesson. 

The logical conclusion of this was quite dire for McCarthy. As I explained then,

But if, as before, McCarthy seeks the help of Democrats to get the budget bills through, including past the conservative- controlled Rules Committee, his own right flank might well “file the fucking motion” to vacate. Then he’ll need Democrats to hang on to power, which will be a huge blow to his prestige and his legacy, if he even survives the challenge to his leadership.

Narrator: He did not survive the challenge to his leadership.

GOP appropriations bills flounder, again, this week

This very same situation is now playing out with the new Speaker because nothing has fundamentally changed about the GOP’s ungovernability. Minority Leader Jeffries and Senate leaders have called for a “clean” bill, but GOP extremists want it loaded down with conditions, reneging on McCarthy’s earlier budget agreement. 

As a kind of test of party unity, Speaker Johnson tried to move two bills to a House floor vote. But like Speaker McCarthy before him, Speaker Johnson couldn’t even get the votes together in his own party to manage it. 

One transportation funding bill would have stripped $15 billion in funding for Amtrak, effectively seeking to undo the White House’s plans to upgrade passenger rail services. The timing was no accident: This bill was proposed in the very week Biden announced that key work to repair and replace rail infrastructure in the Northeast, providing 100,000 new jobs, was to begin. Republican members from those states rebelled against the bill, however, and it died in committee.

A second $25 billion bill to fund financial services contained such strong anti-contraception and anti-abortion language that GOP candidates in vulnerable swing districts simply couldn’t support it. A provision in the bill would have blocked D.C. from preventing employment discrimination based on reproductive health choices, including birth control or abortion. That was problematic for less extreme GOP members, especially after the trouncing that the party suffered in the most recent election on the issue of abortion. So the bill once again got pulled.

If, like McCarthy, Johnson cannot unite his own party behind basic appropriations bills that are free of unrelated poison pills, then he will have a very difficult time getting them behind any kind of CR that the Democratic-controlled Senate would even be willing to consider.

That means he will either have to allow a government shutdown to happen under his watch, or he will need to pass a CR that the Senate can accept. But that would mean a bipartisan bill with strong Democratic support. Such a move risks Johnson’s own political future by angering his right-wing allies.

Gosh, that sounds awfully familiar.

Johnson squanders precious time, fiddles while D.C. burns

Johnson had a “honeymoon” period where he could probably have leaned upon his MAGA credentials to force a clean CR through. Instead he spent the week allowing floor votes on an absurd list of resolutions, from (checks notes) reducing Pete Buttigieg’s pay to $1 to banning the use of Latinx as a term.

But with the shutdown now just days away, Johnson is surely busy seeing to the concerns of his party and working to arrive at a grand compromise, right? 

Nope.

Last time the folks over at Capitol Hunters checked, Johnson appeared to be focused on Paris, France, where he is a keynote speaker at a far-right “Worldwide Freedom Initiative” conference, alongside people like Brexiteer Nigel Farage, Moms for Liberty, Devin Nunes, and of course Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota and her paramour, Corey Lewandowski (neither of whom appear to be in a “covenant marriage” like Johnson).

The Senate moves to propose a CR

Bills relating to taxation and revenue are supposed to originate in the House. But these are strange times, where the party in charge of the House can’t even bring its own bills to the House floor for a vote. So the Senate, under Majority Leader Schumer, is now looking to fill the void.

“I’m taking the first procedural step for the Senate to move forward on a short-term extension to avoid a MAGA government shutdown,” Schumer stated.

But without the House in order, and it is very much not so, even a Senate-originated CR can’t become law. Any budget solution, even a temporary one, has to come from the narrow House Republican majority. When we are down to the wire later in the week, Johnson will either have to cause a government shutdown or concede the terms the parties already agreed to back in March when they compromised to avoid a debt ceiling limit catastrophe.

For all his cowardice and equivocation, McCarthy in the end chose not to drive the country off a cliff and risk loss of the House next year by angering the public. A government shutdown, especially right before Thanksgiving, would be a huge economic blow to millions of working families. And if history is any guide, Republicans will bear the lion’s share of the blame. 

But it is far from clear that Speaker Johnson will choose the same path as McCarthy did. Johnson’s political allies are burn-it-down radicals who would rather see no functioning government than one that funds programs they despise. Will Johnson risk their ire through a bipartisan CR, just weeks into his own leadership? 

If he had any backbone, he would test the far-right and go the McCarthy route. It’s the only one that’s left that makes any sense. But we all know that backbone and sense aren’t hallmarks of the modern GOP.

We’ll learn in a few days whether Johnson will blink and swerve, or whether he will simply smile and offer a prayer as he takes his remaining hand off the steering wheel.

Correction: An earlier version of this misindentified Gov. Kristi Noem as from Nebraska, instead of South Dakota.