Budget Follies: The Endgame

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-22-congress-budget-follies-endgame/



There’s an old saying that when the other guy is destroying himself, the best tactic is to stand back and let it happen. That’s certainly the case with the House Republican refusal to fund the government. Yesterday, six members of the tiny nihilist caucus in the House once again blocked even floor consideration of a rule to allow debate to proceed on funding the Pentagon. Speaker Kevin McCarthy, humiliated for the second time in a week, sent the House home for the weekend.

Even if the Republican ultras relent, this will be only the beginning of a long series of extortionate demands that Democrats can’t accept, including cuts of 70 to 80 percent in domestic spending. McCarthy’s failure to get his own caucus to deliver on the budget agreement that McCarthy negotiated with President Biden last May in exchange for extending the debt ceiling, is one more example of Republican bad faith, factional disarray, and McCarthy’s dwindling power.

It’s only a matter of time before McCarthy is dumped as Speaker. Democrats should welcome that. His successor will be even weaker because the far-right Freedom Caucus can’t keep doing in Speakers. One of the sillier suggestions is that the Democrats should vote with McCarthy to save his Speakership in exchange for some kind of budget deal (that McCarthy can’t deliver), as Steven Pearlstein proposed in a recent Washington Post column.

The endgame is almost surely a government shutdown once the current fiscal year ends in just eight days on September 30. Government shutdowns have invariably backfired on Republicans. This one is likely to backfire even more disastrously, since it is a product not just of the usual GOP demands for deeper cuts but of nihilism and dysfunction within the Republican caucus vividly on public display.

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