Sudden, Senseless Shutdown Showdown
All Republicans want for Christmas is...????
So it looks as of this writing that we may have a government shutdown this weekend. Everything looked perfectly on track until Wednesday when suddenly Elon Musk called for Republicans to oppose the pending short-term funding bill and close down the government until January 20...after which Donald Trump also came out against the negotiated bill and managed to top Musk in with a ridiculous demand.
As Catherine Rampell put it: “Americans voted for government by tantrum, and they’re getting it early.”1
Now, it’s still possible this will all work out somehow. But I suppose I have to run through shutdown showdown basics.
Extended shutdowns – more than a long weekend – only happen when some group wants one and has the votes to make it happen. They don’t happen accidentally, or because negotiators run out of time.
Shutdowns are unpopular for everyone, but the party or people responsible take the brunt of the blame. Since they doesn’t happen accidentally, it’s usually not hard for the media to correctly assess blame; it helps, of course, when the president’s ally is running around welcoming the shutdown.
The key thing to know about shutdowns is that they eventually will end, and they end with something that can win a majority of both chambers and get the president’s signature.
Since we’ll have a different Senate majority on January 3 and a different president on January 20, it’s at least theoretically possible that a Republican shutdown now could get them a better bill down the road…but only at the cost of a month of getting beat up by everyone. Also, if they thought they had the votes for a better bill in January, they could still do that even if they passed the negotiated deal.
Also, no, they don’t really have a bill ready to go for January either, and they’ll still have to pass it with a tiny House majority, plus additional obstacles in the Senate.
Two more points.
One is that the episode, with Mush throwing himself into a congressional dispute at the last minute, demonstrates one of the many downsides for Trump of Trump’s collection of misfit toys that he’s put together for his second presidency. Up to when Musk spoke, Trump was keeping quiet, which was working out well for him. It appeared that the bill would pass, with radicals and many mainstream conservatives able to vote against it and bash it but without jeopardizing the build-up to the new presidency. And any blame within the party for the bill would be on Speaker Mike Johnson, who negotiated it, and not on Trump given that he’s not president yet.
Once Musk spoke, however, Trump either had to break with his ally or stick with and even try to top Musk, just to show that he, Trump, was the one really in charge.2
This isn’t the last time one of Trump’s yahoos is going to create that kind of problem.
The second thing is that since Trump doesn’t have any idea about the budget or what’s in it, the big demand he somehow came up with was asking for a clean spending bill except for also raising the debt limit.3 The problem? Democrats are certainly not going to vote for Trump’s bill, given that it strips out all the things they wanted. And House Republicans really, really don’t like voting for debt limit increases. What’s more, many of them want the goodies – disaster aid, extending agricultural benefits – that were in the negotiated deal, even if they might not want to say so publicly.
A real Speaker would put Trump’s bill on the House floor immediately.4 It’s win-win for Mike Johnson. He can claim he’s doing what Trump wants and even vote for it. In the unlikely even the bill passes the House (even though it would be doomed in the Senate), so much the better for Johnson. But if it loses – and I’m not sure that even a majority of Republicans would support it, and it might be very few indeed – the humiliation is Trump’s and Musk’s, not his.
But Speaker Johnson probably isn’t going to make Trump eat it, because Trump might get mad at him.
Of course, none of that gets any closer to keeping the government open, or for that matter re-opening it before Trump takes office in a month. Who knows? I’m writing this Wednesday night; by Thursday morning Musk may have realized that a government shutdown will slow something one of his businesses needs (rocket launch permits?), or Trump may be convinced that a shutdown would lead to a bare-bones inauguration instead of full pomp and circumstance.
At any rate, the only thing that makes a worse battle cry than “We’re shutting down the government to prevent disaster relief and farm programs” would be “We’re shutting down the government to force an increase in the debt limit that isn’t even needed for another six months or more.” But that seems to be what Trump and Musk are sticking themselves and their party with.
Which doesn’t mean it won’t happen.
Technically, he didn’t have to, I suppose. But no president wants to appear to be allowing a hanger-on to dictate major decisions. And even with Trump jumping in, Trump’s opponents were refering to “President Musk” on cable news Wednesday night. You don’t have to have Trump’s insecurities to consider that a problem.
So far I haven’t seen any reporting on how Trump came up with the debt limit as his demand. We do know that as of last week the Trump transition (very sensibly) was steering clear of the temporary spending measure.
Procedural notes: To get it on the House floor, Johnson could go through the Rules Committee, but it’s not clear he could get the votes in committee or on the House floor to even be able to take up the bill that way. The other option, which Johnson was originally planning for the bipartisan bill, was to use a different procedure that avoided Rules but requires a supermajority. That’s not going to happen with Democrats probably united against it, but at least it would get a vote.