Chaos Returns To Capitol Hill
Chaos returns to Capitol Hill next week.
The chaos began in January when it took House Republicans 15 floor votes to elect Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker.
Chaos returned last month when eight House Republicans triggered McCarthy’s ouster. It took three weeks to finally replace him with the virtually unknown Rep. Mike Johnson.
Those were three weeks when the House could have been working to resolve urgent issues facing Congress.
Speaker Johnson is a soft-spoken MAGA extremist and an election denier who looks to the extremist House Freedom Caucus and his mentor, Rep. Jim Jordan, as his starting point for determining House legislative strategy.
The Senate meanwhile has imposed nine months of chaos on the nation’s armed forces by allowing first-term Sen. Tommy Tuberville to single-handedly block the promotions of hundreds of senior military officers in his attempt to end a Pentagon policy on women’s reproductive rights.
Tuberville’s position and his abuse of an antiquated Senate rule that has allowed him to paralyze action on military promotions has little support in the Senate – from Democrats or Republicans – and has done real damage to our national security.
As Veterans Day approaches on Saturday, this performance by Tuberville, and by the Senate in failing to stop him, is nothing less than a national disgrace.
And, the congressional chaos, however, is by no means limited to this.
The government will shut down next Friday at midnight unless Congress extends government funding before then.
Time is also running out on passing the $105-billion package requested by President Biden for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, and to strengthen our southern border.
Speaker Johnson’s approach to these critical requests is to either ignore them or propose legislative solutions that are dead-on-arrival in the Senate and at the White House.
Johnson is unwilling to pass a clean continuing resolution (CR) to extend government funding.
A CR would provide time for Congress to fund the government by passing appropriations bills or an omnibus appropriations bill. The new Speaker also keeps presenting appropriations bills that are filled with extreme spending cuts and poison pill provisions that ensure they will go nowhere in the Senate, but help keep Johnson’s MAGA Freedom Caucus happy.
Johnson has voted in the past to deny funding for Ukraine, joining with a growing isolationist movement among House Republicans that brings back memories of the 1930s.
As Speaker, Johnson has refused, to date, to bring Biden’s request for Ukraine funding to the House floor, which implicitly plays into the hands of Vladimir Putin.
Johnson held a House vote only on funding for Israel, but undermined it by tying it to an unrelated “spending cut” designed to undermine the IRS’s ability to gather tax revenues due to the government – a spending “cut” that, in reality, would save no money and instead would increase the national debt by $26.8 billion over 10 years.
The legislation, which passed the Republican-controlled House last week, is dead-on-arrival in the Senate and at the White House.
Johnson is ultimately going to have to fold on the CR, and the longer he holds out the more congressional Republicans will be blamed for causing major disruptions in the country.
In the Senate, while a bipartisan majority supports funding for Ukraine, as well as funding for Israel and Taiwan, Senate Republicans are demanding immigration policy changes as their price for supporting the Biden package.
A bipartisan group of Senators is attempting to develop an approach on immigration that would satisfy Republicans and Democrats, but immigration is an exceedingly difficult issue on which to obtain bipartisan consensus.
In the end, it will likely take Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, a strong supporter of Ukraine assistance, working together to get the Biden package passed by the Senate. If it does pass, it will be in the hands of Speaker Johnson as to whether he will allow the House to vote on it.
It is not unusual for major issues in Congress to back up to deadlines before they are resolved. But it is unusual to face such chaos on many major issues at one time.
With the new House dynamic, led by a MAGA extremist House Speaker, the path ahead is unclear.
To date, Speaker Johnson appears to be more concerned with satisfying his Freedom Caucus and MAGA colleagues than with addressing the nation’s problems.
The bottom line: the chaos continues. Get ready for the political equivalent of white-water rafting in the coming days.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears on Thursdays in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
