Amid GOP confusion, U.S. braces for ‘first-ever shutdown about nothing’
‘Nothing’; also why the GQP-led impeachment hearing was such a "disaster" for the Republican lawmakers.
What’s the deal with this government shutdown? In a standoff even Republicans are comparing to ‘Seinfeld,’ it’s hard to tell.
In 2013, the government shut down because of a partisan disagreement over President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. In 2018, Democrats bucked President Donald Trump’s demands to fund a U.S.-Mexico border wall, leading to the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
And now?
“We are truly heading for the first-ever shutdown about nothing,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. Strain has started referring to the current GOP House-led impasse as “the ‘Seinfeld’ shutdown,” a reference to the popular sitcom widely known as “a show about nothing.” “The weirdest thing about it is that the Republicans don’t have any demands. What do they want? What is it that they’re going to shut the government down for? We simply don’t know.”
Lawmakers have until 12:01 a.m. Sunday to pass a new law to extend government funding, or a wide range of critical federal services will come to a halt. On Thursday, a bipartisan Senate agreement to temporarily fund the federal government passed a procedural hurdle, but that plan has already been rejected by House Republicans.
Typically, funding showdowns in divided government between Congress and the White House have featured pitched battles over specific policies, such as Trump’s border wall or Obamacare. But budget experts and historians say the current impasse stands out for its lack of a clear policy disagreement.
House Republican leaders had already worked out an agreement with President Biden in May on government spending levels for the next fiscal year, but they’re working on legislation that would spend far less than the agreed amounts. The House has no plans yet for a temporary extension to government funding, which means there haven’t been significant negotiations with the Democratic Senate and White House. As long as House Republicans cannot find consensus on their demands, Democratic policymakers — largely backed in this fight by Senate Republicans — have declined to offer concessions, because they don’t know which ones would suffice.
Asked by reporters Wednesday what could be done to avoid a shutdown, Biden responded, “If I knew that, I would’ve already done it.”
Compounding the confusion is that it is not clear how or when House Republicans can forge consensus. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has for weeks tried to unify his caucus around a set of spending demands, but his efforts have been stymied in part because a handful of far-right insurgents keep changing their own demands. And so with less than two days until a shutdown, the legislative leaders tasked with funding the government appear stuck.
House Republican appropriators have advanced legislation that would dramatically slash the safety net and other domestic programs, including gutting some education subsidies by 80 percent. Those bills, however, are not only doomed in the Senate but also have failed to pass the House, leaving the lower chamber’s policy priorities unclear.
“I frankly don’t understand it — I think it’s sort of nuts. There are times people vote yes one day, and then they come back and vote no the next day, and can’t explain why they switched,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and a McCarthy ally. Gingrich led House Republicans through two different shutdowns nearly 30 years ago, a brief one in late 1995 and a longer one weeks later. “I find it hard to understand what they want, too, because they change constantly — that’s a big part of the problem.”
Asked if he has a hard time tracking the insurgents’ demands of McCarthy, Gingrich said yes, adding, “So do they.”
Grover Norquist, the president of the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, has tormented generations of GOP officials by organizing House backbenchers against their leaders. But he chastised the current group of House insurgents for failing to coalesce around an intelligible set of demands. The shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 eventually pushed Clinton and the GOP-led Congress to agree on balanced-budget legislation and other federal changes. Now, Norquist said, far-right members throw out so many different demands — an end to Ukraine funding, tougher immigration restrictions, dramatic spending cuts, changes to House procedures — that it is impossible to know what they want.
“You can’t have seven reasons, and a different one each week, and expect American people to understand what your point was. In prior fights, there was a focus on why you were doing this. But right now, what would someone watching this on TV be taking away? It’s about too many things, which makes this about nothing,” Norquist said.
If this weekend truly does bring the “Seinfeld” shutdown, Norquist said, it will in part reflect the lack of clarity about what the holdouts in the House are demanding.
“One of the rules of ‘Seinfeld’ was: ‘No learning takes place,’” he said. “And one of the rules from that show is the case here — there’s no attempt here to learn from previous episodes.”
Some Republican strategists have complained about Rep. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), one of the most bombastic GOP holdouts, who recently sent a fundraising email that blamed McCarthy for the potential shutdown.
“Gaetz is threatening the speaker’s job if he works with Democrats, while leaving no choice to but to rely on Democratic votes,” said Liam Donovan, who worked for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “The entire exercise is designed to fail. It’s all impressively nihilistic.”
The action on the House floor this week captured just how far afield the debate has strayed.
Far-right lawmakers offered dozens of amendments to the defense bill that had no chance of passing the Senate and an uncertain fate in the House. Lawmakers voted on stripping tens of millions of dollars from the Peace Corps, reducing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s salary to $1, and eliminating international aid for disaster assistance. Other amendments included cutting the salary of U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield to $1 and banning State Department employees from using taxpayer dollars to attend events or conferences hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative.
“It’s a symbolic fight for bomb-throwing lawmakers who want to pick a fight with Republican leadership, no matter what,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank. “It’s not really about anything.”
MEANWHILE:
'They need FEMA’s help'
During Thursday's episode of MSNBC's The Reid Out, United States Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) explained why the House Republicans' first impeachment hearing against President Joe Biden was such a "disaster" for the Republican lawmakers.
Moskowitz emphasized, "This was an unmitigated disaster. It's a shame the Republicans are going to shut down the government, because they need FEMA's help. That's how bad it today was. They were not prepared. In the very first minute, their own witness — and I wasn't surprised, because it was in the testimony that was written — comes out and says, 'Everything you have been working on for the last eight months, everything that you have presented to the American people does not rise to the level of impeachment.' That's their own witness. It was awkward. It was just like, I started to feel kind of bad, like this is clearly what they didn't plan for Fox News today."
Host Joy Reid replied, "I mean, Jonathan Truly is not someone who is not interested in getting Democrats. He's pretty motivated, I think, to try to find some reason to impeach Joe Biden. I think his team would love to do it, if they could say to do it, he would. He didn't. He said, 'No there's nothing here.' Their forensic accountant, his name is Bruce Dubinsky also said, 'Mm mm, there's nothing.' Eileen O'Connor, a former assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's tax division said, 'Nothing.' Was there a single witness, congressman, on their side who presented evidence that Joe Biden somehow was taking bribes, apparently during the timeline when he was neither president nor vice president? Because all this was supposed to have taken place when he was sitting at home in Delaware."
Moskowitz replied, "No. not a single shred of evidence, not a new fact, nothing. this was a recitation of the last eight months. It was a panel to kind of comment on what the Republicans have been working on. All he did was say, you know, 'The Biden family, and Hunter Biden, and Jill Biden, and Commander Biden' — the dog. You know, they never mentioned Joe Biden. They never say, 'Joe Biden did X,' because it's not there. There's no evidence of that. By the way, they filed articles of impeachment — some of them filed articles of impeachment two weeks into the Biden administration, right after January 6th, before a single hearing took place. So, if they're so gung-ho —Joy they refuse to call the vote. I gave them the opportunity to call the vote, 'Right now, call the vote for impeachment in the hearing.' And Comer pretended like i didn't even say it. It's because they don't have the votes, because they don't have any evidence on Joe Biden."
