On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that it would be “politically beyond stupid” for Republicans in the House to send the nation careening toward a government shutdown just one month before a national election. One day later, House Republicans seemed to treat this as a dare. They went beyond—by a big margin.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finally got a continuing resolution to the floor on Wednesday evening to keep the government funded beyond the end of the month. The vote wasn’t even close. Johnson could only afford to lose a handful of Republican votes if he hoped to pass the legislation. However, 14 Republicans voted no and the bill went down 202-220.
Now, with the government scheduled to run out of cash on Sept. 30, and no proposal on the table to stop it, Republicans could be the proud owners of a government shutdown that could still be going on Election Day.
How obvious was Johnson’s failure? So obvious that even Fox News host Sean Hannity is tired of his crap.
Johnson: We ran the right play. We came a little bit short of the goalline. So now we go back to the playbook, we draw it up, we’re already hearing good ideas from our members. And we’ve got time to fix this and we’ll get it done.
Hannity: Let me ask you, you keep saying ‘it’s the right play,’ and you can’t get every Republican to vote for it. That’s your own party.
Johnson replied by blaming Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Senate for his inability to secure the votes of his own party in his own chamber.
“Chuck Schumer is to blame for this,” Johnson said.
Somehow, that seems unlikely to fly with voters when their services turn off.
While the Republican speaker may claim that there’s time to fix this problem, he’s been burning through that time without a sign of progress. A week earlier, Johnson tabled nearly identical legislation after it became clear that too many Republicans intended to vote against it. Then he revived it on Wednesday after being unable to secure a compromise with the fractious members of his own party.
Johnson’s inability to control Republicans—or even count the votes well enough to understand when moving forward is fruitless—continues to be a legacy of unparalleled incompetence.
Other Republican leaders can’t even figure out why Johnson is blowing his time, and what little remains of his authority, on this kind of pointless exercise.
“It takes a lot of political capital trying to get members to vote for something that won’t pass,” one senior Republican told reporters for Politico’s Playbook. “It’s bad member management.”
The continuing resolution got assistance from three Democrats who voted in favor, but in addition to the 14 no votes, two other Republicans voted “present,” so even those few Democratic votes didn’t do much to trim the magnitude of Johnson’s loss.
The reason the current bill doesn’t enjoy more Democratic support is that it is tied to the SAVE Act—placed there on orders from Donald Trump. The SAVE Act is based on racist conspiracy theories claiming that elections are threatened by large numbers of votes by non-citizens. It would place national requirements on voter IDs that could be difficult for many voters, especially working-class voters, to meet.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has made it clear that Democrats are ready to step in and give Johnson the votes he needs to sustain government funding, but only if he stops tying the funding bill to the racist and unnecessary SAVE Act.
However, Schumer has also made it clear he needs time to move the bill through the Senate. Johnson can’t take until the last hour of the last day before agreeing to something that would get wider support.
At the moment, Republicans seem to be trapped. Johnson doesn’t want to drop the SAVE Act because it would anger Trump. He can’t get Democratic votes because the bill is tied to a racist conspiracy theory. He can’t get all the members of his own party in part because some of them think this bill doesn’t go far enough as far as voter suppression.
And because his own members voted the bill down, Johnson has exactly zero leverage over Democrats.
Johnson reportedly has a “Plan B” for getting something passed, but no one seems to know what it is. Maybe it involves Johnson resigning and letting someone else carry the ball.
Johnson would lose many Republican votes, but could likely pass the legislation in a heartbeat if he dropped the SAVE Act. But that would mean offending Trump and being targeted as a “RINO.”
Meanwhile, the clock keeps on ticking.
