Oh, joy! What an age we live in! Folks, I’m excited to inform you that our dedicated cadre of crack boffins, toiling furiously within the prestigious and ever-expanding Needlefish Scientific Research Facility and Innovation Campus, have identified and isolated the conceptual essence of the governing philosophy driving almost all public policy in the modern U.S. Congress. They’ve even managed to distill this essentially abstract construct down to an eerily apt metaphoric sound file, audible within the normal range of adult human hearing. It’s practically sorcery! Have a listen:
Yeah! Go for it Congress! Anytime you’re in a jam, you can always kick that frickin’ can down the road! So what the Hell, and why the Hell not – kick it good!
Hyuk!
Well, I thought it was kind of funny. Geez, what a tough crowd. What a bunch of grumps.
OK, let’s forget about my poorly received attempts at humour and move on. This is serious stuff. Harrumph. I agree. I bet you have serious questions too, like wait a minute, what’s going on? What are you on about this time? Is this about the budget? What about it? Did they finally pass one? Did Ukraine get its aid package? Was the imminent government shutdown avoided at the last minute, as usual? What just happened? Why does what just happened keep happening?
Short answer: no there’s no budget, yes there was a last-minute avoidance of a shutdown, and no, Ukraine didn’t get its aid package, and neither did Israel or Taiwan.
That’s the Cliff’s Notes, but you all crave a little more detail than that, don’t you, loyal readers? You want to know the whole story, how things are supposed to be working, as opposed to how things are actually working, correct? Why, sure you do! I know my readership! Every one of you is an insatiable consumer of intelligently curated information, especially when accompanied by nuanced analysis sufficient to put things into context, and bring the blurry picture into sharp focus. It’s what you all live for. Right? So perhaps a bit of a refresher course is in order. This American legislative arcana can be so confusing and difficult to keep straight. So many rules! So much process! So little getting done! How to make sense of it? Allow me to run a remedial course of Congress 101. I’ll be ever so succinct.
Bear with me, as I’m going to proceed from the assumption that none of you know the first thing about how any aspect of the U.S. Government works. You know, just as if you’re all average American voters. Thus, back to basics.
The first and most important thing to remember is that within the American constitutional framework, only Congress can raise and spend money, which means that every year, the House and Senate are constitutionally obligated to agree on a federal budget. Well, it’s more like a dozen sub-budgets these days, each funding different sets of government departments, but you get the picture. The first draft may come from the White House, but that’s just the opening bid. Appropriations are what Congress does, not the President.
The enactment of a never-ending series of superficially unexciting money bills doesn’t get a lot of attention, unless something goes awry, but it’s actually most of what Congress does, especially when, as now, control of the chambers is divided. Back in the day, bipartisan cooperation was still a thing, and meaningful stuff could always got done if you were ready to do the horse trading, but these days it’s only when one party runs both the House and the Senate that significant new public policy initiatives like Obamacare, or the Inflation Reduction Act, get passed into law. Still, no matter what, come Hell or high water, the fundamental matters of taxation and appropriations need perpetual legislative tending. Those bills have to become law.
They just have to. Even when Congress is broken, as it is right now.
It’s hard to wrap one’s mind around what it would mean if the legislative gridlock that now stymies almost all other governing initiatives extended as well to the budget process. Such would eventually amount to the dismantling of the entire federal government, following which, in the midst of all sorts of ensuing calamities, it might start occurring to folks that Congress no longer had any reason to exist. The mind boggles. It’s practically a logical impossibility. I have my doubts that a sustained refusal to fund government is even constitutional (but who knows with the crappy Constitution they’re forced to work with), but in any case you’d think that legislators wouldn’t even flirt with behaviour that’s antithetical to their very existence as the Article 1 branch of government. It’s as if they’re messing around in the lab with antimatter. The whole place might end up going POOF, and vanish from the observable Cosmos.
So far, nobody’s talking about stonewalling the budget to the same extent that Mitch McConnell stonewalled Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland for a seat on the Supreme Court, so that’s something, I guess, but I’m not so sure it’ll never come to that. We’re already living in a mind-bending Upside-Downiverse in which the Republicans have all but normalized extortionate games of chicken as part of the budget routine, thus giving rise to to an intermittent but regular risk that the federal government of the United Fucking States will actually run out of money before a new round of spending becomes law.
Nutty as it sounds, this can actually happen, has actually happened, ten times to date, and when it does, much of the government is forced quite literally to close up shop. Not all at once, usually, and maybe not right away. There may still be a little left in the kitty when the taps are shut off, and every accounting trick in the book will be used to keep things running as long as possible. Paying interest on existing debt, and Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid payments wouldn’t be affected because that money doesn’t come from regular annual appropriations. Otherwise, the various agencies of the federal government have to lock the doors and furlough staff. It’s actually illegal to do otherwise, under something called the Antideficiency Act, or so says a legal opinion issued by the Attorney General over 40 years ago. The last shutdown, which, arguably and unusually, could be laid at the doorstep of the Democrats (it was when Donald was trying to obtain funds to build his ridiculous border wall), dragged on for an increasingly unnerving 35 days. How long will the next one last?
Sometimes I can barely believe where we’ve ended up. Even the budget process, the core responsibility of Congress, is in danger of becoming mired up to its wheel wells in the same dysfunctional partisan muck that already stops the legislative branch from achieving anything else. Being, er, mature, I can recall how shockingly crazy it seemed to everybody when, near the end of the Carter administration, things got so screwed up that the government, for the first time ever, was technically out of operation for something like a whole day. These days, courting the risk of repeating what was, within my adult lifetime, a largely hypothetical and almost politically impossible End of Days scenario has now become something akin to regular order.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world’s greatest nation.
Now, I should stress that it’s not all doom and gloom. Not necessarily. A temporary failure to pass a budget doesn’t have to be an extinction level event. It doesn’t even have to shut down government operations. There’s a makeshift work-around to the gridlock, so long as the requisite majorities in both chambers are looking to avert chaos, rather than revel in it (lately, not always the case). To sustain government functions pending the passage of proper budget legislation, an interim solution is available in the form of a “continuing resolution”, a legislative device that temporarily extends the funding from the previous budget, usually for a fixed period of perhaps six or eight weeks, or thereabouts. Lawmakers are supposed to use the reprieve to get their shit together and do some legislating. Which is, after all, their job. Their sworn duty, even.
Well and good, but we’ve seen rather too many of these “CRs” lately, which is a Bad Thing because everybody’s become used to them. They’re no longer imbued with the sense of urgency appropriate to the last-gasp emergency measures they actually are. These days, they’re just something more to use as leverage, something to be seized upon by the usual cast of GOP trolls as an opportunity to indulge in a few preliminary rounds of public policy blackmail. Why wait? Again, this is madness, and mind-roastingly illogical: they want to start in on the budget battle straight away, when the object of the exercise is to pass something temporary and relatively innocuous to ensure that there’s going to be time, after that, to fight the budget battle. I feel a need to emphasize this: they want the CR itself to include the budget concessions that are supposed to be taken up in the ensuing budget negotiations.
All of the Democrats, and about half the Republicans, understand how batshit crazy that is, and won’t vote for it. A CR that suits the Freedom Caucus would therefore be dead on arrival, even before it gets to the Senate, which would immediately kill it with fire if given the chance. It follows that the only way to push a CR into law is to persuade the Democrats to jump in to save the day, by bringing a “clean” draft to the floor, with no new Freedom Caucus add-ons. That’s sensible, but politically risky for the Republican Speaker, whoever it happens to be at the relevant moment. If he goes that route, the moon bats in the extreme right wing of his own party might try to put an end to him, just like they did to that other guy – what was his name again? – Devon, or Kevin, something like that.
Of course, the whole dynamic changes if, following the next election, the Dems can keep the Senate and take back the House, but you can see how the present situation is just a great big, knee-deep, steaming hot mess. Things are all out of whack in just the worst way. Look what happened as 2023 drew to a close. The train really jumped the rails, beginning, as the reader may recall, when dear, departed Devon Kevin McCarthy made a deal with the Dems during the most recent round of negotiations over the debt ceiling (a whole other kettle of fish, so for now let’s not even go there). The arrangement would have funded the federal government through to the end of the current administration, and seemed, finally, like a big stride in the direction of sanity. The thing was, McCarthy couldn’t get it past his own caucus. When budget time rolled around, the Freedom Whack-Jobs dug in their heels and forced Kevin to renege on the deal, and there they were, standing once again in the dog’s business. The budget was stalled, shutdown was perilously close, and then the Freedom Fuckwits wouldn’t agree to a clean CR either, so Kevin had to pass one with the support of the Dems. That got him booted from the Speaker’s chair. Yup – he got the heave for keeping the federal government in operation. It was the first time in American history that a party had deposed its own Speaker, probably not the sort of history that Kevin was hoping to make, and I guess I’d feel sorry for him, except I don’t (if it had been my job to give him a little parting gift, the card would have read so long, pal, and remember, everybody hated you.)
Anyway, as 2023 drew to a close, a CR was in place, the budget can of worms had yet again been kicked just a little ways down the road, Kevin McCarthy’s head had been handed to him, and Mike Johnson emerged as the new Speaker, doomed from the outset to face, before long , exactly the same fiscal clusterfuck that ended his predecessor’s Speakership.
Which brings us to today. Johnson, believe it or not, has reached pretty much the same budget deal with the Dems that Kevin negotiated – didn’t see that coming! – so great, except the Sun was setting on the latest interim CR faster than Mike could figure out how to shepherd the deal through the same caucus that rejected it last time, before frog-marching the Speaker out the front door for his trouble. When the last instalment of the Needlefish landed with the predictable thud, the country was yet again, for the umpteenth time, in a bit of a pickle, with the lights scheduled to go out in just a couple of days, on January 19. The only way Johnson could avert the shit show was to do what McCarthy had done, and pass yet another clean CR with the help of the Dems.
So that’s what he did. Amazing. Good for you, Mike, I hate your guts but that was kind of ballsy. And what do you know, the GOP goon squad didn’t have the cajones to fire him for it. Not for now, anyway. There’ll be another chance to wreak havoc when the current CR turns into a pumpkin, starting on the first day of March. Freedom Caucus luminaries like Chip Roy and Marjorie Taylor Green are warning that it might then be necessary to flush Johnson down the same Congressional crapper in which a sad-sack Kevin McCarthy was last seen swirling ’round the bowl, bless his heart. We’ll see. I’m guessing there won’t be the votes next time to kick off yet another three ring circus of fumbling to find a new Speaker. I’d also be surprised if anyone wanted the job.
Anyway, once again, here we are, with the budget can kicked forward again, so still no budget; no desperately needed support for Ukraine; another round of abject clusterfucking inevitable in less than two months; nothing much else getting done; overall, it’s what my Mom used to refer to as a dog’s breakfast, and it only gets worse, because the GOP is splitting up into factions, rendering them unable to govern without the Democrats’ help. That wouldn’t be so bad, in a sane universe, but Republicans would generally rather eat a bowl of pig droppings than make the compromises necessary to secure help from the hated Dems. Meanwhile, every time the two parties do manage to cooperate just enough to avoid driving the whole country into the ditch, the best available fix is something with a limited shelf life that actually doesn’t solve a damned thing.
That’s no way to run a railroad.
OK, maybe that wasn’t so succinct. Cut me some slack, won’t you? This stuff is complicated.
Supplemental thought: I don’t know why I keep writing things that nobody will ever read, but for some reason I feel driven. I enjoy it, I guess. Or more than that, actually. It turns out that I need to write, even if only to myself.
the needlefish 