My Thoughts on the Crisis in Congress
What I'm really thinking about the first branch's chaos
A thumbnail sketch of the past week in Congress: with a government funding deadline looming, Speaker Mike Johnson has been trying to get a continuing resolution passed in order to keep the government going through March, allowing GOP majorities and …
shudder
… President Donald Trump to pass a budget chock-full of their funding priorities.
This will be a tough lift. Bear with me.
Right now, Republicans have a hard time, even if they were quarterbacked by the Patrick Mahomes of legislating, which Mike Johnson is not. You see:
The Democrats control the Senate and functionally are in a power-sharing arrangement to sustain Johnson’s leadership in the House, because a claque of extreme right-wingers in the GOP caucus there refuse to back him on the floor or the Rules Committee, so Johnson can’t bring anything to the floor and get it passed under either regular order or regular-unorthodox order, meaning that Johnson has to pass major bills on the suspensions calendar,1 which in turn requires a two-thirds vote, which Johnson can only get with (depending) dozens to many dozens of Democratic votes, which means that in turn Democrats have a ton of leverage if you want to get a bill through right now, and so to meet his deadline Johnson has been giving away a hell of a lot to Democrats, even though some to a lot of that is actually stuff many Republicans want (like loads of money for farm bills and disaster aid—remember the hurricane that wrecked, uh, mountain North Carolina?).
But then …
America’s Next Top Genius Elon Musk and some other guy who get all their news from X decided that the spending bill was chock full of too much stuff, and that the Republicans needed to Git Tuff and go ahead and trigger a shut down to avoid all that money being spent, and who cares if the government is shut down now …
also, did you know Johnson, Musk, and Ramaswamy are on a group chat? Group chats do run the world!
… and then for some reason Trump and some guy from Ohio posted on Truth Social (remember that Trump technically owns an X competitor?) about their list of demands, which both legislators and journalists politely called hard to parse, but the upshot of which is that Johnson doesn’t seem to have anyone’s confidence and …
well, here’s what I really think about all of this:
I have to teach a course on this f*#(ing Congress next term?
The number of times I’ve said “they’re passing that on f*dkcing suspensions?!” in the past 24 months is … well, it’s a lot.