Last week, House Republicans once again struggled to meet the most basic obligation of a governing party as roughly half its members effectively voted to force a government shutdown.
This was only the latest chapter in Congress’s long, strange quest to pass a budget for 2024. Eight months ago, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy cut a deal with Joe Biden over this year’s spending bill. Before that agreement, McCarthy and his caucus had held the nation’s economic health hostage, threatening to force the United States into a debt default — a course of action that could trigger a global financial crisis — unless the Democratic president acquiesced to conservative policy goals.
Nevertheless, when Biden made it clear that he would not be coerced into repealing his own climate and student debt policies, McCarthy accepted a relatively ordinary fiscal compromise.
This cost McCarthy his job. In order to secure election as speaker in the first place, McCarthy had needed to appease the far-right flank of his party’s narrow House majority. He did this by, among other things, giving conservative hardliners the power to vote him out of his leadership position at any time. Still smarting over McCarthy’s traitorous openness to legislative compromise, the hardliners ousted the speaker in October.
The party’s new leader, Mike Johnson, himself extremely right-wing, is a member of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus. Unfortunately for his right-wing comrades, however, Johnson is also capable of understanding that his party does not control the White House or Senate and must therefore compromise with Democrats in order to pass legislation. Thus, earlier this month, Johnson reached a budget deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that closely resembled McCarthy’s agreement with Biden from last year. Yet Johnson’s House allies in the Freedom Caucus still feel entitled to dictate terms to Democrats, so they have denounced the new agreement for its…
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