Those who spend time on Capitol Hill know that very little tends to happen on Saturdays. There are, however, occasional exceptions. NBC News reported:
The Senate voted 88-9 on Saturday night to pass a short-term bill to keep the government open, averting a shutdown at the last minute after a dramatic turnaround in the waning hours. The bill passed the House earlier on a substantial bipartisan vote of 335-91, and President Joe Biden signed it into law late Saturday.
This is a story with a variety of overlapping elements, so perhaps it’s best to unpack the developments with a Q&A.
Didn’t you write last week that there would be a shutdown?
Well, I don’t remember saying that exactly….
Don’t try to get out of it.
I actually wrote, “Does this mean that a government shutdown is inevitable? Unless key Republicans change their positions quickly, it’s increasingly difficult to see how a shutdown can be avoided.”
And?
And key Republicans changed their positions quickly.
To hear Democrats tell it, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy helped prevent a shutdown by caving.
That’s effectively what happened. In the runup to the deadline, when McCarthy was barely trying to prevent a shutdown, GOP leaders prioritized deep spending cuts and provisions related to border security. The bill that passed on Saturday didn’t include any of these measures, which is why Democrats were eager to crow as the dust settled.
One of the key details of the entire drama was that there was one straightforward solution: The more radical House Republicans stood in the way of a stopgap spending bill, the more obvious it became that McCarthy would have to go around them and settle on legislation that Democrats could support. The House speaker resisted this approach, and tried everything else first, before eventually settling on the only conclusion that would work.
What did the final deal look like?
The stopgap measure — known as a “continuing resolution,” or “CR” — keeps the government funded at existing levels through Nov. 17 and authorizes additional disaster relief money. It does not, however, include assistance for Ukraine.
How many GOP members ended up balking at the final deal?
In the House, 90 Republicans, representing roughly 40% of the conferences, voted “no.” In the Senate, nine Republicans, representing nearly a fifth of the conference, also voted “no.”
Why didn’t McCarthy just take this obvious step sooner and avoid all the drama? Because the speaker understandably feared that if he relied on Democratic votes, some far-right members would try to oust him, by way of a motion to vacate the chair. And? And according to Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, that showdown will happen this week. I’ll have more on this a little later. Fine. So Congress has until Nov. 17 to prevent the next shutdown. Doesn’t this mean that we might have to go through this again in roughly six weeks? Pretty much. The underlying dynamics haven’t changed. McCarthy, in the 11th hour, was willing to prevent a shutdown by relying on Democratic votes, but there’s no reason to assume that GOP leaders will do the same thing in November. Where does this leave Ukraine? There’s still some ambiguity surrounding McCarthy’s decision to pull aid from the final bill, but for now, support for Ukraine was left on the cutting-room floor. (It led Rep. Mike Quigley to become the only Democrat to oppose the bill: The Illinois congressman helps chair the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus.) That said, for proponents of Ukrainian aid, this was a temporary setback, and many members from both parties and both chambers issued statements on Saturday night making clear that they expect to approve another round of support in a separate bill. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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