The current Congress has already been credibly described by some as the worst Congress ever. As regular readers know, resignations in the 118th Congress have reached a generational high. Legislative progress has slowed to a pace unseen in nearly a century. Lawmakers have struggled mightily to complete basic tasks. One Republican House speaker was ousted — a development without precedent in American history — and another only survived after Democrats came to his rescue.
Americans have seen a needlessly shambolic process to elect a House speaker, a wildly unnecessary impeachment inquiry against a sitting president, an equally unnecessary impeachment of a sitting cabinet secretary, the expulsion of a disgraced member, and several pointless censures.
But as truly dreadful as Congress has been since voters put far-right Republicans in control of the U.S. House, at least there haven’t been any government shutdowns — or more accurately, there haven’t been any government shutdowns yet. NBC News reported:
After a six-week summer recess, lawmakers return to the Capitol on Monday facing a changed political landscape but a vexing, very familiar problem: figuring out how to avert a shutdown. They have just three weeks to do so. Funding for the government runs out at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, and former President Donald Trump is urging Republicans to force a shutdown unless certain demands are met.
Late last week, House GOP leaders unveiled a stop-gap spending bill — known as a “continuing resolution” (or “CR”) — that would keep the government’s lights on until March 2025. As expected, House Speaker Mike Johnson included something called the “SAVE Act” in the legislation, despite knowing that it would make a shutdown far more likely.
The SAVE Act — the “Safeguard America Voting Eligibility Act” — remains a solution in search of a problem. The point of the legislation is to require proof of citizenship to register to vote, despite the fact that (a) it’s already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections; and (b) the bill’s far-right champions can’t find any evidence to support their effort. (Johnson said in May that he “intuitively“ believes in the legitimacy of the problem, which continues to be amusing.)
Some Republicans have effectively argued, “Sure, noncitizens are already prohibited from voting in federal elections, and yes, evidence of noncitizens casting ballots is nearly impossible to find, but maybe there’s no harm in simply passing the legislation anyway? Just to be safe?”
Except, that’s wrong, too, because the legislation would add new and entirely unnecessary hurdles for Americans who want to participate in their own country’s elections — forcing them, for example, to produce documents such as a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. As House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has explained, “[T]his extreme MAGA Republican voter suppression bill is not designed to solve any problem on behalf of the American people. It is designed to jam people up and prevent Americans from voting.”
The bill passed the House in May with unanimous GOP support, and was ignored in the Democratic-led Senate. Now, House Republicans have included the same policy in their spending bill, effectively telling Democratic officials, “Either the SAVE Act becomes law or we’ll shut down the government.”
It was against this backdrop that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray released a joint statement on Friday, which began, “As we have said repeatedly, avoiding a government shutdown requires bipartisanship, not a bill drawn up by one party. Speaker Johnson is making the same mistake as former Speaker McCarthy did a year ago, by wasting precious time catering to the hard MAGA right. This tactic didn’t work last September, and it will not work this year either. The House Republican funding proposal is an ominous case of déjà vu.” The Democratic senators added, “If Speaker Johnson drives House Republicans down this highly partisan path, the odds of a shutdown go way up, and Americans will know that the responsibility of a shutdown will be on the House Republicans’ hands.” For his part, Trump began pushing his congressional allies to shut down the government a couple of weeks ago, and as my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown explained, the former president’s lobbying efforts appear to be intensifying. The GOP nominee’s allies are reading from a similar script: Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, for example, argued last week that if his party shuts down the government, he’ll try to blame Democrats for failing to pay the GOP’s anti-voting ransom. With exactly three weeks remaining before the deadline, it’s simply inconceivable that Democrats — on Capitol Hill and in the White House — will give in to the Republicans’ threats, which means that GOP leaders will either have to back down (again), or they’ll shut down the government (again). 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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