House Speaker Kevin McCarthy's last-ditch plan to keep the government temporarily open has collapsed. Friday's vote a day before the deadline makes a government shutdown almost certain.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of hard-right holdouts rejected the package, making a shutdown almost certain.
McCarthy’s right-flank Republicans refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.
The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The vote was 198-232, with 21 hard-right Republicans voting to sink the package. The Democrats voted against it.
Why is it whenever a govt shutdown almost anything bad in government occurs it’s because of Republicans?
I didn't used to think like this and I didn't used to be so one sided in my political thinking, but events from 2016 on have turned me into a 100% Democrat voter. I always was for presidential elections but I used to consider more nuance in local elections and actually read the positions before voting. Now I don't even bother. Democrats are not without sin but I'm always going to vote for the party that at least pays lip service to social improvement instead of greed being the core value of the party.
Ranked choice voting and more than 2 parties would be the best situation but until we get that I'm straight down the ballot with the lesser of two evils.
I'm the exact same way. The first election I voted in was Bush v Gore. Then and for nearly two decades later, I would look closely at each candidate no matter the party, and vote for the best candidate. I tended to vote for the Democrat more often, but was never a straight down ballot voter, especially for state and local elections.
At this point though, the (R) next to someone's name on the ballot is so toxic that I won't even consider them. They've all drunken the MAGA Koolaid and are doing everything they can to destroy our government and rip up the Constitution in the name of Trump. Maaaaaaaaaybe if I saw someone with balls to standup and say "hey, I'm a Republican but all this Trump worship has gone too far" then I would consider them. But that's not the case here. Everyone running on the Republican ticket in my area has Trump's balls in and around their mouth, so I will vote straight (D) for the next several years.
Because Republicans campaign on the principal of "government is inept" and do everything they can to make it so. They're literally trying to destroy it from within to make their claim true.
Their motivation for destroying the government is their corporate funders. A weak government means corporations have more freedom to truly fuck over their customers and workers.
Money is their God and country.
Edit - I forgot to include their extremist faction's motivation since Trump took the wheel. Foreign funders. Russia and China have Trump, and therefore the MAGA faction, in their pocket.
There's a quote from P.J. O'Rourke that illustrates the point well:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
A central tenant of the Democratic Party is that government can be a force for good and should be run well. Republicans try to tear the government down, especially at the federal level. The party as a whole doesn't care nearly as much about good governance principles, though there are of course exceptions.
It’s because of the Two Santa’s Problem. Republicans figured out in the 1970’s they couldn’t get elected competing with Democrats who want to expand social programs. They then adopted the strategy of saying the government doesn’t work, defunding it so that the self fulfilling prophecy comes true and they can be a Santa by giving tax cuts for the programs they defund.
Republicans are always the cause of it and yet they all shout afterwards that it's the democrat's fault. At this point, I'd be surprised if any republican politician ever told the truth once.
The most pathetic bit is that this impasse won't end because of the pressure of federal workers suffering at all.
This impasse will end because our credit rating effects the profitability of our capitalist owners, whose greed infecting our society with its private profit first and only values is the reason we have sociopathic, "what's in it for me" modern politicians willing to hold their breath like infants in the first place. This is what legislators that embrace market capitalist values look like.
Because here in the US, sociopathy is encouraged, even mandated in business by shareholders, hurt whatever peasants you want if it makes you an extra nickel, just not the owners. If we don't want politicians like this, greed needs to be recognized and shamed from childhood as the character defect it is. Instead, we celebrate and encourage greed, and use successfully executed greed as the greatest metric of what we consider "success" regardless of how it was made.
Otherwise, as always, our politicians will be a reflection of us, a people who literally look at our tent cities filled with powerless human beings we've left to die of exposure with contempt for the sin of their continued existence reducing local property values.
Where does a society like that get off then expecting their appointed leaders to somehow prioritize the common good? It's irrational.
This likely won’t impact the credit rating. That is the debt ceiling debate. The US will continue paying its foreign debts.
A lot of folks mix up the debt ceiling and budget debates. They’re related, and both involve the GOP playing with fire, but they have different consequences.
The sick thing here isn't the impending shutdown. It's that the article implies McCarthy did everything he could to make a deal, when in fact he and his party are the sole cause of the crisis - on purpose, to later blame the Democrats for "having no leadership or policy" and causing harm to the country.
It was a last ditch plan to use only Republican votes to keep the government open.
I bet he can still bring the Senate CR (or whatever they pass) up for a vote. He'll lose his job as Speaker, though.
"Safe" districts allow people to pull this shit. If any of these wackadoo Republicans had to explain themselves to their constituents it would be a totally different story. But most of them only have to win their primary.
Failure to do their jobs and negotiate should result in automatic removal from office. Republicans are fascist traitors and whores to 750 parasitic worthless billionaires. The whole lot of them are modern privateer criminals stealing from the rest of us.
In a lot of parliamentary systems that is what happens. In Australia it can result in a double dissolution election, in which every elected representative can potentially lose their job. The threat of that seems pretty effective at guaranteeing supply. Our conservatives would absolutely cripple the functions of government if they could.
If these Republicans could just do their fucking jobs instead of throwing tantrums every other week maybe we could have a government that could last a whole fiscal year without having to shutter up.
"Last ditch plan" just means maximum crying. Not surprised these pigfuckers shit the bed AGAIN.
How often does the …senate? vote on a federal funding bill, and why does the last one expire? Why isn't there some default level of funding for federal spending?
The house is the bigger shit show and typically writes the budget bills since the Senate will usually pass it if the house does. (Not 100% accurate , see edit) The Senate did pass their own bipartisan stopgap funding for 6 weeks, but McCarthy refused to even discuss it because it contained funding for Ukraine.
This is yet another one of those things that has no real safeguards because Congress has always passed budgets without much issue for the majority of history. There's always negotiating, but shutting down the government has always been off the table until fairly recently.
There is a bipartisan bill being proposed to end shutdowns and just fund the government at current levels until a budget is passed. But most members of Congress don't support it because it means they can't use the shutdown as leverage, on either side.
yep. the guy has a choice right now of choosing the thing that was an actual compromise, or shutting down the country... what is good for his position vs what is good for EVERYONE... and thats a tough decision!? these people are just terrible in every way.
He could make a last last ditch effort and put the Senate compromise bill up for a vote and let the Dems and Republicans who aren't completely insane have a chance to pass that. It would show he isn't a slave to the extremists who openly hate him, so he won't do that.