It’s a brand new 12 months however the identical previous mess in Congress. As an alternative of a recent begin, lawmakers return subsequent week to their stale, dead-end arguments and legislative gridlock.
And by now the explanation they’re mired within the mess is an previous story: Repeatedly in 2023, we noticed the dysfunction of the MAGA Republicans who narrowly took management of the Home final January, making that chamber nearly ungovernable and yielding one of the least productive years in Congress’ historical past. Only a couple dozen principally minor payments grew to become legislation, a fraction of the usual number.
The Home and Senate broke for the vacations nonetheless bloodied from the unfinished sausage-making. To borrow one other lawmaker metaphor, they kicked the can down the street — cans, plural — into 2024.
But settlement on lingering points — spending, Ukraine assist, immigration — hardly comes extra simply in an election 12 months; the distractions of the presidential primaries begin this month, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then there may be the Home Republicans’ best distraction of all: their top-priority push to question President Biden, on grounds nonetheless TBD.
What we’re in for in 2024 is extra of the misrule that outcomes when one among our two main events morphs from a small-government occasion into an unabashedly anti-government bloc.
The federal fiscal 12 months is already three months previous and nonetheless Congress hasn’t accomplished the spending payments to cowl the federal government’s annual operations. In 2023, Home Republicans provoked two near-shutdowns over 4 months. This 12 months we’ll get such threats twice simply inside the subsequent month.
That’s as a result of Congress, on the insistence of Home Republicans and their neophyte chief, Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson, illogically extended stopgap funding for federal packages in separate payments with separate cutoff dates. One measure, together with cash for farm, transportation, vitality and veterans’ packages, expires Jan. 19; the second package deal, for different giant home packages and the Pentagon, lapses Feb. 2.
Meaning the Home and Senate could have simply 10 days once they return (together with a break for the lengthy Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend) to achieve settlement earlier than their first price range deadline. Right here’s a New 12 months’s prediction: Home Republicans’ antics will power Congress to overlook its first deadline, triggering a partial authorities shutdown even because the second funding deadline looms.
The hapless Home Republicans say they gained’t assist one other stopgap invoice or the standard “omnibus” package deal combining all authorities funding, however they’re too divided to move the 12 spending payments individually. Their already skinny majority shrank additional with the year-end resignation of dethroned Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the expulsion of fabulist fraudster George Santos; a 3rd Republican, Ohio Rep. Invoice Johnson, is resigning Jan. 21. And but Home hard-liners are upping their calls for for extra spending cuts and culture-war add-ons in opposition to abortion, drag exhibits and the like, oblivious to different Home Republicans’ opposition, not to mention that of the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Briefly, the 2 homes of Congress are farther aside than ever. They haven’t even agreed on the bottom-line figures for the spending payments, a prerequisite for setting funding ranges for packages inside them.
And nearly nobody has confidence that the brand new speaker can corral his caucus. Johnson hails from among the many anti-government hard-liners, not the pragmatists; he counts the Bible as his legislative manual and follows Donald Trump as his North Star.
As a fellow Louisianan, fashionable outgoing Gov. John Bel Edwards, instructed Politico not too long ago, “I might really feel higher about Mike Johnson being speaker of the Home if I felt he was somebody who actually believed in making authorities work.”
Not with the ability to move important payments is only one facet of Republicans’ dysfunction. Blocking payments is one other, they usually’re good at that.
So it’s that Congress hasn’t authorised extra assist for Ukraine because the finish of 2022, when Democrats managed the Home. With the second anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion approaching, bipartisan majorities within the Home and Senate nonetheless favor continued Ukraine assist as vital to our nationwide safety and Europe’s. But Home Republican leaders echo Trump, Vladimir Putin’s pal, in opposition.
They’re joined by Senate Republicans, together with Ukraine supporters, in insisting that Biden and Democrats assist an immigration crackdown in return for extra assist. But they will’t agree on what the brand new immigration measures needs to be. Home Republicans need way more punitive adjustments for asylum, deportations, detentions and border safety than their Senate counterparts.
A bipartisan group of senators continued negotiations for an immigration compromise over the vacations. Any deal, nonetheless, would seemingly draw opposition within the Home from each proper and left. In the meantime, shunning compromise, Johnson and about 60 different Home Republicans opted for a photograph op, touring to the U.S.-Mexico border Wednesday.
Democrats aren’t any much less divided than Republicans on border points, between progressives against powerful restrictions and centrists longing for Biden to chop nearly any immigration deal, to blunt what’s change into a dangerous election-year situation for his or her occasion.
For all Congress’ challenges — funding the federal government, confronting decades-old migration issues and responding to the worst conflict in Europe since World Battle II and one other engulfing the Mideast — House Republicans signaled final month that their focus for 2024 is what?
Impeaching Biden.
They’d reportedly like to draft articles of impeachment as quickly as this month, maybe for bribery. However they’ve neither the products on Biden nor the votes.
“I haven’t seen any [evidence] but, to this point, that exhibits me that the president did something incorrect,” Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce, a Republican former prosecutor, instructed NBC News simply earlier than Christmas.
Regardless of — the Javerts amongst his occasion colleagues will hold claiming in any other case. They usually’ll hold digging for proof, as they’ve for over a 12 months.
As in the event that they didn’t have anything to do.