IN 2024, GOP WILL DO WORSE THAN NOTHING
It’s a new year but the same old mess in Congress. Instead of a fresh start, lawmakers will return to their stale, dead-end arguments and legislative gridlock.
And by now the reason they’re mired in the mess is an old story: Repeatedly in 2023, we saw the dysfunction of the MAGA Republicans who narrowly took control of the House last January, making that chamber virtually ungovernable and yielding one of the least productive years in Congress’ history. Just a couple dozen mostly minor bills became law, a fraction of the usual number.
The House and Senate broke for the holidays still bloodied from the unfinished sausage-making.
Agreement on lingering issues — spending, Ukraine aid, immigration — hardly comes more easily in an election year; the distractions of the presidential primaries start this month, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then there is the House Republicans’ greatest distraction of all: their top-priority push to impeach President Joe Biden, on grounds still TBD.
What we’re in for in 2024 is more of the misrule that results when one of our two major parties morphs from a smallgovernment party into an unabashedly anti-government bloc.
The federal fiscal year is already three months old and still Congress hasn’t completed the spending bills to cover the government’s annual operations. In 2023, House Republicans provoked two near-shutdowns over four months. This year we’ll get such threats twice just within the next month.
That’s because Congress, at the insistence of House Republicans and their neophyte leader, Speaker “MAGA Mike” Johnson, illogically extended stopgap funding for federal programs in separate bills with separate cutoff dates. One measure, including money for farm, transportation, energy and veterans’ programs, expires Jan. 19; the second package, for other large domestic programs and the Pentagon, lapses Feb. 2.
That means the House and Senate will have just 10 days when they return (including a break for the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend) to reach agreement before their first budget deadline.
The hapless House Republicans say they won’t support another stopgap bill or the typical “omnibus” package combining all government funding, but they’re too divided to pass the 12 spending bills separately. House hard-liners are upping their demands for more spending cuts and culture-war add-ons against abortion, drag shows and the like, oblivious to other House Republicans’ opposition, let alone that of the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Not being able to pass essential bills is just one aspect of Republicans’ dysfunction. Blocking bills is another, and they’re good at that.
So it is that Congress hasn’t approved additional aid for Ukraine since the end of 2022, when Democrats controlled the House. With the second anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion approaching, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate still favor continued Ukraine support as critical to our national security and Europe’s. Yet House Republican leaders echo Trump, Vladimir Putin’s pal, in opposition.
They’re joined by Senate Republicans, including Ukraine supporters, in insisting that Biden and Democrats support an immigration crackdown in return for more aid. Yet they can’t agree on what the new immigration measures should be.
For all Congress’ challenges — funding the government, confronting decades-old migration problems and responding to the worst war in Europe since World War II and another engulfing the Mideast — House Republicans signaled last month that their focus for 2024 is what?
Impeaching Biden.
They’d reportedly like to draft articles of impeachment as soon as this month, perhaps for bribery. But they have neither the goods on Biden nor the votes.
No matter — they will keep claiming otherwise. And they’ll keep digging for proof, as they have for over a year.
As if they didn’t have anything else to do.