Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
In Congress, functional dysfunction is at work
WASHINGTON — The congressional theater around federal spending fights that have repeatedly brought the government to the brink of a disastrous shutdown over the past six months, only to be resolved just in the nick of time to avoid one, has become quite predictable.
For days before a Friday midnight deadline, there is no official word of a compromise between Republicans and Democrats that will avert the crackup. But behind the scenes, members of the appropriations committees in both parties are hammering out complex deals among themselves.
Speaker Mike Johnson hems and haws publicly — and even in private — about whether he is willing to agree to the emerging compromise but ultimately insists that Republicans must avoid shutting down the government and claims they got some wins despite failing to secure the spending cuts and policy mandates they wanted. He puts the legislation on the floor using a maneuver that effectively deprives hard-right Republican rebels of the means to block it. The archconservatives breathe fire and condemn it, but the bill passes easily, with far more Democratic than Republican support.
Johnson keeps his job anyway. The Senate sends the measure to President Joe Biden, who quickly signs it.
Welcome to functional dysfunction, an emerging form of minimalist coalition government that has taken hold on Capitol Hill in a divided Congress where the House majority is barely in control. It’s a dynamic that is keeping the government’s lights on — but doing little else so far.
“We have found a way,” said Rep. Tom Cole, R-okla. and a senior member of the Appropriations Committee. “It is not a pretty sight, but it is working.”
With Congress finally completing its basic job of funding the government, albeit six months late, the outcome of the latest spending fight illustrates what happens when an extreme bloc of the House majority — in this case, far-right Republicans — digs in and refuses to compromise, forcing their colleagues into the arms of the minority. The legislation has to be shaped more to the liking of the minority — now the Democrats — and the archconservatives lose out entirely.
If there is a “uniparty,” as members of the far right have long contended, they have helped to empower it.
“We’ve said all along that we’re either going to lock arms and do this together, or you are going to force us to have to water these things down, make them more expensive and accept things that we would prefer not to accept in order to be able to move something across the finish line,” Rep. Steve Womack, R-ark. and another senior appropriator, said in explaining the dynamic with the far right.
The failure to bend the spending curve significantly more in their direction has left ultraconservatives in the House frustrated and flailing. They attack the spending bills as Washington business-as-usual packages that make no real attempt to exact the deep spending cuts Republicans pledged they would deliver when they took over the House last year.
“The fact of the matter is, all of this is just a shell game,” said Rep. Chip Roy, R-texas. He was one of the few critics who took to the House floor this past week to lay into the six-bill spending package that in the end passed the House and Senate in overwhelming bipartisan fashion.
He and others are discovering that the vast majority of their colleagues just do not embrace the slash-and-burn shutdown tactics that those on the far right would willingly deploy in the interest of winning some deep spending reductions in an election year.
“People get comfortable with the status quo, and it works for them,” Rep. Andy Biggs, R-ariz., said about the resistance within his own party to significantly paring back spending and disrupting the government.
With Republicans holding a razor-thin majority, the conservative refusal to go along has left Johnson little choice but to deal with Democrats if he wants to avoid a government closure — and like his doomed predecessor, Speaker Kevin Mccarthy, he has made clear time and again that he does.
In the end, anti-spending conservatives say there is little more they can do if most House Republicans are unwilling to entertain another coup against the speaker after the chaos spurred by Mccarthy’s ouster last year.
“We tried structural change, and that didn’t work,” said Rep. Ken Buck, R-colo. “We did a personnel change, and that hasn’t worked. What’s left at this point — another personnel change? Nobody seems to want to do that.”
Cole said if the right wing truly wanted to cut the deficit, it should focus less on the annual spending bills and more on giant programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
“If you’re really worried about the deficit, then I want to see your entitlement reform plan,” he said. “You know, tell me what you’re going to do.”
But the political danger inherent in merely mentioning those programs has left even the most conservative members of Congress reluctant to raise them. Sen. Rick Scott, R-fla., took a beating when he broached the subject a few years ago in a proposed party agenda that fell flat.
The spending situation has worked to the advantage of Democrats. Although the six spending measures were not written the way Democrats would have insisted were they in the majority, all but two House Democrats supported them, along with 132 Republicans; 83 Republicans voted no.
Democrats said they were able to use their influence to keep a bevy of provisions sought by the far right out of the legislation. Republicans knew they had to strip most of them to win the Democratic votes necessary to pass the legislation, since the conservatives refused to vote for the spending bills under any circumstance.
Still, those who have backed the spending bills over the fervent but so far ineffectual opposition from the far right say they are satisfied with what has transpired, with both parties getting some wins and taking some losses while keeping the government open.
“Both sides can claim some victories in this thing,” Womack said of the legislation passed this past week. “And, gosh, isn’t that the way this is supposed to work?”