Why to expect more chaos in US House of Representatives
Compared to a Republican representative allegedly receiving “a clean shot to the kidneys” from another representative last week, the House passing a plan to avert a government shutdown and keep federal funding flowing into early 2024 seemed almost anti-climactic.
But we shouldn't lose sight of how annual efforts to pass spending bills have changed. They are now one of the highest-stakes elements of the congressional workload. The showdowns and shutdowns, threatened and realized, don't occur in a vacuum but are a symptom of the broader challenges — some would say dysfunction — that have often plagued Congress.
The budget process has become less about major fights over taxing and spending and more about the ways in which this fundamental congressional responsibility can be undermined by narrow partisan conflicts and performative politicking.
Standard legislating, when it happens, is often bipartisan. But Congress routinely struggles to write new laws, leaving major issues unaddressed.
This puts more and more stress around the handful of bills that are seen as so important that they must pass, and the annual spending bills fall into this category. That is why they have become targets for members who are eager to get something done (including narrow partisan objectives and even when it reveals divisions with some of their party colleagues) and for members who are eager to draw attention to themselves (like The Florida panhandle's Matt Gaetz and some of his fellow hard-liners).
We can see how the process has devolved in the evolution of shutdowns, both threatened and realized, over recent decades. Consider the partial shutdowns in late 1995 and early 1996, both resulting from broad disagreement between President Bill Clinton and the new House Republican majority on big-picture fiscal questions about taxes and the deficit.
The next shutdown, in 2013, however, was not fought over those kinds of high-level issues; it involved a faction of congressional Republicans seeking to use the appropriations process to limit parts of President Barack Obama's signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, we had two shutdowns — the second affected some federal agencies for a record 34 days, over President Donald Trump's desire to secure additional funding for a wall along the nation's southwestern border.
But this year's versions have been different. They have not been about specific policy asks. Or as the former House speaker Newt Gingrich — an architect of the 1995 and 1996 shutdowns — put it in September: “There are times people vote yes one day, and then they come back and vote no the next day, and can't explain why they switched.”
It used to be that the annual budget process was the only place for the majority and the minority to fight
across party lines. But now, spending measures are the only place for House Republicans to have fights
within their conference, and those can end up being as much about style as about substance.
Consider the House's bill, passed on Nov. 2, providing $14.3 billion in military assistance to Israel. It also contained cuts to funding for enforcement at the I.R.S., which Republican leaders included to “ensure responsible spending and reduce the size of the federal government” while providing aid to a U.S. ally. But because reducing I.R.S. enforcement leads to less revenue, the measure would, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office, actually increase the federal deficit. Cutting I.R.S. funding, then, wasn't about fiscal responsibility as much as it was about ensuring that Republicans had support from their own members — some of whom had threatened to vote against the bill unless it contained spending cuts.
What's more, the battles being fought within the Republican conference often don't appear to be in pursuit of policy objectives — the fighting itself is the point.
The particular nature of this year's conflicts does not bode well for Congress's prospects for meeting the nation's future fiscal challenges. Any “grand bargain” that would make the combination of spending cuts and tax increases likely to be needed in the long run will be a heavy political lift. Success in reducing the deficit requires both substantive agreement on future policy direction and the political will to stick to those commitments.
It's not just the long term that will be challenging. The nature of last week's deal means that Congress and the president will find themselves navigating these same waters — and the fundamental realities of divided government — in early 2024.
Molly Reynolds is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the U.S. Senate.” This article first appeared in The New York Times.
Punishment that causes durable impairments of the punished person's brain surely violates the Constitution's Eight Amendment proscription of “cruel and unusual punishments.” So, last week the Supreme Court's three “liberal” justices rightly dissented against the six “conservative” justices' decision not to hear a case concerning the all-too-common prison practice of protracted solitary confinement.
Michael Johnson, imprisoned in Illinois' Pontiac Correctional Center (we will revisit “correctional” below) for home invasion and assault, was a mental wreck before prison policy made him more so. The state's Department of Corrections classifies him “seriously mentally ill”; his conditions include severe depression and bipolar disorder.
Johnson sued. A district court granted summary judgment in 2018 in favor of the prison officials, even though the Supreme Court has hitherto found officials liable for “deliberate indifference” to a substantial risk to an inmate's health or safety. A three-judge panel of a federal appellate court in 2022 affirmed the district court's legal error, 2-1. This judgment survived when the full court tied 5-5 in considering it.
Last week the Supreme Court denied Johnson's appeal. The court was not even accepting the prison officials' argument that Johnson's ongoing punishment was an administrative necessity. They made no such argument.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from this denial, joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Brown, the first justice to have seen the criminal justice system from the perspective of a practicing public defender, notes that for nearly three years Johnson:
“… spent nearly every hour of his existence in a windowless, perpetually lit cell about the size of a parking space. His cell was poorly ventilated, resulting in unbearable heat and noxious odors. The space was … often caked with human waste. And because Pontiac officials would not provide cleaning supplies to Johnson unless he purchased them from the commissary, he was frequently forced to clean that filth with his bare hands. Johnson was allowed out of his cell to shower only once per week, for 10 brief minutes.”
Ordinarily, even Pontiac inmates in solitary confinement are permitted at least eight hours a week of recreation outside their cells. The denials of Johnson's permission were “stacked,” so he endured more than three years of restrictions. Brown details the consequences of