Shutdown Fears Are Rising ... Again

Sculptures of Grief and History outside the Capitol
Reuters
By Yuval Rosenberg

It's almost Friday! Here's what's going on.

Shutdown Fears Are Already Rising Again

It’s been just five days since Congress averted a government shutdown by extending federal funding through November 17, but concern is already growing that the Republican revolt against former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the ongoing turmoil in the House will make a shutdown harder to avoid next month.

As the race to replace McCarthy heats up, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage write that the risks of a shutdown appear to have increased, with the GOP hardliners who ousted the speaker looking for “impossibly large concessions from the White House and Democratic-controlled Senate.”

The ongoing chaos in the House means that bipartisan deals will likely be even harder to reach and that lawmakers will have less time — perhaps about 30 days — to work on agreements to fund the government.

“It becomes substantially harder to do a government spending deal, because the message has been sent that Republicans should not rely on Democrats to pass any bills,” Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank, told the Post. “Things can always get worse. The no-compromise fringe has been strongly empowered and essentially has a veto over House Republican policy — which can’t be squared with what Democrats and the White House want.”

A newly chosen speaker may look to appease the rebels who ousted McCarthy and stick to a hard line on a government spending bill, a partisan approach that the former speaker backed away from at the eleventh hour. “Senators are worried about who will succeed McCarthy and whether that successor will be so beholden to a small group of conservatives that it will be close to impossible to pass spending legislation before government funding runs out before Thanksgiving,” The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports.

But for whatever leverage the far-right rebels may have — and they could still wind up with less under a new speaker and potentially new House rules demanded by moderates — the hardliners also don’t have enough votes to enact their demands on spending and other priorities into law.

“This was the message the right was trying to send: We’ll do everything on our own, and we will depose you if you work with Democrats,” Bill Hoagland of the Bipartisan Policy Center told the Post. “But what are they going to do when the Senate comes back with different numbers? It doesn’t work, because then you will have government shutdowns and even more chaos. It’s not a strategy that makes sense.”

Quote of the Day

“The fact that McCarthy and the other Young Guns were once called tea party people because they dallied with the movement does not mean that the tiger wasn’t going to consume them in the end.”

− Political scientist Theda Skocpol, whose 2012 book “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” examines the radicalization of the GOP over the last few decades, speaking to Politico’s Ian Ward.

The ouster of Kevin McCarthy — one of the so-called “young guns” who were seen as new leaders of the Republican Party in 2010, along with Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan — represents the “culmination” of the tea party’s legacy, Skocpol said.

“I think most people in the in the media thought the tea party was about cutting the federal budget deficit because that’s what a few elite spokesmen on TV said it was about,” she told Ward. “But our research always showed that at the grassroots, it was about popular anger over a changing country and fury at a Republican Party that was not responding to that desire. All the research that I and other political scientists have done on the movement shows that by the 2010s, just before Donald Trump emerges, the tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction — and this is the perfect expression of it.”

Biden White House Clears Way to Build More Border Wall

Amid growing concerns about undocumented immigration into the U.S., the Biden administration on Wednesday waived more than two dozen environmental laws to allow the construction of roughly 20 miles of border wall in Texas. The money will come from a fund of about $190 million left over from a $1.375 billion appropriation provided by Congress in 2019.

In a notice published in the Federal Register, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated that an area of “high illegal entry” in the United States Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley Sector warranted the action. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States,” he said.

Still, the move came as a surprise to Democrats, many of whom view the border wall as ineffective and wasteful. President Joe Biden said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he would not add “another foot” to the border wall, which has served as a rallying cry for former president Donald Trump.

Asked on Thursday if he thought the border wall was effective at keeping out undocumented immigrants, Biden said “no,” while framing the controversial issue in budgetary terms. “Money was appropriated for the border wall,” Biden told reporters, referring to appropriations that were made during the Trump administration. “I tried to get them to reappropriate – to redirect the money. They didn't, they wouldn't. And in the meantime, there's nothing under the law other than they have to use the money for what is appropriated. I can't stop that.”

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reports that the funds made available for border wall construction by Congress were in danger of expiring if not used, though there are likely other considerations as well. “[T]he move comes at a time when a new surge of migrants is straining federal and local resources and placing heavy political pressure on the Biden administration to address a sprawling crisis,” Alvarez writes.

Number of the Day: $1,312

Alaskans will start receiving checks for $1,312 this week — their annual dividend from the state’s oil fund, which the Alaska state constitution says must receive at least a quarter of oil- and mineral-related royalties and income.

“Residents have received the check known as the Permanent Fund Dividend since 1982, roughly six years after voters in the early days of oil development in Alaska created the nest-egg Permanent Fund to preserve some of the oil wealth for future generations,” Becky Bohrer of the Associated Press reports.

The average payment over the program’s 42-year history is about $1,200, Bohrer says.

While some state residents reportedly rely on the annual dividend payment for critical day-to-day needs and other use the money to splurge on things like vacations, Bohrer writes that the oil fund, unique to Alaska is the subject of considerable fighting and “has become a blessing and a curse in a state that for decades has ridden the boom-bust cycle of oil.”

Alaska has no personal income tax or statewide sales sax, and the dividend, Bohrer explains, “now competes for funding with services like public education, health care programs and public safety as lawmakers tap into the earnings to help fund the state budget. Squabbling over the oil checks’ size has resulted in legislative paralysis, and a Senate proposal aimed at resolving the dividend debate this year fizzled with no agreement.”

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