Shutdown Watch: Congress Creeps Toward a ‘Preventable Disaster’

Shutdown or no shutdown? The speaker may decide.
Sipa USA
By Yuval Rosenberg

Happy Thursday! Do you believe in miracles? On this date in 1980, the U.S. Olympic hockey team delivered its “Miracle on Ice” upset of the Soviet Union team. The American team would go on to win the gold by beating Finland in their final game.

Here’s what we’re watching today.

'Preventable Disaster': Congress Crawls Toward Shutdown Deadline

We’re just over a week away from the first of two government funding deadlines looming in early March. Appropriators are still working to finalize the annual spending bills for the fiscal year that started back in October — but House and Senate leaders are reportedly still clashing over Republican demands for partisan policy riders on topics such as abortion, diversity, guns and student loan debt.

“Senior aides in both parties say another short-term continuing resolution will almost certainly be necessary to avoid a partial government shutdown on March 1 and March 8,” Punchbowl News reported Thursday. “Needless to say, this will be a problem for Speaker Mike Johnson, who has made opposition to stopgap funding measures the one place he’s willing to express strong opinions.”

The odds of a shutdown are fairly high. In fact, Republican Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee who served as temporary speaker after Kevin McCarthy was ousted from Republican leadership, told CBS News that he sees them as “50-50.”

McHenry told CBS News that is a “preventable disaster,” but he also acknowledged that the chances of a shutdown hinge largely on Johnson and how the inexperienced speaker handles the fear of also being ousted.

Johnson earlier this year agreed to $1.66 trillion in discretionary spending for the year. Now, as appropriators work to flesh out the details of their spending plans, Johnson is reportedly clinging to a hard line on the policy riders, seeking to extract some conservative wins and avoid further fury from the hard right.

House Freedom Caucus members on Wednesday called on Johnson to fight for conservative policy provisions and questioned why Republicans would proceed with a spending deal that didn’t meet their policy or spending objectives. But those conservative policy riders have no chance of passing the Democratic-led Senate, meaning that they would only boost the likelihood of a shutdown.

“All the speaker has to do is allow the Appropriations Committee to go get a deal,” McHenry told CBS. “We will have a deal by March 1 and March 8 if we can allow just momentum to occur. If the speaker wishes to stop it for whatever reason, we'll probably have a government shutdown. It will come down to the speaker's decision on whether or not to just fund the government and get on with the deal.”

McHenry said that if Johnson allows fear to drive his decision, the result will be a shutdown — and, he warned, that result would undercut Republican goals. “What I believe is, we will get higher spending and less policy as a result of the government shutdown,” he said.

McHenry, who was a key ally of McCarthy’s, didn’t mince words about Johnson’s difficulties since becoming speaker after a painful process that saw other candidates fail to get the needed votes.

“We went through five choices and Mike Johnson's the fifth choice,” McHenry said. “He has not been around these leadership decisions. He's had a really tough process. We’ve thrown him into the deepest end of the pool with the heaviest weights around him and [we’re] trying to teach him how to learn to swim. It's been a rough couple of months.”

McHenry also pointed to Johnson as the main impediment to passing more aid to Ukraine, saying that a majority of the House would support the $95.3 billion bill passed by the Senate to fund Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

The bottom line: “If there is a master plan to keep the government funded through March 1, no one seems to know what it is yet,” CNN reported. “Complicated issues have been kicked up to the leadership level where it’s not clear they can be resolved quickly, especially if Johnson digs in. And if negotiators can’t announce a deal by the weekend or early next week, it’s unclear how even a few of those bills could pass in time.”

The tight deadline means that Johnson could well have to decide whether to move ahead with another short-term funding fix, even if it incurs the wrath of his right flank. Or he could follow the suggestion of the Freedom Caucus and pursue a full-year spending patch that would come with an across-the-board 1% spending cut.

For now, though, Congress has eight days and counting until the first shutdown deadline.

Americans’ Top Financial Worry: Healthcare

Healthcare issues claim the top spots in the list of things U.S. voters are “very” or “somewhat worried” about being able to afford, according to the latest tracking poll from the healthcare foundation KFF.

Nearly three in four (74%) Americans are concerned about being able to afford unexpected medical bills, and nearly the same share (73%) say they worry about the cost of healthcare services. The price of prescription drugs is also a concern, with 55% of poll respondents expressing anxiety about being able to afford their medications. Nearly half of Americans, 48%, say they worry about being able to afford their monthly health insurance premiums.

According to the poll, voters want to hear from the presidential candidates about their plans to address soaring costs. Eighty percent of respondents said it is “very important” for the candidates to talk about the affordability of healthcare — an issue topped only by inflation, which 83% of poll respondents cited. Other issues that voters want to hear about include the future of Medicare (73%), the future of democracy (72%) and immigration (69%).

Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com.

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