Government Shutdown... Tick, Tick, Tick-- Will Keeping It Open Cost MAGA Mike His Job?

Last year, Kevin McCarthy made a deal with Biden— a compromise by both sides— to keep the government open. Congressional MAGAts, entirely spurred on by Trump, flipped out and demanded he rescind the agreement. When he didn’t, 8 of them dethroned him and he wrapped up his congressional career. More recently, MAGA Mike made an agreement with Chuck Schumer— Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden and Hakeem Jeffries silently at the table— with very much the same reaction. Trump is fuming, since nothing less than a government shutdown is what he wants. His silliest stooge in the House, Marjorie Traitor Greene, has already boasted, two days in a row, that she will single-handedly vacate MAGA Mike.

Partial government shut down comes in less than a week. Republicans in swing districts are freaking out. Republicans in deep red districts could care less— and don’t seem to understand the reality of how that will send them back into the minority— with Jamie Raskin as head of House Oversight, Jerry Nadler as chair of House Judiciary, Maxine Waters  as head of Financial Services, Frank Pallone as head of Energy and Commerce, Jim McGovern as head of Rules, etc.

Maybe someone explained the ramifications of that to MAGA Mike but, seemingly, he’s standing his ground and going against the wishes of Trump and the MAGAts who are threatening to kick him out the way they kicked McCarthy out. Would they dare? They sure as hell aren’t going to follow a brainless stooge like Traitor Greene. Yesterday afternoon, Catie Edmonson and Kayla Guo reported that MAGA Mike is standing by his deal, despite the fury from crackpots like Bob Good, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, Ralph Norman, Chip Roy and the other neo-fascists who have been barraging him with complaints and threats. MAGA Mike’s “announcement, after days of public silence about what he would do,” they wrote, “all but guaranteed that Johnson will have to work with Democrats in the coming days to pass a short-term bill to keep the government funded past a pair of deadlines on Jan. 19 and Feb. 2, going back on his promise to never bring up another temporary spending measure… [A]fter a flurry of meetings with both ultraconservative critics and politically vulnerable Republicans in swing districts who urged him to adhere to the compromise, Johnson emerged to declare: ‘Our top-line agreement remains. After weeks of hard-fought negotiations, we achieved a strong top-line agreement,’ he said, adding that Republicans had secured concessions including speeding up $10 billion in cuts to I.R.S. enforcement and clawing back $6 billion in unspent Covid dollars and other emergency funds.”

The announcement, which infuriated the hard right, came minutes after an animated back-and-forth on the House floor with members of the Freedom Caucus, many of whom had demanded that he scrap the deal entirely in favor of deep spending cuts and refuse to fund the government further without a severe crackdown on migration at the U.S.-Mexico border.

“My message is the same that it has been— that we need to cut spending year over year, we need to secure the border,” Representative Bob Good of Virginia, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said after the exchange. “We need border enforcement combined with any spending agreement to fund this government. We shouldn’t keep funding this border invasion.”

The scene encapsulated the bind in which Johnson finds himself as he labors to steer a divided Republican conference with a tiny majority— the same predicament that tormented his predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Johnson began the morning meeting with mainstream Republicans facing tough re-election races this year, who urged him to stick to the deal he had negotiated with Democrats and said their voters could not stomach the kind of deep cuts the Freedom Caucus is demanding.

“We’ve got 10 or 12 loudmouths who try to take over the whole conference,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, emerging from Johnson’s office. “We’ve got to do what’s right for the country. And the vast majority of us know that he negotiated— and the speaker before him negotiated— the best deal that we could’ve got.”

“I think the speaker needed to hear that the vast majority of us are with him and just, move on,” Bacon added. “Let’s get this done.”

I want to demonstrate the partisan lean of some of the districts of the vulnerable swing seat incumbents and the hard core Nazi types:

• NY-17- Mike Lawler (D+7)

• NY-04- Anthony D’Esposito (D+10)

• CA-22- David Valadao (D+10)

• NE-02- Don Bacon (R+3)

• PA-01- Brian Fitzpatrick (even)

• NJ-07- Tom Kean (R+3)

• CA- 27 Mike Garcia (D+8)

—

• AZ-09- Paul Gosar (R+33)

• GA-14- Marjorie Traitor Greene (R+45)

• TX-21- Chip Roy (R+24)

• AZ-05- Andy Biggs (R+24)

• OH-04- Gym Jordan (R+40)

• IL-15- Mary Miller (R+42)

• SC-05- Ralph Norman (R+26)

I bet you can tell which group is the conservatives who want to fund the government and keep it functioning and which group is the fascists who want to shut the government down to help bring Trump-- and authoritarianism-- back to the White House.