It’s a new year but the same old mess in Congress. Instead of a fresh start, lawmakers will return next week to their outdated, dead-end arguments and legislative gridlock.
And at this point the reason they are mired in this disaster is an old story: repeatedly in 2023, we saw dysfunction of the MAGA Republicans who narrowly took control of the House last January, making that chamber virtually ungovernable and ceding one of the least productive years in the history of Congress. Only a couple dozen mostly minor bills became law, a fraction of the usual number.
opinion columnist
Jackie Calmes
Jackie Calmes brings a critical look to the national political scene. He has decades of experience covering the White House and Congress.
The House and Senate paused for the holidays still bloodied by the unfinished business make sausages. To borrow another metaphor from the legislators, they left the can on the road (cans, plural) until 2024.
However, it is not easier to reach an agreement on outstanding issues (spending, aid to Ukraine, immigration) in an election year; The presidential primary distractions begin this month, in Iowa and New Hampshire. Then there’s the biggest distraction of all House Republicans: their top priority to remove President Biden, for reasons yet to be determined.
What awaits us in 2024 is more of the misrule that occurs when one of our two main parties goes from being a small government party to becoming a blatantly anti-government bloc.
The federal fiscal year is now three months old and Congress has not yet completed the spending bills to cover the government’s annual operations. In 2023, House Republicans caused two quasi-shutdowns in four months. This year we will receive such threats twice in the next month.
This is because Congress, at the insistence of House Republicans and their neophyte leader, President “MAGA Mike” Johnson, illogically extended interim funding for federal programs in separate bills with separate deadlines. One measure, which includes money for agriculture, transportation, energy and veterans programs, expires Jan. 19; The second package, for other major national programs and the Pentagon, expires on February 2.
That means the House and Senate will have just 10 days when they return (including a recess for the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend) to reach a deal before the first budget deadline. Here’s a New Year’s prediction: House Republicans’ antics will force Congress to miss its first deadline, causing a partial government shutdown even as the second funding deadline looms.
Hapless House Republicans say they won’t support another stopgap bill or the typical “omnibus” package that combines all government funds, but they are too divided to pass all 12 spending bills separately. Their already slim majority was further reduced by the resignation at the end of the year of dethroned President Kevin McCarthy and the ouster of fabulist con artist George Santos; a third Republican, Ohio Rep. Bill Johnson, will resign on Jan. 21. And yet, House hardliners are ramping up their demands for more spending cuts and culture war add-ons against abortion, drag shows and the like, oblivious to other House decisions. Opposition from Republicans, much less from the Democratic-controlled Senate.
In short, the two chambers of Congress are more separated than ever. They haven’t even agreed on the final numbers for the spending bills, a prerequisite for setting funding levels for the programs included in them.
And virtually no one has confidence that the new president can corral his group. Johnson comes from anti-government hardliners, not pragmatists; he counts the Bible as its legislative manual and follows Donald Trump as his north star.
As a Louisiana colleague, popular outgoing Governor John Bel Edwards, said political Recently, “I would feel better about Mike Johnson being Speaker of the House if I felt like he was someone who really believed in making government work.”
Failing to pass essential bills is just one aspect of Republican dysfunction. Blocking invoices is another, and they are good at it.
So Congress has not approved additional aid for Ukraine since late 2022, when Democrats controlled the House. As the second anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion approaches, bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate still favor continued support for Ukraine as critical to our and Europe’s national security. However, House Republican leaders echo Vladimir Putin’s friend Trump in opposition.
They are joined by Senate Republicans, including supporters of Ukraine, in insisting that Biden and Democrats support a crackdown on immigration in exchange for more aid. However, they cannot agree on what the new immigration measures should be. House Republicans want much more punitive changes on asylum, deportations, detentions and border security than their Senate counterparts.
A bipartisan group of senators continued negotiations for an immigration deal over the holidays. However, any agreement would likely generate opposition in the House from both the right and the left. Meanwhile, avoiding compromise, Johnson and 60 other House Republicans opted for a photo op and traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border on Wednesday.
Democrats are no less divided than Republicans on border issues, between progressives who oppose strict restrictions and centrists eager for Biden to reject almost any immigration deal., to mitigate what has become a dangerous election year issue for his party.
For all of Congress’s challenges—funding the government, confronting decades-old immigration problems, and responding to the worst war in Europe since World War II and another raging in the Middle East— House Republicans noted last month that their focus for 2024 is what?
Impeach Biden.
they supposedly he would like to write articles of impeachment as soon as this month, perhaps for bribery. But they have neither the assets nor the votes over Biden.
“I have not seen any [evidence] However, to this day, that shows me that the president did something wrong,” Ohio Rep. Dave Joyce, a former Republican prosecutor, told NBC News just before Christmas.
It doesn’t matter: the Javerts among their party colleagues will continue to affirm the opposite. And they will continue to investigate for evidence, as they have for more than a year.
As if they had nothing else to do.
