The House and Senate might not be able to agree to terms to fund the federal government by the Sept. 30 deadline, and that’s OK to an influential bloc of hard-line House conservatives who are playing an outsize role in both the spending process and the fate of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.
I think Mitch McConnell already started to shut down on his own
I wish that anyone there is a government shutdown no current politician is available for reelection. If you can’t work together sometimes then GTFO!
So don’t elect republicans. Got it.
But that’s collective punishment. Not everyone is trying to sabotage things.
Ideally the voters would have the intelligence to recognize which politicians are acting in good faith and which are not, with only the bad faith obstructionist being voted out (ideally immediately, without having to wait the potentially years till their term is up). But ehhhh, we know how that goes.
I take a somewhat harder line.
Failure to pass an on time budget (no CRs) is treated as dereliction of duty and gets every seat in Congress vacated, requiring special elections, with no member so expelled eligible to run or be a registered lobbyist for at least ten years.
So you want the party of “I’d eat my own shit if it meant democrats had to smell it on my breath” to have the unilateral power to remove every single one of their “enemies” for a decade?
How do you differentiate the good actors from the bad actors with this approach? How does it prevent a bumper crop of even more radical shitheads from popping up and then voting in lockstep for the absolute worst proposals you’ve ever seen?
The confusion of a new congress that needs to build coalitions with the ever-present American demand for the government to do something would be a good solution to that.
#MintTheCoin
The coin was related to the debt ceiling. This is very different than the debt ceiling. The US will continue to pay its debts, and it’s probably not going to kick off the second Great Depression.
This is about agreeing on a federal budget, not about paying debt obligations to the world. It will stop a lot of government employees and contractors from getting paid, and it will gum up a lot of government systems.
This isn’t “upended global economics as we know it” bad. It’s just your normal “republicans can’t run basic government infrastructure and like to fuck over the poor” bad.
This is about agreeing on a federal budget, not about paying debt obligations to the world. It will stop a lot of government employees and contractors from getting paid, and it will gum up a lot of government systems.
A small correction. Contractors continue to get paid because the government has already spent the money to pay them. Almost everyone working directly for the government does not get paid. The ones that do get paid are the ones that are in “critically important positions”. The military members go to work but don’t get paid (they have always gotten back pay) and civilians don’t go to work (they typically get back paid).
I’ll add that shutting down the government is expensive and doesn’t happen in an hour. The money spent to shut it down starts getting spent in the week/weeks before a possible shutdown as agencies close shop for an unknown amount of time. The theater of waiting until the last minute costs millions even if the bill eventually gets passed.
