Government Shutdown Watch: Fourever After

Plus: A former senator floats a devastating rumor.

Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

As the cliff swallows return to San Juan Capistrano after their annual 6,000-mile excursion to Argentina, so will another reliable event come to pass in March: the Republican-led House of Representatives will yet again face a government funding deadline.

Unless a deal is struck to advance another continuing resolution or some kind of other funding vessel, government activity related to about 20 percent of the federal budget will shut down at midnight on March 2. Government functions dependent on the rest the budget will stop one week later, at midnight on March 9. I know everyone’s a critic, but still, the plot we’re being walked through here is quite stale: Members of the Freedom Caucus and their allies do not want a CR, which would temporarily extend government funding at current levels, but they also don’t want a spending bill that would fund the government at levels the Democratic majority in the Senate and the White House would find palatable. This puts the House Republican leadership in a bind, because if they compromise on a passable spending bill or defer responsibility by putting through another CR, they face mutiny, retaliatory torpedoes aimed at the chamber’s regular business, or worse.

Everyone involved is assuming their familiar roles in the process. In a Dear Colleague letter, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote:

While we had hoped to have legislation ready this weekend that would give ample time for members to review the text, it is clear now that House Republicans need more time to sort themselves out.

House Speaker Mike Johnson responded in kind:

Despite the counterproductive rhetoric in Leader Schumer’s letter, the House has worked nonstop, and is continuing to work in good faith, to reach agreement with the Senate on compromise government funding bills in advance of the deadlines. . . .

This is not a time for petty politics. House Republicans will continue to work in good faith and hope to reach an outcome as soon as possible, even as we continue to insist that our own border security must be addressed immediately.

The stultifying power of a clichéd scenario like this is that it often draws clichés out of you in response to it, as though it’s actively closing down your ability to imagine things otherwise. To wit, my colleagues in the press corps are using the typical shutdown speculation language. Congress is trying to “avert” a shutdown, GOP “hardliners” are refusing to budge, cans are being “kicked down the road,” and so on. This is the kind of process language they default to, even when it is inadequate to the moment.

President Joe Biden summoned Johnson and other congressional leaders to the White House today to figure all this out, though I don’t think the outlook for negotiations is hopeful. There isn’t as much distance between most of the representatives who belong to the Republican House majority and the White House as there is between Johnson and his most right-wing colleagues.

Speaking to reporters after the Biden meeting, Schumer said he told Johnson that continuing resolutions will be necessary to make sure government funding doesn’t lapse, but the Senate majority leader also noted they were in agreement about not letting a shutdown happen.

Schumer also detailed how he and a group that included Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries implored Johnson to take up the lingering foreign aid supplemental so further Ukraine funding can go through. He described this episode as “one of the most intense I’ve ever encountered in my many meetings in the Oval Office.”

[We made it clear to Johnson that] this was so, so important and that we couldn’t afford to wait a month, or two months, or three months, because we would likely lose the war. NATO would be fractured. At best, allies would turn away from the United States, and the boldest autocrats of the world . . . would be emboldened thinking that the United States was this soft, fat country that lost its way, and [they] would take advantage. And so we said to the speaker: Get it done.

Even for these strong words, the path forward is still unclear. Johnson emerged with the delusion still intact that Ukraine aid must be paired with border security funding, even though he himself already rejected the conservative-friendly compromise proposed by Senate negotiators. As he told reporters,

When I showed up today, my purpose was to express what I believe is the obvious truth, and that is that we must take care of America’s needs first. When you talk about America’s needs, you have to talk first about our open border. . . . 

So I brought that issue up repeatedly today in that room and, and again, one on one with the president. I think that’s our responsibility to bring that up.

The longer Johnson holds on to this idea, the worse things will get for Ukrainians.

And things are also about to get more difficult for Americans faced with the prospect of another needless shutdown. Shutdowns aren’t gifts of leisure to public employees, like snow days for elementary schoolers: They instead create serious cash-flow challenges for government workers who aren’t financially secure, and given that some politicians constantly threaten to cause shutdowns when they don’t get what they want, these employees and their families are being forced to deal with a lot of extra and completely unnecessary stress. But while government employees have had to experience most of the direct consequences of this pattern of political irresponsibility on the part of the dysfunctional House majority, it could lead to some electoral splashback this year, too. If Johnson ends up getting deposed the same way his predecessor Kevin McCarthy did, the appearance of chaos and division in the party could be damaging for Republicans down the ballot. Then, too, as these funding deadlines recur every few months, House Republicans are being forced to shelve their nakedly political (but base-motivating) agenda items like impeaching Biden cabinet officials for not agreeing with them on policy or investigating the president himself over allegedly made-up claims—robbing Comer to pay Gaetz, if you will. 

The funding deadlines have arrived at a terribly busy point in the spring calendar: Next week is Super Tuesday, when primary contests will put hundreds of delegates in play across 17 states. Then on Thursday, March 7, President Joe Biden will deliver the State of the Union address. Spare a thought for the public employees who might have to donate their labor to these events if those deadlines are allowed to pass.

Heidi is spilling tea

During an appearance yesterday on the Talking Feds podcast, former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat, caused a bit of a stir when she floated a rumor that Rep. Matt Rosendale may have a three-alarm scandal on his hands.

Just a little rumor: I think their caucus may lose a member in the next couple of days. 

It might be the congressman from Montana. Just to gossip a little bit, there’s a reason why Rosendale backed out of that Senate race. The rumor is that he impregnated a 20-year-old staff person.

Immediately after I heard these words, I reached out to Rosendale’s spokesman Ron Kovach, who replied in an email, “This is 100% false and defamatory and former Senator Heitkamp will be hearing from our lawyers soon.”

Heitkamp didn’t outright claim that Rosendale is guilty of what she alleged she heard: She mentioned only that the story has been going around. That is a big difference as far as lawyers are concerned, if they do end up getting involved.

But Rosendale suddenly leaving Congress would throw the House into an even greater state of chaos, hard as that might be to imagine. Losing another member of the House Republican Conference would leave the GOP majority so thin that if you held it up you’d be able to see the sun shining through it.

If you recall from earlier this month, Rosendale entered the Senate race in Montana to challenge incumbent Democrat Jon Tester. Within days of announcing his run, though, he dropped out. The snap consensus was that Rosendale realized he didn’t stand a chance in the primary after Trump endorsed Tim Sheehy, a Mitch McConnell favorite viewed as having far better odds at winning than Rosendale.

Rosendale is also not without enemies. In addition to the many Republicans who don’t want to see him lose another winnable race for the party (like the one he lost to Tester once before, in 2018), Rosendale is on Kevin McCarthy’s revenge list for his role in ousting the speaker last year. Don’t be shocked if this isn’t the last rumor you end up hearing about Rosendale, true or untrue. 

How the Air Force is trying to take care of its own

My Bulwark colleague Will Selber wrote a piece today on the importance of having resiliency teams in the U.S. Air Force to help servicemembers with trauma and moral injuries. He details how the Airman Resiliency Teams, or ARTs, are indispensable to commanders and why other services should take note.

“WILL, YOU GOT A MINUTE?” It was mid-September 2022, and my group commander had called on a Saturday afternoon—never a good sign.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve got bad news,” he said.

I knew immediately what he was going to say. It was the phone call all commanders dread. One of my airmen had died.

We spent about five minutes exchanging information, ensuring I had a good understanding of what had occurred. He knew this would be a body blow for the tight-knit unit my team had been building, so before we ended our conversation so I could start calling my squadron’s enlisted leadership, he left me with one piece of advice.

“Don’t forget to lean on the ART,” he said, referring to the Airman Resiliency Team, a combination of medical, psychological, and spiritual personnel. Our ART consisted of a psychologist, a physician, a physician assistant and the physician assistant’s two senior noncommissioned officers, a medical technician, a chaplain, and a chaplain’s assistant. Rather than being a standalone medical unit, this team was embedded among us. While most also do rotations at medical facilities, their place of duty is inside the unit, shoulder-to-shoulder with our airmen.

The ART would play a crucial part in what my squadron went through in the weeks that followed. It provided the kind of mental and spiritual support that is so often lacking in the military and the intelligence community. The image of a combat veteran suffering from PTSD is common—perhaps too common. Less familiar is the mental toll on servicemembers who conduct intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, like the 240-man Air Force squadron I led, or on other kinds of personnel, including diplomats and intelligence civilians, who play an integral role in executing missions a world away, even if they’re not on the front lines.

Read the whole thing.