Congress officially avoided a shutdown — but GOP hardliners still caused one

Federal workers are still on the job. Unofficially, though, conservatives in Congress got what they wanted: The government did shut down in demonstrable and significant ways this fall — just not on Sept. 30.

After Kevin McCarthy essentially forfeited his speakership to avoid a government funding lapse, his ouster on Oct. 3 effectively closed Congress for business. Washington will wake up on Tuesday to 21 days of a speaker-less House, which has lopped off half the legislative branch while two wars rage overseas and the lower chamber’s GOP implodes.

“We’re a party that can’t govern. It’s really and truly frustrating for those of us who came here trying to get the job done,” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) said in an interview.

Joyce is leading the push to empower Acting Speaker Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) to try to restore bicameral movement on pressing topics issues like government funding and aid to Israel as well as Ukraine.

And Joyce puts the blame for the Hill’s current inability to act on any of those topics squarely at the feet of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and the seven Republicans who helped him on the vote to boot McCarthy: “This is the chaos caused by the Gaetz Eight,” he said.

The internecine conflict that already defined the congressional GOP is getting plenty of attention as it remains unable to agree on a new speaker. But the stakes go far beyond that — as McCarthy (“embarrassing”) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (“it’s a problem”) agreed over the weekend.

While the narrowly divided Senate is trying to take the lead amid the power vacuum across the Capitol, confirming President Joe Biden’s nominees and holding hearings, the House’s absence means no real movement on the essential function of Congress: lawmaking.

With the constitutionally empowered House AWOL as President Joe Biden seeks a government funding deal and tens of billions of dollars for U.S. allies, the Senate Democratic majority is left to hope its ideological rivals in the House GOP wake up from their intraparty speakership nightmare.

“It makes this country look weak and silly, especially at a moment of crisis,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “That there was hope that what happened in Israel would scare these guys straight. It hasn’t.”

The gravity of the House’s paralysis is also hitting hard for senior Republicans who’d much rather be checking off items on the fall’s huge to-do list — spending bills for the next deadline, Nov. 17, for instance. (Nearly all Republicans are already predicting another stopgap bill next month, like the one that led to McCarthy’s firing in the first place.)

Instead, the GOP is now squabbling over its third pick for speaker, still unable to control the House floor. Some of them worry that their nine-man field of candidates may not fix the problem this week, leading to an even longer delay in legislating.

“I don’t think anybody really thought we’d go this long without being able to replace McCarthy as speaker,” said Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.), another House spending leader and leadership ally.

Womack predicted that pent-up frustration back home might show his party the way out of the crisis, with voters and business leaders calling up their members to say: “‘Damn it, Congress, get your work done. Get this behind you.”

Senators in both parties had envisioned potential breakthroughs this fall on modest legislation dealing with rail safety or perhaps even artificial intelligence guardrails. During past moments of divided government, Congress has passed some smaller-scale legislation and made new laws on less controversial issues.

At the moment, though, the House’s congressional shutdown means that expectations are near zero at best on the Hill, where it’s easy to foresee another year of debilitating gridlock before the 2024 election.

“If we can’t keep the government funded and deal with all these pressing international issues right now, then I doubt we’re able to execute on much else,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said.