Another game of shutdown chicken ended last weekend with the status quo and the ousting of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20).
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) said it’s time to end the senseless — and costly — practice of shutdown politics.
Johnson has long championed the bipartisan Prevent Government Shutdowns Act, which he said would effectively end shutdown political theater altogether by enacting rolling 14-day continuing resolutions until Congress passes all of its requisite 12 appropriations bills.
“We need to get rid of this form of congressional gridlock, which is just simply ridiculous. It’s a stupid exercise,” the senator told The Wisconsin Daily Star last week on the Jay Weber Show, on NewsTalk 1130 WISN in Milwaukee. “It’s a stupid exercise.”
Johnson made his comments a day before the House and Senate reached an eleventh-hour deal, a continuing resolution to fund the government through November 17.
The bargain struck — passing in the House 335-91 and in the Senate 88-9 — cost House Speaker Kevin McCarthy his job. Eight hardline conservatives joined all House Democrats this week in approving a motion to vacate, turning McCarthy out of the speaker’s seat after nine tumultuous months. He said he will not run again for the position.
If history is any indicator, Congress very well may be facing another so-called government shutdown in the days before November 17.
As Johnson noted in his floor speech, there have been three government shutdowns since 2019. Congress has passed 34 continuing resolutions to avert shutdowns over that period and has raised or suspended the debt ceiling nine times, as it did in June. Along the way, the U.S. debt has soared by some $8.5 trillion to $33 trillion. Congress has passed more than 200 continuing resolutions since fiscal year 1977.
Johnson said the bill he’s backed since it passed out of his committee in 2019 does what Wisconsin state government does when it faces a budget impasse: It continues to operate on the previous year’s budget levels until the Legislature “can get its act together and appropriate the funds.”
The bill, authored by U.S. Senators Maggie Hassan (D-NH) and James Lankford (R-OK), passed out of committee on a bipartisan vote. Senate Democrats have blocked the “continuous session” bill from reaching the floor, Johnson said.
Following the latest round of shutdown politics, Lankford said his bill is “gaining a lot of steam.” It boils down to forcing Congress to perform its No. 1 job: passing a federal budget. If lawmakers can’t complete the 12 appropriation bills required to run the government by the end of the fiscal year, they keep working, seven days a week, until their work is done. That means no travel.
“It basically puts us in a spot to say, ‘You can’t leave, you can’t go see your family on the weekend, you can’t travel and do other events and things that need to be done. You’ve got to be able to stay here and work on just appropriations until you get those things solved,’” the senator told ABC News.
“When my older brother and I were having arguments growing up, my mom would lock the two of us in one of our bedrooms, and would say, ‘When you guys solve this, you can come out,’” he added.
Johnson said Congress should be starting the budget bill process much earlier than it has to avoid the usual “grotesque” game of brinksmanship. There should be time for members to scrutinize the massive spending bills as opposed to the frequent formula of governing by continuing resolution, waiting until Christmas Eve, and holding a desperate, last-second vote on a 3,000-page omnibus that no one has had the time to fully read.
Johnson said the brokers of continuous government dysfunction need the threat of a shutdown to create a crisis.
“This is a well-honed process that has landed us $33 trillion in debt,” the senator said, noting that the U.S. government will spend $1.7 trillion more this fiscal year than it did four years ago.
“This is completely out of control. This place is maddening,” he said. “There’s such a simple solution to this thing. I’ve been offering it since 2019. They won’t take it up.”
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
