Congress Avoids a Shutdown … For Now

Happy Friday! Is a trip to North Carolina really complete if you don’t stop by the local Cook Out? Obviously not for President Joe Biden, who joined North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper at the southern staple and ordered a bacon cheeseburger, fries, and a milkshake—“triple thick,” by the ice cream fiend’s own account. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) announced Wednesday evening that its forces had conducted their fifth strike in a week against Iran-backed Houthi militia targets in Yemen, eliminating 14 anti-ship missiles. “These missiles on launch rails presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and U.S. Navy ships in the region and could have been fired at any time, prompting U.S. forces to exercise their inherent right and obligation to defend themselves,” CENTCOM said in a statement. The strikes come amid continued Houthi attacks on commercial ships traversing the Red Sea.
• The House and Senate on Thursday passed a continuing resolution (CR) extending government funding—set to expire, for some agencies, on Friday at midnight—at current levels through March 1 and March 8. This bill mimics the previous extension, passed on November 15, which “laddered” funding for certain agencies to Friday and February 2. The measure passed the Senate 77-18, and in the House, where some Republican hardliners were opposed to extending the government’s funding for the third time, the CR passed 314-108, with 107 Republicans and 207 Democrats voting in favor. President Biden is expected to sign the bill into law later today. Both chambers will have to move the remaining appropriations bills before March 1 and March 8 in order to fully fund the government for this fiscal year, which began on October 1.
• The Justice Department found “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of the May 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, according to a report released on Thursday. The review—the result of a 20-month investigation—provides a detailed accounting of “leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training” failures by law enforcement, chief among them a decision not to classify the scene as an “active shooter” event. That resulted, the report concluded, in “a 77-minute gap between when officers first arrived on the scene and when they finally confronted and killed the subject.” Most of the local officials in charge during the shooting were fired or retired in the months following the incident. Had law enforcement acted more quickly that day, “Lives would have been saved, and people would have survived,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde on Thursday. 
• Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on Thursday in support of Donald Trump, as part of the case addressing whether Colorado can remove the former president’s name from the ballot under the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause. In the brief, Cruz and Scalise argued that the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling “directly interferes with Congress’s express authority to remove a Section 3 ‘disability’ during the election season,” and “adopted a malleable and expansive view of ‘engage in insurrection,’ which will easily lead to widespread abuse of Section 3 against political opponents.” In addition to Cruz and Scalise, 177 other Republican lawmakers signed onto the brief, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Another Incremental Funding Plan

The most important piece of legislation under consideration in Congress yesterday was H.R. 2872, a bill to amend the Permanent Electronic Duck Stamp Act of 2013. The proposed changes would allow hunters who purchase migratory fowl hunting permits (aka duck stamps) to use an electronic version of the stamps as proof of purchase instead of having to wait for a physical copy to arrive from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sadly for the duck hunters out there—but not too sadly because a bill to this effect did become law last month*—H.R. 2872 was brought up by the Senate as a legislative trojan horse. Lawmakers gutted the text and used it as a shell for a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded through March. Lawmakers gutted the text and used it as a shell for a continuing resolution (CR) to keep the government funded through March. Thanks in part to an impending “snowstorm” canceling votes on Friday [Midwestern Editor’s Note: Can we really call one or two inches of powder a storm?], lawmakers passed the CR on Thursday, sending it to President Joe Biden’s desk just a day before part of the government would have shut down.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has insisted the CR he spearheaded last fall that funded the government from November to January would be a one-off. “I do not intend to have the House consider any further short-term extensions,” he wrote to his colleagues in a letter last month. One rebrand later, Johnson opted to kick the can down the road again, working with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to pass another “laddered” CR. The stopgap measure maintains current government funding levels through March 1 for four of the 12 appropriations bills that fund the government, and through March 8 for the remaining eight. 

As with the November legislation, Johnson had to suspend the rules—the procedures that govern regular debate on a bill—to bring the measure directly to the floor, limiting debate time and raising the threshold to pass from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority. Only 107 Republicans joined Johnson to vote for the CR, with 106 voting against—including a member of the speaker’s own leadership team, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik. A total of 207 Democrats voted for the resolution, providing the lion’s share of the two-thirds majority. 

How did we get here yet again? As we wrote last week:   

“Johnson and Schumer reached an agreement over the weekend on a $1.59 trillion topline spending number, which includes $886.3 billion in defense spending and $704 billion in non-defense spending. It also leaves in place a $69 billion side agreement for additional non-defense spending that McCarthy negotiated with President Joe Biden last May as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling—a bargain that strained McCarthy’s relationships with some GOP lawmakers and contributed to his eventual ouster. With the side deal included, topline spending would be $1.66 trillion for fiscal year 2024.”

GOP hardliners immediately condemned the agreement, arguing Johnson had caved to the Democrats like his predecessor did a few months earlier. Members of the House Freedom Caucus (HFC) deemed the spending levels unacceptable and argued that GOP leadership should have leveraged the threat of a government shutdown to try to force concessions from Democrats on border security. Yesterday, the HFC tried to attach the GOP border bill, H.R. 2, to the CR, claiming at one point that Johnson was considering the move. But the speaker’s office quickly shot down the idea.  

Johnson is now back to square one, but with the hardline defectors only more incensed at the additional CR. Some lawmakers are now knocking Johnson for not making progress on conservative policy riders, particularly proposals restricting abortion access—blocking the Pentagon’s new policy of funding service members’ travel to receive abortions across state lines, for example, or prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills. When trying to sell his members on the topline spending deal he negotiated with Schumer, Johnson told his colleagues that they could “fight for the important policy riders included in our House FY24 bills.” But it’s unclear how Johnson will be able to negotiate conservative policy wins when he doesn’t have enough Republican support to reach a simple majority.

“We have the majority in one half of the legislative branch,” Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, who chairs the HFC, said yesterday. “When you have the majority in one branch, shouldn’t you get half of what your policy priorities are?” But Democrats may not be inclined to negotiate much on policy when—thanks in part to Good and other hardliners—their caucus, not the Republicans, will be called upon to provide most of the votes to pass any legislation.

“Knowing that this bill is going to need a ton of Democratic votes, how does Johnson or appropriators go into a room and ask for a conservative policy rider with a straight face and think they’re going to get anything out of it,” argued Brendan Buck, a former adviser to House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. “This is the fundamental breakdown of the majority. When you don’t have 218 votes backing your speaker, you have nothing.”  

As our own Nick Catoggio observed last week, “The speaker is essentially leading a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans, with populist Republicans—the activist heart of his party’s base—relegated to a minority.”

To be fair, much of the Republican conference recognizes Johnson’s challenge. “The speaker has put us in a position to at least be able to negotiate,” said Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, a Florida Republican on the Appropriations Committee. “A shutdown will do nothing except waste money and destroy our ability to get conservative wins.” 

House Rules Committee Chair Rep. Tom Cole—an Oklahoma Republican who backed the CR—emphasized that conservatives might not get all they want out of the appropriations process. “[Johnson] hasn’t promised us policy wins,” he told Politico. “He’s promised us that we can fight for policy wins.” 

Still, hardline Republicans don’t seem any more likely to support the spending agreement today than they were earlier this month. “The D.C. Cartel just voted to extend Nancy Pelosi’s policies and Joe Biden’s budget,” Rep. Matt Rosendale of Montana said yesterday. “This is a bad day for America.” Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona had a similar reaction: “Another day, another horrible continuing resolution passed in the nation’s capital.”

Rep. Good took his frustration one step further and appeared to threaten voting against the rule on every bill from now on. “If you don’t need our votes for the material bills that matter for the country … and you continue to pass those under suspension of the rules with predominantly Democratic votes, then don’t presume you’re going to have our votes for the messaging bills that don’t matter,” Good said yesterday. 

The speaker has made clear his preference for passing individual appropriations bills instead of larger funding packages, but with opposition from the HFC and others, that may not be an option. Congressional leaders could end up agreeing on an omnibus package or separate “minibuses” following the pattern of the laddered CR, or they could end up with another short-term funding measure—although at some point before September 30, they’ll have to admit the ship has sailed on appropriating fiscal year 2024. “What a national embarrassment,” said Brian Riedl, a Dispatch contributor who served as the former chief economist to former GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio. “A CR taking us nearly halfway through the fiscal year because our dysfunctional Congress cannot understand divided government and compromise.”

The question that looms over Johnson after this latest CR is whether any hardliners will pull the trigger on a motion to vacate and try to oust the speaker. Earlier this month, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that he’d prefer not to remove Johnson—but he didn’t rule it out. Rep. Eli Crane of Arizona, another HFC member, was more forthcoming about Johnson’s fate. “I think it’s a great tool,” he said of the motion to vacate on Wednesday. “If things continue to go the way that they’re going, do I think that’s a possible outcome? Absolutely.”

Some members of the Republican Conference think Johnson ought to rethink his approach towards members like Crane. As GOP Rep. Steve Womack, chairman of the House Appropriations’ Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee, said last week, “Renegotiating for the purposes of appeasing a group of people—100 percent of whom you’re not going to have, in my opinion—could be a flawed strategy.”

Worth Your Time 

• “Apology” and “Russian President Vladimir Putin” don’t often appear in the same sentence—except, apparently, when he’s issuing a mea culpa for the exorbitant price of eggs. For the Wall Street Journal, Georgi Kantchev explains how the ballooning price of eggs could prove a useful window into Russia’s war economy. “The grocery staple has been in short supply in recent months and prices have skyrocketed, prompting Russians from Belgorod to Siberia to form lines reminiscent of Soviet times,” he wrote. “President Vladimir Putin has publicly apologized, blaming the egg shock on the government. Last month, a poultry-farm boss known as ‘the Egg King’ survived an assassination attempt shortly after authorities started investigating his farm due to high prices. Behind the soaring price tag—up around 60 percent in December from a year earlier, according to data released Friday—is a convergence of factors symptomatic of the economy’s travails. ‘The government looks like a bunch of firefighters who run from one small fire to another with a bucket because they cannot eliminate the underlying inflation problem,’ said Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank official who is now a nonresident scholar at the Berlin-based Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. As the war in Ukraine enters its third year, the egg crisis shows how Russia is struggling to balance clashing economic imperatives—financing the war, placating popular discontent and keeping the economy balanced, including through stable prices. ‘It’s an impossible trilemma,’ said Prokopenko. ‘Achieving the first two goals requires higher spending, which leads to high inflation, which prevents the achievement of the third goal.’ For some Russians, such as Andrey, a 33-year-old software engineer living in Moscow, the egg episode is just one facet of a dysfunctional economy. ‘Russians will pay for the consequences of isolation out of their own pockets for a long time to come,’ he said.”

Presented Without Comment 

President Joe Biden, asked if airstrikes against Houthi rebels were “working”:  

“Well, when you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” 

Also Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump in a post on Truth Social: 

“A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL ‘ROGUE COP’ OR ‘BAD APPLE.’ SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’ ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!”

Toeing the Company Line 

• Congratulations to Dispatch contributing editor, Chris Stirewalt, who’s about to be much busier on Sundays: Starting in March, Chris will be hosting NewsNation’s new Sunday morning show, The Hill Sunday with Chris Stirewalt.
• In the newsletters: Nick argued (🔒) media outlets learned some wrong lessons from the 2016 election: Rather than keeping him off screens, it’s time to put Donald Trump back on TV.
• On the podcasts: David and Sarah dive into the oral argument in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. Plus: Steve, Sarah, Jonah, Mike, are joined by Andrew Kline in this live taping of a Dispatch event (🔒) in New Hampshire to discuss the Granite State’s upcoming primary—and whether it matters it all after last week’s caucuses—on The Skiff.
• On the site: Michael Rubin argues that humanitarian aid to Afghanistan is propping up the Taliban, and Ginger Quintero-McCall explains the revelations in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents.

Let Us Know

After angering hardline Republicans with compromises over funding measures twice, do you think Speaker Mike Johnson will get a third chance in March—or will he be thrown from the chair?

*Correction, January 19, 2024: Originally, this newsletter did not include the separate legislation on the stamps that became law.