House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s last-ditch plan to keep the federal government temporarily open collapsed in dramatic fashion Friday as a robust faction of hard-right holdouts rejected the package, making a shutdown almost certain.
McCarthy’s right-flank Republicans refused to support the bill despite its steep spending cuts of nearly 30% to many agencies and severe border security provisions, calling it insufficient.
The White House and Democrats rejected the Republican approach as too extreme. The vote was 198-232, with 21 hard-right Republicans voting to sink the package. The Democrats voted against it.
Why is it whenever a govt shutdown occurs it’s because of Republicans?
Millions of people are affected by these shutdowns and it’s never brought up during elections.
Govt shutdowns should be enough reason to never vote Republican again.
Why is it whenever
a govt shutdownalmost anything bad in government occurs it’s because of Republicans?I didn’t used to think like this and I didn’t used to be so one sided in my political thinking, but events from 2016 on have turned me into a 100% Democrat voter. I always was for presidential elections but I used to consider more nuance in local elections and actually read the positions before voting. Now I don’t even bother. Democrats are not without sin but I’m always going to vote for the party that at least pays lip service to social improvement instead of greed being the core value of the party.
Ranked choice voting and more than 2 parties would be the best situation but until we get that I’m straight down the ballot with the lesser of two evils.
I’m the exact same way. The first election I voted in was Bush v Gore. Then and for nearly two decades later, I would look closely at each candidate no matter the party, and vote for the best candidate. I tended to vote for the Democrat more often, but was never a straight down ballot voter, especially for state and local elections.
At this point though, the ® next to someone’s name on the ballot is so toxic that I won’t even consider them. They’ve all drunken the MAGA Koolaid and are doing everything they can to destroy our government and rip up the Constitution in the name of Trump. Maaaaaaaaaybe if I saw someone with balls to standup and say “hey, I’m a Republican but all this Trump worship has gone too far” then I would consider them. But that’s not the case here. Everyone running on the Republican ticket in my area has Trump’s balls in and around their mouth, so I will vote straight (D) for the next several years.
Because Republicans campaign on the principal of “government is inept” and do everything they can to make it so. They’re literally trying to destroy it from within to make their claim true.
Their motivation for destroying the government is their corporate funders. A weak government means corporations have more freedom to truly fuck over their customers and workers.
Money is their God and country.
Edit - I forgot to include their extremist faction’s motivation since Trump took the wheel. Foreign funders. Russia and China have Trump, and therefore the MAGA faction, in their pocket.
Every single government shutdown in the last 30 years has been caused by Republicans controlling the House
There’s a quote from P.J. O’Rourke that illustrates the point well:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then they get elected and prove it.
A central tenant of the Democratic Party is that government can be a force for good and should be run well. Republicans try to tear the government down, especially at the federal level. The party as a whole doesn’t care nearly as much about good governance principles, though there are of course exceptions.
It’s because of the Two Santa’s Problem. Republicans figured out in the 1970’s they couldn’t get elected competing with Democrats who want to expand social programs. They then adopted the strategy of saying the government doesn’t work, defunding it so that the self fulfilling prophecy comes true and they can be a Santa by giving tax cuts for the programs they defund.
defunding it so that the self fulfilling prophecy comes true and they can be a Santa by giving tax cuts for the programs they defund.
This is giving them slightly too much credit. They don’t even shrink the government and pass the savings back to the American people. They continually grow the government, just like Democrats, however they have no mechanism to fund it because they also always support tax cuts. That’s why the deficit and the debt tend to grow even larger under their governance. That’s the two santas: government freebies and tax cuts both. Billions for defense contractors while we’re also giving Mr Private Jet a tax write-off.
Because the democrats want to govern
Republicans are always the cause of it and yet they all shout afterwards that it’s the democrat’s fault. At this point, I’d be surprised if any republican politician ever told the truth once.
And the news media repeats everything the Republicans say uncritically.
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Because they have more supporters on reddit and now lemmy, so thats how its framed
The most pathetic bit is that this impasse won’t end because of the pressure of federal workers suffering at all.
This impasse will end because our credit rating effects the profitability of our capitalist owners, whose greed infecting our society with its private profit first and only values is the reason we have sociopathic, “what’s in it for me” modern politicians willing to hold their breath like infants in the first place. This is what legislators that embrace market capitalist values look like.
Because here in the US, sociopathy is encouraged, even mandated in business by shareholders, hurt whatever peasants you want if it makes you an extra nickel, just not the owners. If we don’t want politicians like this, greed needs to be recognized and shamed from childhood as the character defect it is. Instead, we celebrate and encourage greed, and use successfully executed greed as the greatest metric of what we consider “success” regardless of how it was made.
Otherwise, as always, our politicians will be a reflection of us, a people who literally look at our tent cities filled with powerless human beings we’ve left to die of exposure with contempt for the sin of their continued existence reducing local property values.
Where does a society like that get off then expecting their appointed leaders to somehow prioritize the common good? It’s irrational.
This likely won’t impact the credit rating. That is the debt ceiling debate. The US will continue paying its foreign debts.
A lot of folks mix up the debt ceiling and budget debates. They’re related, and both involve the GOP playing with fire, but they have different consequences.
I did make that mistake. Thank you for pointing it out to me.
Pretty common mistake. Most folks mix them up.
Although it’s scarier when people think the debt ceiling is just another stupid GOP budget shutdown. Not paying debts could likely kick off a global depression because US bonds back a lot of the global economy.
We’ve seen what happens when a couple banks default, and it’s scary as shit. If the entire US defaulted…. Oof. That would be history-book level bad.
Honestly I’m of the opinion the global economy is so high on itself as the only priority to most world governments, and so indifferent to anything other than making largely already wealthy private shareholders wealthier, that its painful collapse would, long-term, be a far better outcome than letting it continue as it is in perpetuity, demanding perpetual growth on a finite world and having world governments, including our own, always willing to hurt their own people to satiate that growth because that government’s capital holders make the decisions.
I think our global economy in its current form has turned and keeps humanity at large cruel towards one another, and it’s clearly made humanity self-destructive towards itself as a whole. All to keep feeding its mandate for growth/metastasis for the sake of growth/metastasis. What humanity needs more than anything to survive right now is homeostasis/equilibrium.
I don’t think that can even begin to correct without a lot of severe, but necessary, pain. The pain of indolence/inaction/tolerance of this economy will be more subdued but without end until addressed.
Economies are supposed to be a mere tool to better distribute goods and services for the benefit of a society. Now, when societies face struggle, the only priority is to sacrifice anything and everything to protect the beloved economy. It’s perverse to me. The tail wagging the dog.
People thought that was the case with finance until 2008, instead we had people left homeless and jobless for years. Wealthy people have a safety net when the system fails. Poor people do not. If the U.S. crashed, people would die from the fallout. People died in the last recessions and they weren’t mostly the rich.
By crash I mean a new economy needs to be built, we’ve never not been slaves to this one.
And most humans will continue to slave for a handful of sociopathic families until that happens. It will eventually. Entropy is absolute and Rome always falls in the end. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but if you think we can stay this course without planet devastating catastrophe by our own hands and technology we don’t fully understand used for short term profit at all costs.
Do you want the end to be inflicted on all of us, or do you want there to be enough left to meaningfully rebuild?
Building up a new economy is not a crash. A crash is when the current system gets wrecked and it’s possible something better emerges from the ashes. The problem is that an economic crash primarily hurts the poor, even if they don’t own the stocks/property/means of production. They’re the ones whose jobs and homes are lost.
Consider, for example, the Bengal famine. Entirely economic, there was literally enough food but it became prohibitively expensive due to market forces driven by the British. The rich British aristocrats didn’t suffer, Indians did. In Venezuela when the market crashed, rich people got out or are able to weather it. Poor people are either stuck having to attempt to make the best of a terrible situation, or flee and seek aid as migrants.
Actually while not a direct issue, Moody’s said this shit could impact our rating since it demonstrates our govt is cluster fuck
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/25/economy/moodys-us-government-shutdown-credit-rating/index.html
It’s okay. They probably already knew your government is a cluster fuck.
The sick thing here isn’t the impending shutdown. It’s that the article implies McCarthy did everything he could to make a deal, when in fact he and his party are the sole cause of the crisis - on purpose, to later blame the Democrats for “having no leadership or policy” and causing harm to the country.
He could easily get it through the house with Democratic support but it would mean the end of his speakership.
Millions of people will suffer because one guy doesn’t want to do the right thing.
It was a last ditch plan to use only Republican votes to keep the government open.
I bet he can still bring the Senate CR (or whatever they pass) up for a vote. He’ll lose his job as Speaker, though.
“Safe” districts allow people to pull this shit. If any of these wackadoo Republicans had to explain themselves to their constituents it would be a totally different story. But most of them only have to win their primary.
Failure to do their jobs and negotiate should result in automatic removal from office. Republicans are fascist traitors and whores to 750 parasitic worthless billionaires. The whole lot of them are modern privateer criminals stealing from the rest of us.
In a lot of parliamentary systems that is what happens. In Australia it can result in a double dissolution election, in which every elected representative can potentially lose their job. The threat of that seems pretty effective at guaranteeing supply. Our conservatives would absolutely cripple the functions of government if they could.
If these Republicans could just do their fucking jobs instead of throwing tantrums every other week maybe we could have a government that could last a whole fiscal year without having to shutter up.
“Last ditch plan” just means maximum crying. Not surprised these pigfuckers shit the bed AGAIN.
Shouldn’t be propose it 17 more times?? That might do the trick.
How often does the …senate? vote on a federal funding bill, and why does the last one expire? Why isn’t there some default level of funding for federal spending?
The house is the bigger shit show and typically writes the budget bills since the Senate will usually pass it if the house does. (Not 100% accurate , see edit) The Senate did pass their own bipartisan stopgap funding for 6 weeks, but McCarthy refused to even discuss it because it contained funding for Ukraine.
This is yet another one of those things that has no real safeguards because Congress has always passed budgets without much issue for the majority of history. There’s always negotiating, but shutting down the government has always been off the table until fairly recently.
There is a bipartisan bill being proposed to end shutdowns and just fund the government at current levels until a budget is passed. But most members of Congress don’t support it because it means they can’t use the shutdown as leverage, on either side.
Edit: there’s also the Origination Clause, which directs the house to handle money issues https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origination_Clause#:~:text=The practice was intended to,between small and large states.
Clowns everywhere.
I almost planned a trip to DC with the kids for Columbus Day, glad I didn’t.
(probably not a good idea to plan to fly anywhere in October, actually - possibly November too)
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yep. the guy has a choice right now of choosing the thing that was an actual compromise, or shutting down the country… what is good for his position vs what is good for EVERYONE… and thats a tough decision!? these people are just terrible in every way.
He could make a last last ditch effort and put the Senate compromise bill up for a vote and let the Dems and Republicans who aren’t completely insane have a chance to pass that. It would show he isn’t a slave to the extremists who openly hate him, so he won’t do that.
