Temporary Sanity: GOP Government Shutdown Fails

After months of virtual civil war in the GOP House caucus threatening a government shutdown, driven by a handful of Donald Trump-loyal extremists, Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally agreed to keep his word, and pass a bipartisan continuing resolution in line with the agreement he struck with President Joe Biden to end the debt default crisis.

The continuing resolution, which funds the government through Nov. 17, passed the House 335-91, with the vast majority of votes coming from Democrats: 209 in favor, just one opposed. Similarly, it passed the Senate 88-9, with all 9 votes against coming from Republicans. President Biden signed the bill shortly before midnight Saturday night, when the shutdown would have begun.

The handful of extremists had threatened to depose McCarthy as speaker if he failed to shut down the government, but without a viable replacement, the future remains cloudy at best. McCarthy did meet another of their Trump-backed demands — he opened a baseless impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden, which produced an embarrassing marathon first committee session, in which all three GOP star witnesses said there was no evidence to support impeachment.

But the chaos inside the GOP House caucus continues to threaten the nation as a whole, as Sen. John Fetterman warned in a statement. “Pushing the snooze button solves nothing, because these same losers will try to pull the same shit in 45 days,” he said. “I voted yes tonight to keep the government open, but I’m done normalizing this dysfunction.”

But normalizing dysfunction is precisely what the mainstream media has done, describing Congress as a whole as dysfunctional when budget shutdowns have only become regularized since Newt Gingrich’s first disastrous 1995 foray. And it’s only become increasingly damaging to our democracy.

While the extremist demands have been all over the place, slashing popular programs left and right, their two most high-profile demands directly benefit Vladimir Putin: opposition to Ukraine war funding and a return to Trump-era border policy, framed in terms of  “an invasion” — conflating peaceful civilians fleeing poverty, violence and climate crisis with a hostile military, a fundamental lie of the fascist “great replacement theory.”

Rightwing billionaire Elon Musk endorsed both these positions. “Why do so many American politicians from both parties care 100 times more about the Ukraine border than the USA border?” And it wasn’t just an isolated idle tweet. He also posted a 15-minute video from a Texas border crossing, which falsely claimed the U.S. is being overrun by dangerous immigrants due to the Biden administration’s alleged “open door policy.” In reality, immigrants are dramatically more law-abiding than native-born Americans.

Fueling immigration hysteria is part of Putin’s grand strategy to destabilize Western democracy — not just in the USA. He previously supported Bashar al-Assad’s brutal repression of the Arab Spring, which morphed into a long civil war producing a years-long refugee crisis in Europe. The combination of grain shortages due to the Ukraine war and Russian para-military interventions in Africa is fueling another such potential crisis, as Putin is hoping to fragment Western opposition to his ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

While the mainstream media has devoted significant attention to the domestic authoritarian threat to democracy, it’s been remarkably silent about how much and in what ways Russia has contributed to and benefited from that threat. In the days between now and Nov. 17, Putin’s priorities will continue to be pushed by Trumpists in the House GOP caucus. They will oppose Ukraine aid and demand a return to Trump-era border policies. And the mainstream media will continue to decry democratic dysfunction in Congress. Putin could not be more pleased.