Axios was reporting that Senator Mitch McConnell is working to prevent a government shutdown. This is looking to be possibly quite disastrous if he doesn’t succeed. The odds do not seem in his favor.
The United States House of Representatives is out on a “district work period” from July 25th through September 8th and isn’t transacting business. The Constitution of the United States requires spending legislation to originate in the House of Representatives. According to the appropriations status table, there is no known text of a stopgap spending bill to maintain the legal authority to fund government operations. There are only 13 scheduled sitting days for the House prior to the lapsing of authority for the federal government to spend money. If some sort of appropriations legislation is not in place by 11:59 PM on September 30th, operations of the federal government enter shutdown mode.
We’ve never had a government shutdown during a presidential election campaign. We’ve especially never had it happen with early voting kicking off. Having a government shutdown kick off when the people that potentially caused it are literally facing their voters is unprecedented.
Will voters double down on stupid? I don’t know. I do know that at least one member of the House Freedom Caucus is getting ready to load any stopgap funding measure full of “poison pills” that would keep Democrats controlling the Senate from passing the measure.
Oh, did I forget to mention that the current calendar for the United States House of Representatives shows them leaving to campaign as of September 27th and not returning until November 12th? I assume people in the House Freedom Caucus are banking on that to try to get their way in an inevitable standoff between the House and Senate. The Freedom Caucus people are assuming that Democrats in the Senate would cave to Freedom Caucus demands so as to prevent a shutdown so that everybody could go campaign in October. After all, the House and Senate can’t tell each other when to meet so the House throwing a fait accompli at the Senate could be a big problem.
We’ve already had bizarre things happen in this appropriations cycle such as the Legislative Branch bill failing on the House floor in a 205-213 vote. That bill almost never fails to pass! The odds are actually pretty strong that we’ll see a government shutdown with the way all the players are acting in this situation. Nobody really has any incentive to cooperate. Donald Trump is the wildcard who can inject further chaos into the mix but he’s very likely to push things more towards a shutdown.
I need to accelerate planning as to protective measures.