From Newsweek: Senate Passes Bill to Fund Government Through December 11

This is becoming a pretty standard part of the budgeting process.

- Click here for the story.

On the eve of the government’s annual budget expiration, Senate passed a continuing resolution to provide temporary funding for the government through December 11. The resolution now makes its way to the House and if it is passed, a government shutdown will be avoided for the time being.

The resolution received 78 “yes” votes out of 100, though it only needed 51 to pass.
This decision comes after Cecile Richards, the leader of Planned Parenthood, testified before Congress on the matter of defunding the healthcare provider. Members of the Republican Party, including Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, have sought a government shutdown in order to defund Planned Parenthood after the release of controversial videos by a pro-life activist purporting to expose the illegal practices of the health organization.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, harshly opposed a government shutdown, opting to temporarily fund Planned Parenthood in order to avoid such an outcome.
Congressional Republicans used these brinkmanship tactics in 2013, when Cruz gave a 21-hour marathon speech, opting for a government shutdown in protest of funding the Affordable Care Act. Democrats argued the move produced economic insecurity. With national election campaigning in full force, Republican leadership has been wary of the political dangers of a shutdown.

Will there be a government shutdown over funding to Planned Parenthood?

Some news sources think that is where Congress is headed. The Republican rank and file seems to angling for one, the leadership seems resistant, but that may lead to a move against them - John Boehner's speakership may be on the line

- Politico: Countdown to shutdown begins: It's not clear how Republican leaders plan to resolve the standoff over Planned Parenthood funding.

Congress returned from its long summer vacation Tuesday to an all-out, three-week sprint to avert a government shutdown – and no apparent plan yet to quell the conservative rebellion over Planned Parenthood that has dramatically increased the odds of a closure.

The mad dash – just 11 legislative work days left to solve the shutdown crisis, in between major votes on the Iran nuclear deal and the first-ever papal address to a joint session of Congress – presents a major test for Republican leaders in both chambers who vowed to end crisis-driven legislating.

The smart money is on Congress doing what it typically does when it’s up against a deadline: Find a short-term fix and delay the fight for later. But the dynamics are so fluid and passions high that no one truly knows how it will wind up on Sept. 30, the final day of the fiscal year and last day to extend funding or have the government close its doors.

- National Journal: Republican Leaders’ Stressful September: They’ve already lost the Iran fight, and more infighting over Planned Parenthood funding awaits.

Repub­lic­an Con­gres­sion­al lead­ers are fa­cing a stress­ful Septem­ber, burdened with a best-case out­come of main­tain­ing the status quo in gov­ern­ment fund­ing and a worst-case out­come of an­oth­er gov­ern­ment shut­down.

Adding to their head­aches, a flurry of Demo­crat­ic sen­at­ors pledged late last week to sup­port the Ir­an deal, elim­in­at­ing the pos­sib­il­ity that Con­gress could over­ride a pres­id­en­tial veto of a res­ol­u­tion dis­ap­prov­ing of the mul­tina­tion­al deal.

And as dis­sat­is­fac­tion with their lead­er­ship peaks on the right, it re­mains un­clear what con­sequences could arise for top Re­pub­lic­ans in they fail to de­liv­er on sought-after con­ser­vat­ive de­mands, par­tic­u­larly strip­ping Planned Par­ent­hood of roughly $500 mil­lion in an­nu­al fed­er­al fund­ing.

- The Atlantic: The Plot Against Planned Parenthood and John Boehner.

It has become an annual harbinger of autumn in this era of divided government: The calendar swings from August to September, Congress returns from its long summer break, and Republican leaders try to figure out how to keep the federal lights on past the end of the month.

In 2013, John Boehner gave in to Senator Ted Cruz and his conservative allies in the House, and the government shut down for two weeks in a failed fight over Obamacare. A year ago, Boehner and Mitch McConnell succeeded in twiceputting off a losing battle over immigration until after they could wrest control of the Senate from the Democrats.

With federal funding set to expire on September 30, conservatives are once again demanding a standoff that Boehner and McConnell are hell-bent on avoiding. This time around, the issue that might prevent an orderly—if temporary—extension of funding is Planned Parenthood. Along with Cruz, House conservativesinsist that any spending bill sent to President Obama’s desk explicitly prohibit taxpayer dollars from going to the women’s health organization, which has come under fire over undercover videos that purportedly show its officials discussing the sale of fetal tissue. Democrats have rallied around Planned Parenthood, and an effort to ax its approximately $500 million in annual funding is likely to fall short, either by running into a filibuster in the Senate or a presidential veto.

More on fragmentation within the Republican Party

Here are a few more stories that amplify the theme of the previous one:

- Whither the GOP? Republicans Want Change, But Split over Party’s Direction
- A tea party exit would be a blessing for GOP
- The GOP Can't Survive Without the Tea Party

Is the US now ungovernable?

The Economist worries that it is:

. . . Republicans are setting a precedent which, if followed, would make America ungovernable. Voters have seen fit to give their party control of one arm of government—the House of Representatives—while handing the Democrats the White House and the Senate. If a party with such a modest electoral mandate threatens to shut down government unless the other side repeals a law it does not like, apparently settled legislation will always be vulnerable to repeal by the minority. Washington will be permanently paralysed and America condemned to chronic uncertainty.

It gets worse. Later this month the federal government will reach its legal borrowing limit, known as the “debt ceiling”. Unless Congress raises that ceiling, Uncle Sam will soon be unable to pay all his bills. In other words, unless the two parties can work together, America will have to choose which of its obligations not to honour. It could slash spending so deeply that it causes a recession. Or it could default on its debts, which would be even worse, and unimaginably more harmful than a mere government shutdown. No one in Washington is that crazy, surely?

Like other commentators, they argue the fault lies in the polarization facilitated by gerrymandered districts.

The solution is to reform the electoral process by establishing independent commissions to draw electoral districts instead of parties in state legislatures:

What can be done? In the short term, House Republicans need to get their priorities straight. They should pass a clean budget resolution without trying to refight old battles over Obamacare. They should also vote to raise the debt ceiling (or better yet, abolish it). If Obamacare really does turn out to be a flop and Republicans win the presidency and the Senate in 2016, they can repeal it through the normal legislative process.
In the longer term, America needs to tackle polarisation. The problem is especially acute in the House, because many states let politicians draw their own electoral maps.

Unsurprisingly, they tend to draw ultra-safe districts for themselves. This means that a typical congressman has no fear of losing a general election but is terrified of a primary challenge. Many therefore pander to extremists on their own side rather than forging sensible centrist deals with the other. This is no way to run a country. Electoral reforms, such as letting independent commissions draw district boundaries, would not suddenly make America governable, but they would help. It is time for less cliff-hanging, and more common sense.

Good luck with that. California is using one, but I doubt it would have much of a chance in Texas.

Are government shutdowns the new normal?

This author thinks so, and does not see this as a good thing.

He also suggests that threats of shutdowns will join other procedural changes to make governing more and more difficult:

Just take a look at what’s happened to the Senate in recent years. Once, filibusters were rare exceptions. Now, they are constant. Nearly every bill, no matter how trivial, requires 60 votes for passage in a body that historically required a mere majority.

Similarly, presidential nominations are now routinely blocked for reasons only occasionally having to do with the qualifications of the nominee. Lawmakers have learned that they can take a nominee hostage in order to send an ideological message or convince an administration to change a regulation.

As a result, behavior that was once rare has become as routine as the Senate’s daily prayer.

The same thing has happened with the budget process. Over the past four decades, various efforts to manage the deficit eventually failed in the same way: Each included special rules aimed at waiving their spending limits in the event of an emergency. But lawmakers soon learned they could use these exceptions whenever they wanted. They got addicted, the waivers became the legislative norm, and efforts to control spending withered.

I fear the same is about to happen with government shutdowns. Once those who would use the shutdown as a useful legislative lever succeed, it will become a tool of choice. True, it couldn’t be used in every circumstance, but there would be enough opportunities to make it the next filibuster.

Have Republicans hit a sweet spot in their gerrymandering strategy?

The Economist suggest that they have.

In the redistricting that happened after the 2010 census - and the 2010 election where Republicans did very very well which allowed them to control a large number of state legislatures - a large districts were drawn where Republicans dominated, but not too much. Republican votes were spread enough to guarantee majorities in a large enough number of districts to ensure control of legislature despite having fewer overall votes than Democrats.

They guaranteed themselves a majority, with a maximum number of safe seats. This makes them immune to negative opinion about things like shutting government down.

It was a neat trick:

Republicans have managed to both make their seats safer, and ensure there are more of them, despite the fact that they lost the overall popular congressional vote. How did they do that?

By finding the golden mean. The ideal strategy for elections is to make sure your districts have just enough of a partisan tilt to ensure you'll almost certainly win them, but not so much that you win them overwhelmingly and waste your votes. Meanwhile, you want to cram the opposition's voters into districts which they win by overwhelming margins and thus waste their votes. Republicans can make sure their seats are both safer and more numerous by achieving lots of districts where they're likely to win by a safe but not extravagant margin, say 15-30%. If they pursue this strategy, they should wind up with relatively fewer seats that tilt overwhelmingly Republican. Meanwhile for Democrats, whose votes have been "cracked" or "packed" such that they lose more districts, the districts that they do hold would be more likely to be overwhelmingly Democratic than is the case for Republicans.

And this is what the Republicans' redistricting appear to have achieved. Of members of congress who won their districts with a margin of 60% or more in 2012, 18 were Republicans, while 29 were Democrats. In the crucial safe-but-not-overwhelming zone, with victory margins between 15% and 30%, Republicans won 92 seats while Democrats won 42. The average margin of victory for Republicans was 28.6%; for Democrats, it was 35.7%.

So there you go. This is one big reason why Republicans in the House are likely to react to widespread anger over the shutdown by becoming more, rather than less, confrontational. The vote distributions in their districts would have to swing by 10% or more for any sizable number of them to lose their seats, and that's not very likely to happen.

30 Republicans are forcing the shutdown

2305 students should remember Madison's comment in Fed 10 that minority factions can clog the administration and convulse the society - here's your proof.

- How 30 House Republicans are forcing the Obamacare fight.
- 8 million to 1 ratio.

Can a discharge petition be used to end the shutdown?

Some commentators argue that there are enough moderate Republicans willing to vote with Democrats on a clean continuing resolution - one that does not contain language denying funding for the ACA - to pass it, even over the objections of the House Speaker.

It involves the use of a discharge petition - which we discussed a bit in 2305 when we walked through the bill-making process. Not everyone agrees that this is likely to happen.

For detail:

- Wikipedia: Discharge Petitions.
- Democrats can use this one weird trick . . .
- CRS: The discharge rule in historical context.
- Why the discharge rule wont help Democrats . . .

From the Fiscal Times: GOP Moderates Rally to Stop the Government Shutdown

Some see evidence that moderates within the Republican Conference might be willing to split with the Tea Party Caucus and possibly join with Democrats to end the shut down - no guarantee of that though.

Several GOP congressmen are openly rebelling against their hardline colleagues—whose insistence on gutting Obamacare has led to the first government shutdown in 17 years.

Going into the third day of the shutdown, the criticisms of this tactic by this group of GOP pragmatists has become louder, offering the first sign of hope that the government might reopen.

The fissure inside the Republican Party has become undeniable, even as House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) continues to side with the Tea Partiers who have demanded that the 2010 Affordable Care Act be derailed. Moderates including Rep. Peter King (R-NY) and Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) are pressuring Boehner to ditch the dozens of Tea Party types who have controlled the caucus in recent weeks – but for now that seems unlikely given Boehner’s unyielding statement after leaving a meeting with Obama and Democratic congressional leaders at the White House late Wednesday.

From the Texas Tribune: Federal Government Shutdown to Keep Texas Workers Home

How will the federal shutdown affect the state? Many federal workers live in Texas. That's lots of lost revenue.

Thousands of “nonessential” Texas federal employees will be off the job until Congress passes legislation to turn the government’s lights back on.

Texas has the nation's third-highest concentration of federal employees, according to the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Politics Project, and many of those 140,000 workers will go without a paycheck.

. . . NASA, headquartered in Houston, is slated to close, with 97 percent of its employees at home. The Department of Homeland Security will temporarily halt its E-Verify program, preventing business owners from checking the immigration status of prospective employees. Border Patrol agents will remain on the job, but their paychecks will most likely be delayed. The Department of Energy will run on a third of its staff, with employees working on nuclear materials and power grids still on the clock.

Military personnel would have been paid by IOUs following a shutdown, but a last-minute bill signed by the president two hours before the deadline Monday night extended military salaries into fiscal year 2014.

While federal employees will feel the initial pinch, state agencies reliant on federal funding are scrambling to cover budget holes to carry them through the shutdown. The stalemate will be “catastrophic” if it lasts longer than a few weeks, said Tory Gunsolley, president of the Houston Housing Authority, which distributes housing vouchers to low-income families. October payments for the Housing Choice Voucher Program are already promised by Washington, but November’s are not.

“There simply isn’t enough money to be able to make good on our obligations without the federal government because there is not another source of money,” Gunsolley said. The Houston Housing Authority provides rental assistance for 60,000 people, costing about $10 million per month.

From the NYT: Senate Action on Health Law Moves to Brink of Shutdown

Keeping up with the excitement on Capitol Hill:

Plus: Who works and who stays home in a shut down?

A history of government shutdowns

From the Washington Post.

By this count there have been 17 since 1976.

From the NYT: The Money Behind the Shutdown Crisis

The NYT editorializes on one of the causes of dysfunction in Congress - the fact that conservative interest groups increasingly target Republican member of Congress who are not conservative enough, and who have shown a willingness to make compromises.

Representative Aaron Schock is a conservative Republican from Illinois, but not conservative enough for the hard-right activist group Club for Growth, which is seeking someone to run against him in next year’s primary.

His crime? In 2011, he voted to increase the debt ceiling, and, in 2012, he voted for a stopgap spending bill that prevented a government shutdown. In neither case did he demand the defunding of health care reform.

Club for Growth and other extremist groups consider a record like his an unforgivable failure, and they are raising and spending millions to make sure that no Republicans will take similar positions in the next few weeks when the fiscal year ends and the debt limit expires.

If you’re wondering why so many House Republicans seem to believe they can force President Obama to accept a “defunding” of the health care reform law by threatening a government shutdown or a default, it’s because these groups have promised to inflict political pain on any Republican official who doesn’t go along.

When we discuss elections in future classes, we will look at arguments that the primary election process has evolved into a mechanism for rewarding extremism and punishing moderation. This editorial provides evidence.

What is a government shutdown?

Now that Syria is off the radar screen - for now - attention is turning to a more predictable crisis: the looming government shut down.

This comes at a convenient time because we will be discussing the budgeting process very soon.

You may need a primer on this, so here's the obligatory Wikipedia entry on government shutdown, CNN has a guide to it, and the Washington Post lists 5 reasons why its likely to happen.

Simply put its a negotiating tactic that can be used by one side that wants to force concessions from another by refusing to allow for any spending at all if the concession is not met. It can be effectively the end of the budgetary cycle - when a new budget has to passed and money appropriated to fund governmental projects - or when the budget ceiling is about to be hit.

Both of those are looming right now. Tea Party Republicans are using this scenario to try to force Democrats to defund ObamaCare. If not - no spending so the government shuts down.

We will go over the budget process and the political issues associated with the shutdown in the coming weeks. in the meantime here are freaky slides showing the process.