This Alexander Bolton piece in The Hill is pretty damn good. It’s so good, in fact, that I recommend that you read it to get a sense of how fucked up things are in Congress and what you should expect to see there for the remainder of the year.
If you read between the lines a little bit, one thing becomes pretty clear. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell fully intends to screw over conservative budget hawks, blow off military hawks, tell the culture warriors to pound sand, and to almost completely capitulate to the administration.
The way he’s probably going to try to do this is by just punting on all the work the Senate will do this year on appropriations and asking for a last second continuing resolution that will keep spending the same. All he gets out of the deal is the ability to preserve the cuts he won during the fight over the Budget Control Act of 2011, but that means that defense spending will remain below what even the Obama administration wants.
He’ll need the Democrats to go along with his plan, in both the Senate and the House. And he’ll have to let his own caucus vote on a bunch of riders to do things like ban spending on Planned Parenthood, kill Obamacare (again), declare Iran the second coming of the Third Reich, and obliterate the Environmental Protection Agency. But, since the only way the Republicans could conceivably prevail on any of those issues is to shut down the government and pray for a miracle, McConnell doesn’t really give a shit about them. He’s not interested in another government shutdown that yields nothing but aggravated voters and higher disapproval numbers for his party.
However, he’s going to have to contend with 17 presidential contenders braying at him to fight, fight, fight, as well as constant bellowing about what a sellout he is and how Washington Republicans never keep their promises. The only thing he has going for him, besides reality, is that he’s not Speaker Boehner. He can hide behind Democratic filibusters, for example, and he doesn’t have 150 members who make Michele Bachmann look statesmanlike. Boehner will deliver a conservative heat-fever wish list of a budget and then have to turn around and sell McConnell’s nothing burger to his caucus.
And, of course, the House Republicans won’t go for it. At all. So, Boehner will have to go hat in hand (again) to Nancy Pelosi and beg her to deliver her caucus.
Pelosi, of course, wants nothing more than another government shutdown, provided that she can avoid taking much blame for it. So, her inclination to give Boehner some kind of fig leaf to disguise his humiliation will be limited. And, yet, with all these presidential candidates claiming that if we just elect them things will magically get done the way that conservatives want them done, Boehner will have a tough sell to explain why a Republican-led House and a Republican-led Senate cannot accomplish even one item on their insane wish list.
What McConnell’s trying to do is preemptively accept a harsh reality, but he’s going to have very few supporters and they’ll be quieter than church mice.
Just gaming this out a little, it seems like a recipe to make the conservatives go absolutely berserk and lose every last shred of their shit.
And I just don’t see how this will work in Jeb Bush’s favor.
