In putting forward a short-term funding bill that Democrats could support, McCarthy took the most obvious path to success.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., owes me financial compensation for the amount of whiplash he put me through this weekend. After 16 years in Washington, almost all of which have been spent in House leadership, he should have known good and well that, given the intransigence of his caucus’s far-right flank, the only real solution toat the risk of his speakership is more than I expected of him — and it previewed a possible shift in McCarthy’s approach to his particular dilemma.
For weeks now, as a shutdown grew more and more likely, the only strategy that McCarthy had pursued was to pass long-term funding bills with exclusively Republican support. That was the idea , but that theory was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption: that McCarthy’s future success hinged on a negotiation in which these bills passed the House with only Republican support; in which Democrats conceded to all the provisions that brought the conservative Republicans on board; in which Senate Democrats held their nose and voted to fund the government at deeply reduced levels; and in which Biden didn’t use his veto.
I can’t overemphasize how much of a pipe dream McCarthy’s original sad excuse of a plan was, even before this weekend. It’s true that the House has passedthan the Senate , but it’s a hollow victory. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already passed all 12 spending bills, with major bipartisan majorities for each of them, but their passage in the full Senate was delayed while scrambling senators focused on a stopgap bill.
This pivot, however, puts his entire long-term strategy on spending fully into question.
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