However, Democrats will never respond to hard-right Republican demands for savage spending cuts and to end funding for “woke programs” like President Biden’s climate change spending, Planned Parenthood, or veterans cuts. They are considered mentally incompetent when they apply for a gun license. This is why the United States is reeling from near-crisis to near-crisis.
Government finance policies have become more complicated due to Donald Trump's campaign to reclaim the presidency.
He appears to believe it is in his interest for Congress to deny Joe Biden even the appearance of victory. He wants dysfunction and inaction, and the hard right within the House Republican Caucus appears willing to do his bidding.
The recent bipartisan bill in the Senate, which would have provided funding to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and was tied to funding for U.S. border security and measures that Biden and Democrats would never have agreed to in any other circumstances, would never have agreed to. Reaching the House floor over conservative opposition.
It is, of course, in Trump's political interest that no progress is made in stemming the tide of migrants at the southern US border.
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While the delays reflect the difficulty of any level of consensus within House Republicans, they also relate to the instability of Johnson's situation.
He chose to postpone financing arrangements rather than resolve them to avoid a confrontation with hardliners and risk facing the same fate as his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, who lost his prestigious role after a deal with Biden averted a more serious shutdown. The strange ceiling that the United States imposes on its federal government debt levels.
Under the deal, which came into focus because of recent controversy over funding bills, the cap was suspended for two years after Biden agreed to freeze non-defense discretionary spending this fiscal year and increase total spending by just 1 percent next year. .
There were some Republicans who wanted Johnson to refuse to agree to even a temporary fix without major concessions, while others were calling for an extension of current funding levels until September 30, which, under the deal agreed upon by Biden and McCarthy, would effectively reduce Financial deficit. – Discretionary spending on defense of up to 10 percent.
Under complex congressional rules, more short-term deals after April 30 would lead to cuts in entire government spending, including defense and veterans spending. Traditional conservatives want to avoid that.
If Johnson wants to postpone the deadline again, even if just a week, he will likely need the support of House Democrats, or at least most of them. With the retirement and expulsion of controversial Republican George Santos, whose seat was held by a Democrat, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives shrank to two seats.
There will certainly be more than a couple of conservative MAGA members who will vote against any deal that does not include, for Democrats, unpalatable terms.
So the likelihood is that Congress will buy a few days before Johnson has to grapple once again with the impossibility of matching the expectations of the agitated conservative minority in the House that ousted McCarthy — and which could do the same to him — with an acceptable deal. Democrats and the White House.
The government's routine funding (which has proven to be less than routine) is separate from funding for Ukraine that the White House and the largely bipartisan Senate are imploring Johnson to bring to the House.
At a meeting Tuesday at the White House to discuss the broader funding impasse, the Ukraine funding discussion was, according to Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, one of the most intense meetings he had ever seen. Everyone in attendance, including Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, urged Johnson to support the new US aid.
Johnson has said he supports Ukraine (he hasn't always) but that border security is his priority — though he declined to bring up a Senate bill that would include funding for both. Trump, who has a strange relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been publicly and successfully urging Republicans to oppose any additional aid to Ukraine.
The unwillingness or inability of House Republicans to do something as basic as providing certain funding for the government spending budget that Congress approved last year does not bode well for the prospects for the 2024-2025 budget, which Biden will present soon. For discussion and negotiation.
Using the threat of a government shutdown every two months or weeks is no way to run a country. The routine, almost farcical confrontations over the debt ceiling and appropriations bills are bound to embarrass members of Congress.
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It undermines the American brand globally and costs it financially, in light of the evidence it provides of political dysfunction leading to credit downgrades and rising government debt financing costs that are escalating to dangerous levels.
It is an issue that will not be resolved unless the core of America's more mainstream political leadership is willing to marginalize its extremism and address it in a bipartisan manner. But that is unlikely as long as Trump, conservatives and the MAGA group in the House have a disproportionate voice in their affairs.
