Shutdown Showdown Shut Down

I was ready to go. 

Assuming the clusterfuck that is the current GOP led House of Representatives would shoot themselves in the foot and NOT avoid a government shut down, I went back to a blog post from  Wednesday, October 2, 2013  to re-use this graphic.  

Look, if Jeopardy can re-use clues, I can re-use my graphics.

But the narrative took an unexpected turn.  

On Saturday afternoon, the House voted 335 to 91 for a temporary funding bill to keep the government operating through Nov. 16 and also fund disaster assistance. 209 Democrats joined 126 Republicans in voting for the package.

Basically Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy actually did his job.

And he may lose his job as result of doing his job. 

OK, so here's the deal. The party with the most members gets to put forth the Speaker of the House. In this case, the Republicans have the edge in membership so they voted for Kevin McCarthy to be the Speaker of the House.

Now the Speaker of the House is supposed to be the person in charge of the House of Representatives. It's the Speaker's job to get things done, find the votes among both parties to pass legislation, etc etc.

But due to the partisan nature of the current political scene,  the Speaker of the House has to focus on corralling votes from their own party to get anything done. 

The Republican Party is divided into 2 factions:

1) The group that still believes in getting things done to benefit their constituents and accepting the responsibilities of their position.

2) The other group that does not.

The "other group that does not" are right wing ideologues who would rather see the whole god damn thing burn that cede any ground in any budget negotiations.  

And there are the Donald Trump faithful who see their roles as Representatives less as serious jobs that need to be done and more as political theater to obtain and keep power over the "enemy". 

McCarthy sold his soul to these competing interests in getting his job as Speaker of the House. Up until Friday, he was still trying to appease these competing interests to pass a budget on a party line vote in order to keep his job.

The ideologues didn't care to negotiate on the budget. They wanted only the cuts they wanted and nothing else would be acceptable.  

And the Trump heads took their marching orders from Li'l Donnie who was of the mind set that a government shut down would make Biden and the Democrats look bad and of course, the MAGA heads will obey Der Fuehrer. 

The thing is everyone with a fucking shred of common sense could see that a government shutdown would be squarely on the Republicans and nothing would gained from it. 

So McCarthy made another deal, this time looking for support from both sides of the aisle. 

He did his damn job. 

Matt Gaetz has said he will call for a non-confidence vote against McCarthy if the House passed a funding bill with Democratic support.

And McCarthy showed some surprising backbone, saying “If somebody wants to make a motion against me, bring it. There has to be an adult in the room."    

Now the deal isn't perfect. Our pals in Ukraine still fighting against Russian aggression will have to do so without additional aid from the United States. And the concensus is that Vladmir Putin is going to see this as weakness in the United States and a fracture in the support of Ukraine's allies. A war that Putin should not have started in the first damn place and has gone on too long will now likely go longer if Putin is emboldened our lack of support for Ukraine. 

And it's only a stop gap deal that will keep the government open for business until November. 

When this will happen again.

And maybe then I will get to use this for real.  

And that flying reptile may not find Kevin McCarthy as the Speaker of the House. 

For daring to actually do the job of Speaker of the House.