The Biggest Surprise of the 118th Congress

This week, Speaker Mike Johnson surrendered a spending battle that Republicans had hardly even fought. The House will vote on legislation today to avert a government shutdown without demanding any significant concessions from Democrats. In a letter to Republican lawmakers on Sunday, Johnson acknowledged that the bill “is not the solution any of us prefer.” But, he wrote, “as history has taught and current polling affirms, shutting the government down less than 40 days from a fateful election would be an act of political malpractice.”

Johnson’s retreat highlights a strange, seemingly contradictory truth about the 118th Congress: It’s been extremely chaotic, and yet the dysfunction has barely affected most Americans. The GOP’s House majority proved to be too thin to govern, and Republicans spent at least as much time bickering over who would lead them as they did voting on bills of consequence. Electing Kevin McCarthy as speaker required 15 rounds of voting, and he was ousted nine months later; a few months after that, a Republican fraudster, George Santos, was expelled. Somehow, though, Congress has escaped catastrophe: The U.S. did not default on its debt. Lawmakers managed to approve $61 billion in new aid to Ukraine that House Republicans had held up for months. And the government stayed open—largely because Republicans seem finally to have grown tired of shutting it down.

The GOP’s two speakers this term, first McCarthy and now Johnson, have each struggled to wrangle a divided party, placate former President Donald Trump, and confront President Joe Biden and the Democratic majority in the Senate. But both of them repeatedly avoided disaster. “They’ve taken the lumps and done the things they need to do to keep the place afloat,” Matthew Glassman, a former congressional aide who is now a senior fellow at Georgetown University, told me.

[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]

That’s not to say either leader deserves all that much credit. Ukrainians said the long wait for more U.S. assistance cost its forces lives and territory. Domestically, funding the federal government through temporary extensions known as continuing resolutions hampers agency planning. And neither McCarthy nor Johnson were able to turn Republican priorities into law.

Johnson’s latest folly came last week, when he attached to a government spending bill a partisan proposal aimed at ensuring that only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections (which the law already requires). Fourteen Republicans joined with most of the Democrats to defeat the measure, leaving the speaker with little leverage in negotiations. The gambit had been doomed long before it came to a vote. Yet with his own future as speaker in doubt and Trump egging on a shutdown, Johnson made at least a perfunctory attempt to get it passed. “I think he had to put it on the floor to say, ‘Hey, I tried,’” Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who has been critical of the hard-liners in his party, told me.

In his letter to lawmakers, Johnson cited the upcoming election as reason to keep the government open. But as plenty of Republican leaders have concluded over the years, shutdown fights have rarely turned out well for the GOP, whether an election is looming or not. “They never have produced a policy change, and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically,” Mitch McConnell, the party’s longtime Senate leader, said a year ago, when a similar surrender by McCarthy cost him his job as speaker. Last week, the senator said a Republican-orchestrated shutdown would be “politically beyond stupid.”

[Russell Berman: Why Republicans can’t keep the government open]

McConnell, who is giving up his post after this year, has played some part in all of the government shutdowns of the past 30 years—when Newt Gingrich was battling President Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s, when Senator Ted Cruz and his conservative House allies pressured a reluctant Speaker John Boehner to wage a fight over over Obamacare in 2013, and when Trump was demanding that Democrats fund his Southern border wall in 2018-19. Holding up federal operations to extract policy concessions has become synonymous with the party of smaller government, as Democrats are fond of pointing out. “Government shutdowns are in the DNA of the Republican Party,” the House Democratic leader, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, told Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic Festival last week.

Johnson’s maneuvering this week suggests that Republicans might be evolving. “I think we’ve learned shutdowns don’t work,” Bacon said. “People feel good on day one [of a shutdown], and then you realize it’s stupid.”

Republicans will face one more test this year, assuming the House and Senate approve (as is expected) the three-month stopgap measure Johnson unveiled on Sunday. This round of funding will expire on December 20. If Trump wins the presidency, the GOP will have little incentive to wage a shutdown fight only a month before he takes office. If Kamala Harris wins, Republicans’ calculus could change. But just as lawmakers are itching to leave Washington for the campaign trail now, they will likely want to head home for the holidays in late December. As Bacon said: “I don’t think there’s an appetite for it.”