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I avoided writing about the ongoing government shutdown negotiations for a long time because, in a sense, they’re not very interesting until they’re over. In the study of intelligence gathering, a distinction is often made between “secrets” and “mysteries” - secrets are things that you could figure out if only you had enough sources and were smart enough, and mysteries are things that it’s just not possible to figure out because they depend on too many unpredictable factors or some truly unknowable information. When Kevin McCarthy got out of bed last Saturday morning even he didn’t know what was going to go down that day, so how could any of the rest of us reliably figure it out?
What ended up happening over the weekend bucked the conventional wisdom, which had solidified around the idea that there would be an immediate government shutdown. McCarthy ended up jamming through a continuing resolution, which is a short term funding bill designed to create the space for more detailed negotiations over the rest of the budget. One thing I don’t think a lot of people appreciate, though, is that it seems that when McCarthy put that continuing resolution up for a vote, he probably expected it to fail. The CR continued funding at current levels, but it didn’t include funding for Ukraine - and McCarthy probably expected Democrats to vote against it for that reason. He then intended to blame Democrats for the shutdown, claiming that they had refused to fund the government and pay the troops because they cared more about Ukraine than the American people. When they instead voted in favor of it, McCarthy was doomed.
What was notable about this stunt was that the sheer bad faith of it burned any possible remaining bridge that McCarthy had to the Democrats. When McCarthy needed Democrats to save his speakership this week, it was another reason for them not to be there.
So what happens next?
With McCarthy gone, we’re now shaping up for a speakership contest. Right now the declared candidates are Jim Jordan and Steve Scalise, and there are rumblings about Donald Trump becoming a candidate. Let’s deal with Trump first.
The Speaker doesn’t actually have to be a congressman, always they always have been in the past, and some people seem to think that it will help them suck up to Trump or just generally create chaos if they try to convince him to take the position. The arguments for going for this from Trump’s point of view are pretty much zero - the vote in the caucus to choose a Speaker is via secret ballot, so Trump can’t use his pull over the base to intimidate members into backing him. He would almost certainly lose, tarnishing his brand and creating bad blood within the GOP.
Even if he became Speaker, there’s little upside for him. The function of a Republican Speaker, apart from all of the ceremonial and procedural stuff (can you really see Trump presiding over the House?), is basically to shaft the party’s right wing in order to pass budgets and raise the debt ceiling. Sure, they might take a long time to get there and tack on other demands along the way, but that basic function of surrender is built into the position. There’s absolutely no reason for Trump to dirty himself with the mechanics of governing in this way when he can just crow from the sidelines. That’s what he preferred to do even when he was president!
Perhaps the one argument that might lead Trump to seriously seek the position is that he might believe that as Speaker he would be better able to delegitimize or even stop the criminal investigations against himself. He could argue that as Speaker of the House, he had very important duties to perform, and that it was outrageous for the functions of government to be disrupted by making him stand trial.
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