House Republicans STILL Have No Strategy To Avoid a Government Shutdown

John Boehner continues to say that House Republicans will pass a CR that avoids a government shutdown, but behind close doors Republicans still don’t have a strategy to avoid another shutdown.

Roll Call reported,

Another obstacle for the House Republican leadership team — which has a brand new configuration after the resignation of ex-Majority Leader Eric Cantor — is coming up with a legislative response that actually has the votes to pass, and preferably without too much help from the Democrats. The House was meant to vote on a CR on Thursday, but with Obama’s eleventh hour request for ISIS language, the GOP pulled the measure to re-evaluate options.

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Whether adding the Syrian rebel language in the CR would make it harder to pass is still a question with no easy answer.

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“Let’s just see what [Republicans] propose, we have no idea what they’ll propose,” said Ways and Means ranking member Sander M. Levin, D-Mich., on Thursday. “We don’t know what’s in the CR … Republicans just don’t seem to make clear what they want to do.”

House Republicans have left themselves four legislative days to pass a CR, and nobody knows what the bill is going to look like.

John Boehner and Harry Reid had agreed to a short-term CR in August, but now that is up in the air, “The stop-gap spending bill that Reid and Boehner had quietly agreed to over the August break would need to be revised to include the new measure and skeptical rank-and-file lawmakers would need to be wooed and whipped, adding new drama to what many in Washington expected would be a sleepy September session.

President Obama wants the authorization for training the Syrian rebels included in the CR, but House Republicans are already expressing reservations that are about voting for anything that the president asks for so close to an election. The fact that Republicans have no strategy isn’t surprising. This is a House majority that has been guided by the whims of the tea party for years.

Another government shutdown would be a disaster for the Republicans. It is possible that they get their act together, but with outside groups like Heritage Action calling for the government to be shutdown, House Republicans could be on the verge of an act of political suicide.

Speaker Boehner criticizes President Obama, but the Republicans don’t even have a plan to avoid another government shutdown.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association