You don’t play constitutional hardball to help the other team

There is a very real possibility that Republican congressional majorities will walk into a government shutdown before the midterms by failing to pass a spending bill:

Annual spending bills aren’t the only items on the congressional agenda that are an urgent priority for Republicans. They need to show some accomplishments prior to facing voters and are also acutely aware that they are likely to lose control of the House (and possibly the Senate) in November. That means they may lose the power to pass party-line legislation via the budget-reconciliation procedure used to enact last year’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The weeks just ahead may offer the GOP its final chance to impose Donald Trump’s legislative agenda before he leaves office in 2029.

Unfortunately for his own team’s legislative prospects, Trump himself is making it very hard for House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to get anything done. He can’t seem to end the war he began with Iran, which not only saddles GOP candidates with an unpopular overseas conflict but also increases pressure on Congress to pay for the costs of this and future military adventures. In addition to the regular appropriations bills, the White House wants an emergency supplemental appropriations bill right away to pay for Iran war needs. Congressional Democrats, who almost uniformly oppose the war, are not likely to cooperate. And aside from that problem, Trump has been pitching temper tantrums demanding that Congress put aside everything else and somehow enact his pet SAVE America Act proposal, to which Democrats are bitterly opposed.

The break-glass-in-an-emergency device congressional Republicans have been mulling to overcome both Democratic opposition and Trump’s unreasonable demands is a third budget-reconciliation bill (the first was the OBBBA and the second was last month’s ICE-funding plus-up). Democrats cannot filibuster it, and many of Trump’s and Congress’s priorities can be shoehorned into it. Unfortunately, as head of the Senate Budget Committee, Lindsey Graham was expected to play a crucial role in shaping and shepherding this legislation. Now that mantle will likely fall to the next in line seniority wise, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. He’s a hammer-headed fiscal hawk who has virtually none of Graham’s legislative or public-relations skills and hasn’t been known to exert any powers of persuasion at the White House.

In this context, it’s worth reiterating the point made by Rob’s earlier post on Beshear and McConnell. We’re still seeing one-dimensional Candyland arguments that Beshear should somehow declare McConnell dead and try to get another senator appointed. The first problem with this is that if he tried to call a special election without McConnell being actually declared dead he would be quickly impeached and removed by the huge Republican supermajorities in the Kentucky legislature. The second is that Booker would not actually win a special election. The third, and most important, is that McConnell’s incapacity benefits Democrats. It’s already hard enough for Thune to put majorities together, and with Collins facing an election and no longer going up against the Nazi tattoo sex pest the would presumably prefer she not cast any major pro-Trump votes before the election. Why would you want to help Republicans by replacing a guy in the hospital with a Trump rubber stamp? It would be extremely stupid even if it could be done, which it can’t.

I learned on social media last week that there are still people who think that Obama could have replaced Scalia by fiat. This is very dumb, but at least if this were possible it would have been a huge win for Democrats (which indeed is why you have to be clinically braid dead to think Mitch McConnell could have been pressed into confirmed someone, or that the Court would have accepted someone who just showed up without being confirmed.) I really don’t see the point in galaxy-brained maneuvers that benefit Republicans.