McCarthy has demonstrated he's a man of bad faith by reneging on the agreement he made with the White House in May. He's a liar leading a caucus filled with liars, none of whom trust each other -- and with very good reason.
I guess the GOP figured that putting one of their leading charlatans in charge of hundreds of other charlatans made sense, but the result is just a circus.
The question I have is why are House members being sent home for the weekend?
The most optimistic interpretation is that they're getting off the floor so that deals can be struck "behind closed doors" and then hopefully come back with an actual solution.
The most likely reason is that representatives are lazy fucks who only actually work like 50 days out of the year
I'm sure they're doing fundraising the other 315 days
They have such hard lives. They deserve a long weekend, no?
/s
I'm under the impression they know they need several days to get the votes they need. (Hint: they aren't going to get them in time and we're going into shutdown mode)
I wish I could take time off work as often as the House does.
Become a government employee and you'll take off on October 1st, whether you want to or not.
Government employee here. It'll actually be the 3rd. We work our shifts for the first 72 hrs after the shutdown and then we go home. We do get back pay for all the hours we would have worked after the budget is approved, so that's nice. The service guys just have to keep working with no pay.
Yeah, I'm not sure how much they're going to have the military on their side if they cause this shutdown.
Didn't they just get back in session?
Yeah but it's soooo exhausting.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
House Republican leaders are sending members home for the week amid deep divisions over funding the government ahead of the rapidly-approaching September 30 deadline, according to multiple GOP sources.
House Republican leaders are running out of options after conservative hardliners sunk a Pentagon bill from advancing on Thursday and the fate of a GOP effort to keep the government funded remains uncertain.
The procedural vote’s failure marks yet another blow to Speaker Kevin McCarthy as he faces a major leadership test and threats over his ouster and Congress inches ever closer to a potential shutdown at the end of next week.
Days of negotiations have yielded a few apparent breakthroughs, but McCarthy’s Republican opponents have been quick to throw cold water on progress and openly defy the speaker’s calls for unity.
Late Wednesday evening, McCarthy briefed his conference behind closed doors on a new plan to keep the government open – paired with deeper spending cuts and new border security measures – in an attempt to win over wary members on his right flank.
As part of the deal, Republicans told CNN on Wednesday night that they have the votes to move forward on the yearlong Pentagon spending bill that five conservative hardliners scuttled just Tuesday, with Reps. Ralph Norman of South Carolina and Ken Buck of Colorado indicating they will flip to a yes on the rule and will vote to advance the Department of Defense bill Thursday after the speaker came down to the spending levels that Norman had been demanding.
The original article contains 738 words, the summary contains 253 words. Saved 66%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
So I'm just thinking about the numbers here, but if the procedural vote to just get things moving a bit failed 216-212, would that suggest the hard-line Republicans voted with Democrats to kill it? So they essentially voted with Democrats to keep their non-hard-line counterparts from voting with Democrats? And Democrats are voting against because... they don't like the bill? They want to keep McCarthy in this position to force him to work with them? This article talks a lot about the Republican divide but treats Democrats like kids in the back seat along for the ride. But they have nearly half the House themselves, so if there is a divide in the Republicans, where their vote goes matters.
Or did all the Republicans vote against it even though their speaker pushed for it, and the Dems just want to get on with the governing?
Either way, not a good look for Republicans, and Democrats are essentially ignored in the problem.
Edit: I get the impressions people think I'm blaming Dems at all, which I'm not. It was just unclear to me how this was playing out, what the Dems motivations were, and how these votes were going, and wished it was part of the article.
Democrats voted no because it's a divergence from the deal McCarthy negotiated in May. Hard-line Republicans voted no because it's not enough of a divergence and only gives them some of what they asked for (even though what they're already getting is a non-starter in the Democrat-controlled Senate).
McCarthy could present a bill that adheres to the previously negotiated spending limits and it would almost 100% pass with support from moderate Democrats and Republicans overriding the no votes from the freedom caucus and a few progressive Democrats, but McCarthy is afraid to do that because the wing nuts are threatening to oust him from the speakership if he doesn't cave to their demands.
Make no mistake: the Democrats have zero responsibility for this mess. And make no mistake: the only way this ends is McCarthy growing the balls to tell the wing nuts to get fucked. The only variable is whether that happens before or after a government shutdown.
Ah, okay, so the Dems voted against because they aren't given anything and McCarthy already reneged on their previous deal. I feel like that's some important context the article could have used. But that does mean the hard-liners are voting with the Dems, which is ironic considering their whole position.
Problem is that the Republicans don't negotiate with the Democrats so they have nothing to vote for. If they actually negotiated in good faith there would probably already be a bill passed by about 70 percent of the house.
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