The countdown to the next government shutdown starts ... now

It’s November, which means it’s time to start the clock on the next government shutdown deadline. The continuing resolution that Congress passed at the last minute on Sept. 30 expires Nov. 17, and House Republicans are even more poorly equipped to deal with that reality now than they were under now ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Now that Rep. Matt Gaetz led a MAGA rebellion to drum McCarthy out of a leadership role, the threat of a shutdown is possibly even greater. For one thing, the House Republicans spent nearly the whole month of October at war with each other. trying (and failing several times) to elect a new speaker. From Oct. 3 until Oct. 25, no legislation made it to the floor for a vote and Republicans spent almost all of their time fighting with each other rather than trying to figure out how to come up with a government funding plan that could pass the House and the Senate.

The threat of the House just bungling its way to a shutdown is even greater with McCarthy out of the picture because the guy they finally landed on (in the fourth try at finding someone who could get enough votes) is a legislative cipher. Newly installed Speaker Mike Johnson has never chaired a committee and never held a leadership position in the six years he’s been in the House. He sponsored five uncontroversial bills that made it into law and a few very controversial ones, like his version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which have not. As a highly ideological back-bencher, Johnson hasn’t had to figure out how to make deals with various blocs of the Republican conference. He hasn’t had to figure out how to count votes. He hasn’t figured out who he can trust, which in the House GOP conference is probably nobody, anyway.

So here’s a relative newbie in the speaker’s chair, “leading” a fractious caucus that is capable of turning on him at the slightest provocation. (The motion to vacate the chair, the mechanism Gaetz used to oust McCarthy, still exists.) What Johnson lacks in experience is replaced by an astonishing bravado that is reflected in the ridiculously ambitious agenda he set for his term. That starts with passing seven appropriations bills in the next two and a half weeks—when some of the bills haven’t even been passed out of committee yet.