Nov.11

electoral-vote.com

Dem 47

   

GOP 53

The Bitch Is Back

Recall the chorus to the classic 1974 Elton John track:

I'm a bitch, I'm a bitch, oh, the bitch is back
Stone-cold sober, as a matter of fact
I can bitch, I can bitch 'cause I'm better than you
It's the way that I move, the things that I do, oh-oh-oh

Yesterday, with the Senate having passed the temporary budget bill, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that the House will reconvene after nearly 7 weeks of recess. Readers can decide for themselves which person, group, entity or circumstance the headline might describe. We suspect different readers will reach different conclusions.

In any event, Johnson has had a pretty easy time of it while the House was out of town. He did his daily Baghdad Bob-style press conference in which the Democrats were invariably blamed not only for the shutdown, but for pretty much every other ill that has faced human societies, at least as far back as the Bubonic Plague. Then, it was time for his daily devotion—he headed over to the White House to kiss whatever part of Donald Trump was on the schedule for that day. Then, Johnson's time was his own.

Now, however, the Speaker is going to have to earn his paycheck. He's got a list of upcoming headaches that he will have to deal with. In roughly chronological order:

• White Flight: Quite a few GOP members live in rural areas that are pretty far removed from Washington and, critically, are not especially well served by airports. And so, although the GOP Conference was warned they should be back in D.C. today, and although votes have been scheduled for this afternoon, it's not at all clear that the Republican members will be back in time. Remember, the shutdown is still underway, and it won't be over until the House convenes and approves the stopgap measure. So, there is a shortage of air traffic controllers and a reduction in flights. If a member is coming from a big, blue city, then even with a 10%-20% reduction in the number of flights, there will still be plenty of options to get back to the capital. If a member has to rely on FSD (Sioux Falls, SD) or BHM (Birmingham, AL) or LNK (Lincoln, NE), maybe not so much.
  
  
• Epsteinpot Dome: Sometime today, the House will be gaveled into regular session. At that point, Johnson will have to swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ). She will then apply her Adelita Hancock to Rep. Thomas Massie's (R-KY) discharge petition. Then, Johnson will have to schedule a vote on that. Normally, privileged motions are handled on Mondays, which means the Speaker can probably buy another few days. But he's on a collision course with Trump, who very clearly does not want the vote to be held, much less for it to be successful. And, fair or not, Trump is going to blame Johnson if Massie succeeds. Will Johnson find a way out of this pickle? He's basically shameless when it comes to bending the rules, but even many of his own members will be very unhappy if Johnson turns "swear in a duly-elected member" or "hold a vote on a privileged matter" into things that he does whenever he feels like it, as opposed to when he's supposed to do them.
  
  
• Obamacare: It probably won't happen this week, but sometime soon, Johnson is going to have to deal with the issue of the Obamacare subsidies. If a bill passes the Senate (and there's a pretty good chance it will), then he'll have to decide whether or not to bring it up for a vote. There are some Republican members of the House, largely in swing districts, who think they will get crushed in 2026 if the subsidies are not restored, so they might support a discharge petition if Johnson tries to bury a Senate bill. Or, they might work with Democrats to come up with their own bill.
  
  If Johnson allows the vote to move forward, and if it passes, he is going to aggravate two different stakeholders. The first is Donald Trump (more below), who is aware that killing the subsidies, keeping the tax cuts for rich people and corporations, and keeping the deficit from exploding are mutually exclusive propositions. Trump might be able to have two of them, but not all three, and the sacrifice that he prefers to make is the subsidies.
  
  The other stakeholder is the House Freedom Caucus, which most certainly does not want to give money to poor people, even if they are sick, and even if they are Republican voters. If Johnson allows the bill to come up for a vote and it passes, could they exercise their option to vacate the chair? Maybe.
  
  On the other hand, if a bill passes the Senate (or if one of the other scenarios comes to pass), and Johnson and his conference are responsible for killing that bill, he knows that the Republicans will get crushed at the polls next year. And they STILL might not stop the subsidies from being restored, because the Democrats would likely choose not to play ball in January if they don't get the Obamacare money. So, the Speaker could end up in a situation where he holds a vote that looks very bad for the GOP, and then just ends up kicking the Obamacare can down the road to March or April. By then, enough members of his conference will be fearing for their political lives that killing the hypothetical bill a hypothetical second time might not be possible.
  
  
• The Budget: This may or may not end up being related to the previous issue. Recall that there's still no budget for most federal departments for FY 2025-26, and that one needs to be worked out by January 30. That brings up the exact same issue that Republicans face whenever they are in the majority: It's hard to herd all the cats, and giving the Democrats enough goodies to get some of their votes will cause much of the GOP Conference to rebel. Given the election results, not to mention how strained relations are right now, it's likely going to be even more difficult to try to come up with something. And if the Democrats don't get the Obamacare subsidies back, they almost certainly won't even accept a CR, for fear of being drawn and quartered by their base.

They used to have commercials about a "Maalox Moment." Well, Johnson's about to have a Maalox Month. Or two. Or maybe three. (Z)