Republicans struggle to explain shutdown of the House

This week, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) faced a tough-love complaint from a usually loyal soldier among rank-and-file Republicans.

“This shutdown strategy is old, and Republicans need to have new tactics,” Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) told House Republicans on a private call Tuesday afternoon as federal agencies passed their third week without funding.

Because part of the exchange had leaked to the press, Johnson relayed his version of that discussion to reporters Wednesday. He was adamant that Van Duyne – “a dear friend,” as he put it – was not being critical but instead pushing for something to break up the monotony of the current impasse.

But her critique highlighted the growing struggles that House Republicans face in their effort to try to force Democrats into opening up the federal government.

Ahead of the shutdown, Johnson and House Republican leaders chose a classic congressional negotiation posture: They passed legislation that would temporarily fund the government back on Sept. 19, then closed up their chamber for legislative business. That decision was meant to jam Senate Democrats into voting for the GOP plan. The thinking was, if Democrats refused to do so, they would get blamed for the shutdown.

So far, Johnson’s plan has failed.

On the critical Sept. 30 Senate vote, just three Democrats joined 52 Republicans in voting to keep the government open, five short of the 60 needed to overcome the filibuster.

Almost every day since, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) has held do-over votes but keeps getting the same result, well short of winning.

Thus far, Democrats do not appear to be bearing the brunt of the blame for the shutdown, either. An early October Washington Post poll found 47% of voters blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, while 30% blamed Democrats. A new Reuters poll this week found 50% blamed Republicans and 43% blamed Democrats.

But Johnson has not altered his strategy. The shutdown of the House has now reached almost five weeks. It began not long after lawmakers returned from the regularly planned end-of-summer recess to spend time with families and voters back in their districts. In the past three months, House lawmakers have been in the Capitol voting just 12 days.

That has given Democrats an opening to go on the offensive, targeting Johnson over his refusal to call the House back into session.

“As House Republicans continue their month-long vacation, House Democrats are on Capitol Hill hearing directly from Americans impacted by service cuts, mass firings and health care price hikes,” the Democratic caucus’ social media account wrote Wednesday, linking to a meeting lawmakers had in Washington about the shutdown.

House Republicans are not on a vacation, to be sure. The vast majority of them are back in their districts doing meetings and talking with local officials about trying to help with services.

Johnson’s defense has been to reiterate – on a near daily basis – that the House closure is a way to demonstrate that the ball is in the Senate’s court, and show Americans it is up to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) to line up the votes to reopen the government.

During the shutdown, Monday through Friday, almost always at 10 a.m., Johnson holds a news conference, almost always with the same three members of his leadership team and then a couple GOP guests from various ideological factions of their conference.

He said he has to keep doing the same thing each day because Democrats are on “an all-out assault” against the truth of their role in shutting down the government.

Johnson has accused the media of colluding with Democrats by not covering the impact of the shutdown, yet almost every day, he or another GOP leader cites media reports about bad things that have happened because of the shutdown.

It is clear that Senate Democrats have not felt much political pressure at all to change their votes and reopen the government, and House Democrats appear to have dug in for the long haul.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), in a district with tens of thousands of federal workers, said that is because his party is united around its demand to extend tax credits for health-insurance exchanges, while the issue has divided Republicans.

“They don’t really have a message to carry to the country. And we’re telling everybody, this is our chance to save the health care system,” Raskin said.

On Tuesday, 13 House Republicans – most from the type of swing districts that will determine the majority next November – wrote Johnson pleading for a compromise fix to the tax credits for health insurance premiums.

In the meantime, dozens and dozens of House committee hearings, on a world’s worth of issues, have been postponed or canceled outright. Legislation approved by House committees last month, some with large Democratic support, cannot be acted on.

That has led some Republicans to complain that the House should come back. Johnson said Wednesday that “99.8%” of his GOP colleagues agree with his plan. Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-California), who came to Capitol Hill last week to demonstrate his disapproval of Johnson’s strategy, said a much larger number of rank-and-file Republicans think it looks terrible to have the House closed for this long.

“To the contrary, the fact that the government is shut down is all the more reason we should be here trying to do everything we can to get it open,” Kiley said.

The Senate, which has for years endured a well-deserved reputation as a slower moving body, has been setting modern records for productivity this year – in fact, at more than 580 votes, the chamber is way busier than the House.

Senate Republicans, especially those with previous House tenure, are reluctant to criticize Johnson’s approach, but they go out of their way to talk about all the work they are doing here in Washington while the shutdown is happening.

“I tell folks, when I was a practicing physician, if it was Christmas Eve and my family’s getting ready for dinner, and they call from the ER to say a patient was vomiting blood, I didn’t say: I’m sorry, I’m at Christmas Eve dinner. I said: I’m sorry, family, I have to go take care of a patient,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) said Wednesday.

While the Senate has spent time in recent weeks on its repeated attempts to reopen the government, it has also tackled a wide variety of other issues.

For instance, as chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, Cassidy has held five hearings this month on topics ranging from labor to AI’s potential in health care.

“I can’t speak for others, but I’m saying for the Senate and our committee, I think it’s time for us to be here,” Cassidy said.

As of Wednesday, the House had held just 282 roll-call votes this year. That is less than half as many votes conducted at this point in 2017, the last time Republicans held both chambers of Congress and the presidency, and well behind the 525 votes the GOP majority had held at this stage of 2023.

Of course, an unusually high number of those House votes in 2023 came trying to elect a speaker, beginning with the 15 ballots in January to finally elect McCarthy. By Oct. 3, 2023, a renegade group of Republicans voted with Democrats to oust McCarthy.

For the next 22 days, the House essentially shuttered, as Republicans tried and failed to forge unity. On the night of Oct. 24, they reached into their junior leadership ranks to pick Johnson, a conservative lawyer who had not made the type of enemies that McCarthy and others had.

The next day, Johnson formally won the speaker vote on the floor, making Saturday his two-year anniversary. It is all but certain the House will still be closed, a 35th straight day.