Shutdown Countdown: Here We Go Again

And the Tea Party hostage situation and government shutdown train rolls on, the clock now set to midnight, September 30th.

House Republican leaders suffered a surprising setback on Wednesday when the House rejected their version of a stopgap spending bill, leaving unclear how Congress will provide money to keep the government open after Sept. 30 and aid victims of a string of costly recent natural disasters.

The 230-to-195 vote came after fiscally conservative Republicans joined an overwhelming majority of Democrats in opposing the legislation. As it became clear that the bill was going down, a number of Republicans changed their votes from yes to no.

The unexpected outcome illustrated how the intense fiscal fights of recent months had transformed the politics of disaster relief, which in the past has typically been rushed out of Congress with strong backing from both parties. Democrats remained nearly united against the measure because they saw the amount of disaster assistance — $3.65 billion — as inadequate, and they objected to the Republicans’ insistence on offsetting some of the cost with cuts elsewhere.

The vote also showed the Republican leadership’s continuing struggle to corral the most conservative members of the caucus, as more than 40 Republicans rejected the measure because they did not believe it cut spending enough.

The setback on a bill that only a week ago seemed headed for easy passage came just hours after Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader, joined other top Republicans in predicting that the House would pass it. 

But here's the thing:  The GOP wanted to pass this bill to jam the Senate.

Now House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his leadership team must decide whether to acquiesce to the Democrats, or to cut discretionary spending below the level provided for in this bill. Neither option is good from Boehner's perspective. Appeasing Democrats will cost him support in his caucus, further weakening his standing in his party. But bowing to his own members by cutting spending even further would violate an agreement he struck with Democrats during the debt limit fight, and poison an already sour relationship between leaders of both parties.

GOP leadership is now debating whether to seek a new, less controversial offset, to scrap the idea of offsetting altogether, or to disentangle the disaster aid from the government funding bill altogether -- to essentially admit that yoking the two together in the first place was an error. Democrats say it's plausible there's another, hypothetical offset they can live with -- the only bright line they're drawing now is that further cuts to the budget, below the level Republicans agreed to in July, are unacceptable.

And once again it's Orange Julius who has lost control of his caucus.  We'll see where this goes.