Brace for another government shutdown early in the new year, as the GOP’s narrow majorities and the Democratic base’s deep desire to derail the Trump presidency makes it near-impossible for Congress to get anything done.
The first piece of coal in Americans’ stockings: The short-term funding bill that Democrats finally allowed to pass last month, ending the record-long shutdown, only runs through Jan. 30.
The federal Fiscal Year 2026 started Oct. 1 this year, yet the House and Senate have so far passed only three of the 12 appropriations bills to fund various parts of the government.
And they’re not even close on the other nine; they’d need a Christmas miracle to get it done in time.
And it’ll be brutally hard to pass yet another stopgap bill, or alternately an “omnibus” to cover everything through next Oct. 1: Too many Republicans are sick of these contraptions, while too few Democrats are willing to give the GOP any help at all.
And the combined moderate wings of both parties aren’t enough to do the job, even if both were willing to take such drastic action.
But this dysfunction has been building for decades: Congress failing to get all 12 bills done by the deadline has become standard operating procedure. (Or perhaps that should be standard not operating procedure.)
Both House and Senate have passed all 12 appropriations bills before the deadline only four times since “reformers” established the current process in the 1970s.
And the workarounds keep getting uglier.
Worse, Democratic “leaders” like Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi came to see the failure to do business in “regular order” is a feature, not a bug: Having to settle everything in one bloated omnibus all but guarantees that spending keeps going up, up, up.
It’s a crisis — there’s no time to make it make sense, runs the argument.
And with most of the media always insisting every government shutdown is the GOP’s fault, enough Republicans will bend in the end, even when they control both chambers.
Yet getting enough votes always requires “buying” many of them with pork and other special-interest favors, and/or with high-impact policy changes to appease some ideologues — all of it jammed into one bill that no one has time to examine for all the outrages.
It’s lawmaking at its worst: Rushed, unaccountable and corrupt.
And when Dems control the White House and Congress, it yields horrors like President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan” in 2021, followed by another $1.7 trillion spendfest in 2022, throwing gas on the inflation fire that’s still burning Americans.
Compromise and restraint are out the window, along with concern for the soaring national debt and wise spending of taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.
No one wants to get blamed for grinding the government to a halt, so instead we have a government slowly grinding away at the bases for future prosperity.
It’s bad enough that Congress shirks its duties until the 11th hour year after year; after all, regular Americans have to do their jobs on time or they get canned.
That the last-minute product is also garbage only adds more injury to the insult.
And a warning from the Ghost of Christmas Future: If Republicans lose the House or Senate in the 2026 midterms, it’ll get even worse.
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