On Sept. 30, 2023, then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy shepherded a short-term continuing resolution through the House of Representatives in a bid to stave off a government shutdown. It required support from Democrats, but it cost McCarthy his job.
Two days later, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) filed a motion to vacate McCarthy from the speakership, accusing him of violating an agreement that was struck to install him in the top position in the House.
“Speaker McCarthy made an agreement with House conservatives in January, and, since then, he has been in brazen, repeated material breach of that agreement,” Gaetz said at the time, citing McCarthy’s willingness to fund the government through a continuing resolution despite conservative opposition.
McCarthy was ousted from the speakership and replaced by Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who promised to fund the government through the regular appropriations process after one more continuing resolution through Friday, which would buy the House time to pass the remaining appropriations bills.
But of the 12 appropriations bills, the House of Representatives has passed only seven, and none have cleared the chamber since Nov. 3, 2023. So unsurprisingly, in a bid to avert a looming government shutdown on Friday, Speaker Johnson is pushing another pair of continuing resolutions with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) that would extend the deadline again through the first week of March.
For all the chaos of last year in selecting a speaker at the beginning of the 118th Congress, ousting him for passing a continuing resolution, and then electing a new speaker, House Republicans have yet to show that they can govern without these stopgap funding bills.
The promise to “return to regular order” has failed to materialize, and while it may have something to do with the fact that Republicans have a razor-thin majority in the lower chamber, it doesn’t change the fact that they have made repeated promises to put an end to these short-term funding bills.
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Johnson’s continued recourse to continuing resolutions is all the more ironic given how similar his actions are to the ones that led to the ouster of his predecessor. Whether, like McCarthy, he loses his job over it remains to be seen.
Despite the chaos that doomed McCarthy, Johnson is not charting a different course than that of his defenestrated predecessor, and while his position is unenviable, his repeated recourse to continuing resolutions shows that “business as usual” is alive and well in the House of Representatives.