Cutting Off Your Nose to Spite Your Face

The House Republican budget promises more tax cuts for the wealthy and cuts in services for everyone else. The Chaos Caucus of ultra-right House Republicans reject even that budget, and want to shut down the government entirely. 

“Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,” says the old adage. That means not taking revenge in a way that will end up causing harm to yourself. Both a government shutdown and the Republican budget would damage the entire country. 

The two questions—budget and shutdown—are closely related. The government fiscal year ends on September 30. House Republicans waited until mid-September to release their budget proposal, making it completely impossible to pass any 2024 budget before the 2024 fiscal year begins on October 1. The only way to keep government operations funded, and to keep the government running, is now a continuing resolution, which is kind of an emergency measure to keep some funding in place for a limited time. Not passing the continuing resolution means shutting down the government. 

The Republican Budget

Trump era tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars every year since 2017. Those cuts are scheduled to expire in 2025. The Republican budget plan would make them permanent, and would further cut taxes for the top one percent of taxpayers, at an additional cost of $350 billion per year. 

In contrast, proposed Republican spending cuts target middle and lower-income families. 

One glaring example: the Republican budget plans call for slashing WIC funding. WIC stands for Supplemental Food Assistance for Women, Infants and Children. WIC provides food subsidies to some low-income pregnant women and children under the age of five. Food subsidies are narrowly targeted: they pay for only certain food such cheese, eggs, bread, cereal, and infant formula.  Participants also get vouchers to pay for fruit and vegetables. The average cost per participant in May 2023 was $56.26. 

Other budget cuts aimed at the poorest and least powerful among us target Medicaid, SNAP food assistance (food stamps), and rental assistance. 

Many other cuts affect all of us. These include reduction in support for national parks, Social Security customer assistance, K-12 education, clean air and water, and college funding. Funding cuts for the IRS would reverse recent efforts to audit high-income and corporate tax cheats, as well as reducing customer service funding. 

The Republican budget proposal could pass the House if all Republicans backed it, but it could never pass the Democratic-controlled Senate. But it will never get to the Senate, because the pain it inflicts is not enough for the ultra-right Republicans in the House. 

The Republican Continuing Resolution

The proposed Republican continuing resolution would fund some, but not all, government operations for 30 days. That is not time enough to get a 2024 budget passed, even if House Republicans all agreed on it. So we would face a new government shutdown threat at the end of October, the end of November, the end of December… 

If no budget passes, the continuing resolution would become the de facto budget. 

The Republican continuing resolution provides:

• No funding for military aid to Ukraine;

• No funding for U.S. disaster relief (think: hurricanes, floods, fires); 

• Severe cuts to childcare, education, environmental protection, food assistance, medical research, and transportation programs. 

That’s not a continuation of government operations, but a backdoor blackmail proposal to slash social spending. 

Democrats in the Senate will not agree to these provisions. But neither will the Republican Chaos Caucus in the House. Those ultra-right crazies want to shut down the government entirely. They seem mainly interested in pain and punishment—for the poor, the Democrats, the “woke,” or whoever their target-of-the-moment is.

While appropriations bills traditionally originate in the House, Democrats in the Senate are moving forward with their own continuing resolution. A bi-partisan Problem Solvers Caucus in the House is working on a different 90-day continuing resolution. And Kevin McCarthy is negotiating with his House Republicans to make changes in their resolution. 

We used to talk about the minority party in Congress or in the state legislature as the “loyal opposition.” Loyalty to country was a higher value than opposition to the other party. There’s nothing loyal about the Chaos Caucus, or about Republican leadership allowing them to hold the country hostage to their extreme demands.