Who’s actually to blame for the looming government shutdown, explained

The prevailing question on Capitol Hill Thursday was not whether the federal government would shut down at midnight on Friday — most people seem to believe it will — but who is going to take the blame for it.

Democrats say that Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House — of course it’s their fault if they can’t keep the government open. Republicans, meanwhile, are accusing Democrats of withholding their needed votes in the Senate in order to press for a resolution to the impasse in the immigration debate, even at the expense of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

It’s a question with a few layers — including ontology, political metaphysics, and interpretation. Even as a matter of pure procedure, there are no easy answers.

“It’s an interesting question, but I don’t think it’s really answerable as a procedural matter,” Sarah Binder, who has studied congressional procedure at George Washington University, told me by email. “‘Shutting down the government’ means of course failure to act. And there are lots of veto points within Congress and between the branches making it difficult to say who per se would be shutting down the government.”

But we can say this: Right now, it’s not at all clear whether Republicans have the votes within their own conference that would keep the government open. Until they do, it would be harder to put the blame entirely on Democrats. But Democrats have made clear that they are indeed willing to shut down the government — and their rationale can be traced back to that infamous White House “shithole” meeting.

The government shutdown scenarios — and who should get the blame
Republicans look to have averted the most embarrassing shutdown scenario: the House failing to pass a spending bill. Given that a bare majority can move a bill in the lower chamber, Republicans would have had nobody to blame but themselves in that case.

There are still, as far as I can see, two distinct ways that the federal government shuts down at midnight on Friday.

1) The Senate can’t pass a spending bill and can’t even get 50 Republican votes.

With the House pulling itself together, the action will move to the Senate, where things look especially grim.

Passing a bill in the Senate is a two-step process: First, you need 60 votes to start debate on the bill, and second, you need 51 votes to pass it. So Republicans, who have 51 senators, need at least nine Democrats in order to start debate on the bill. But they don’t, in theory, need any Democrats to actually pass it once debate begins.

But here is the problem for Republicans: They don’t even appear to have 51 Senate Republicans in support of the spending bill. Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Rand Paul (R-KY) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ) have all said they would oppose the House bill or at least are skeptical of it.

There is a hypothetical scenario where even if Democrats gave Republicans the necessary votes to at least start debate on the bill — on the “motion to proceed” vote, as it’s called — Republicans couldn’t pass it, as of now. Democrats wouldn’t really have anything to do with it. It would appear that Republicans have shut down the government.

But this is a little more esoteric. A hypothetical. Because Democrats are not going to give Republicans the votes to start debate. But it’s worth pointing out that it’s not at all clear Republicans could keep the government open on their own, even if they were given the chance. The motion to proceed could end up failing with less than 50 votes, with several Republicans joining Democrats to block the spending bill.

“McConnell has to prevent that from happening come hell or high water,” one former Republican aide told me. “But yes, if a motion to proceed only got 48, that would make it harder to blame” Democrats.