Shutdown that almost was: Washington’s week of the spending fight

Washington spent the week before Christmas doing what Washington does when the calendar forces the question: it fought over money, almost shut the government down, and then, in the final hours, found a way not to. The week’s outline is easy to state and harder to explain. A bipartisan funding bill, negotiated for weeks, was blown up in public; a replacement, renegotiated under pressure, failed in the House; and a third version, stripped of the demands that had wrecked the first two, passed in the small hours and was signed by the president on Saturday, just before the deadline would have closed the government’s doors.

The explosion came first, and it came from the incoming administration. The president-elect, joined by the vice-president-elect, declared the bipartisan bill unacceptable, and the declaration was amplified within hours by the tech billionaire who had been appointed to lead a new efficiency commission, whose objections spread across the social platform he owns; Republican members who had supported the deal withdrew their support, the speaker cancelled the vote, and the package died under the weight of the objections. The episode was a demonstration of where power in the coming government will sit, and the demonstration was conducted in public, at speed, and with relish.

The replacement failed for a different reason. The new version restored some of the spending that the first bill had cut, added disaster aid, and attached the debt-limit increase that the president-elect had demanded; the debt limit proved too much for the House’s right flank, the conservative revolt that had ended the first bill’s predecessor was repeated, and the vote went down on the floor. The failure was the pattern of the year: a speaker dependent on a narrow majority, a minority within his own conference able to veto the leadership’s plans, and a calendar that leaves no room for the deadlock to heal.

The rescue came in the final hours. A third bill, carrying the disaster aid and the extension but dropping the debt-limit demand, passed the House by three hundred and sixty-six to thirty-four and the Senate by eighty-five to eleven, with the government’s funding technically having lapsed for a few hours overnight; the president signed it on Saturday morning, and the shutdown that had loomed all week was averted. The margin was the point: when the poison was removed, the deal that most members wanted passed overwhelmingly, and the overwhelming majority was the proof that the week’s drama had been manufactured rather than inevitable.

The deeper lesson of the week is about the coming arrangement of American power. The episode showed an incoming president willing to dismantle a negotiated settlement, a party follower prepared to move the Congress with posts, and a Congress that can still produce large majorities when the demands are removed; the fight over the debt limit, parked for a few months, will return in the spring, and the spring’s fight will be conducted with the same cast and the same script.

Washington averted the shutdown that almost was, and the averted shutdown is the real news: the government stayed open, the disaster aid passed, and the holidays arrived with the lights still on. But the week will be remembered for the way the fight was conducted, the deal killed by objection and saved by subtraction. The machinery worked in the end, and the working was the demonstration of what the next year will look like when the machinery is tested.