US Congress Chaos: The Dismissal of Kevin McCarthy and the Threat of Another Shutdown

2023-11-14 23:52:28

Most elected officials from both camps do not want this extremely unpopular situation, the famous “shutdown”, especially as the Thanksgiving holidays approach. Two months following having narrowly avoided shutting down part of the country, the world’s leading economic power once once more finds itself close to the precipice.

Tensions that led to the dismissal of Kevin McCarthy

The dissensions in Congress – between Republicans in the majority in the House and Democrats, in control in the Senate – are such that elected officials are currently unable to vote on one-year budgets, contrary to what most economies in the world do. Instead, the United States must settle for a series of one- or two-month mini-budgets.

Each time one of these budgets expires, everything has to be done once more: acrimonious negotiations, commented on extensively on social networks, threats, then a series of votes, in the House, in the Senate… It is certainly very common that last minute agreements are reached on these finance laws. But the latest negotiations around the American federal budget, at the end of September, plunged Congress into chaos.

Read: With the impeachment of Kevin McCarthy, the US Congress plunges into chaos

Trumpist elected officials, furious that Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House at the time, had reached a last-minute agreement with the Democratic camp, dismissed him, an absolutely unprecedented situation.

Two deadlines at the start of next year

This time, the agreement on the table proposes to extend the budget at two different deadlines: one part until mid-January, the other until the beginning of February. It was presented by the new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, unknown to the general public and with very limited experience within the Republican staff.

Read also: Tired of war, Mike Johnson is the new “speaker” of the House of Representatives

The elected official from Louisiana, by his own admission, is still trying to find his feet. “I’ve only been doing this job for three weeks,” he said Tuesday at a press conference. He is in any case forced to deal, like his predecessor, with a handful of Trumpists, supporters of a very strict budgetary orthodoxy, and the Democrats, who refuse to have the country’s economic policy dictated to them by lieutenants of the former president.

These are the same conservative elected officials who pushed the United States to the brink four months ago. The world’s leading power then avoided a payment default at the last minute following long negotiations between the Biden administration and the conservatives.

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