This “budget battle” feels like it’s going to end up being a whole lot of nothing

| 3:00 pm EDT May 3, 2023
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Some brewing political storylines feel like they’re going to have legs and really go somewhere and end up having a big impact. Other brewing political storylines feel like they’re a whole lot of nothing, just a bunch of posturing and hyperbole that ends with such a whimper, everyone forgets it ever happened.

All along I’ve expected this “budget battle” to end up being a very noisy non-story, with no real impact on anything. I expect that President Biden will win, because he’s holding most of the cards and savvy at playing them, while Kevin McCarthy is a dummy who wouldn’t know how to win the game even if he did have any cards to play. We’re nearly a month into this storyline, and nothing has happened thus far to change my expectation that this will end with an irrelevant whimper.

There are a number of House Republicans from far right districts who would prefer a prolonged government shutdown. They know that the majority of their constituents are bitter right wing losers who don’t care if a shutdown hurts them, so long as it hurts everyone else.

But there are also a number of House Republicans are from moderate districts where a prolonged shutdown would play poorly for them. They might be willing to shut things down for a day and a half just to say they did it. But a prolonged shutdown would prompt the deciding voters in moderate districts to blame “both sides” for the supposed government incompetence – and those voters would be most directly inclined to take it out on their own House Republicans in 2024.

In other words, there aren’t enough votes in the House to keep a prolonged shutdown going. Biden only has to find five or six House Republicans who are worried about reelection, and convince them to come out against a shutdown, and that’ll be the end of it. Biden will use this leverage to force those vulnerable House Republicans to swallow most of what he wants.

Once McCarthy sees that he’s about to suffer the public embarrassment of some of his own House Republican members cutting a deal with Biden, he’ll have to get on board with that deal, to try to save face – even if it means he has to give Biden 90% of what he wants. McCarthy has always been willing to debase himself in order to survive another day, and that’s likely what he’ll do here. Then he’ll try to make nice with the extremist House Republicans who had wanted a painful shutdown.

It’s always tricky to try to predict the specific steps and details and timeframe for how this kind of thing will go. I can’t tell you how we’ll get from Point A to Point B. But Biden holds most of the cards and is savvy at this stuff, while McCarthy is a dummy who holds few cards, and McCarthy has a long habit of caving when overmatched – so how does anyone think this is going to end? It feels pretty easy to figure out what Point B is going to be. Biden will win, House Republicans will lose and claim they won, and all of this posturing will have been for nothing. That’s why I don’t spend most days writing about this “budget battle” story. I don’t think it is one.