Republican clown show in D.C. will bring real pain in Massachusetts

By Yvonne Abraham

This is going to be very bad.

After last week’s Republican clown show in Washington (their words, not mine), a government shutdown is now looking inevitable. Utterly controlled by the nihilistic Trump cultists who now run his party, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has little to no chance of getting his majority to approve the appropriations bills that would fund the federal government after Oct. 1. Worse, any measures they might agree on would be so packed with poisonous provisions that they would be dead on arrival in the Senate, controlled by Democrats and more serious Republicans.

The guy can’t even get his caucus to agree to debate an always-uncontroversial Pentagon funding bill, let alone pass the thing.

What are the holdouts holding out for? They don’t even seem to know! They just keep moving the goalposts and voting no. It’s not just that they want to govern badly, holding Ukraine and disaster relief hostage to raise their own profiles, for example. They don’t want to govern at all.

Take it from the speaker himself: “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down,” McCarthy said Thursday.

He’s only just learning this?

Pity the poor legislators who went to Congress to help their constituents, to fight for their values and compromise in the interests of keeping the country running.

Congresswoman Lori Trahan is one. The Westford Democrat is watching disaster hurtling toward her Merrimack Valley constituents, and sees no way to prevent it. McCarthy could get the compromise spending levels he agreed to months ago passed right now with Democratic legislators’ help, but if he does that, fame-seekers like Florida’s Matt Gaetz will rally the clowns to remove McCarthy from the speakership.

“Preventing a shutdown rests solely with McCarthy and what he cares about more, the speakership or the country,” Trahan said on Friday.

Congressman Seth Moulton, whose constituents live north of Boston, recounted a conversation he had with a Republican colleague last week — a legislator who would have been considered extreme five years ago but now looks moderate compared to the braying attention-seekers who call the shots. Moulton asked him if there is any way out of this. The legislator said no: Gaetz and his fellow destroyers want McCarthy to step down, but even more than that, they actually want a shutdown.

“He told me they want our government to fail because they believe it gives them a personal political advantage with the extremists,” the Salem Democrat recalled. “It’s frightening, it’s embarrassing, and it’s dangerous for our country.”

So Moulton, Trahan, and other legislators who care about their constituents are bracing for the inevitable, trying to put plans in place to lessen the pain in their districts come Oct. 1. Trahan worries about the tens of thousands of federal workers in Massachusetts who face furloughs and will have no way to pay rent and gas bills for as long as the shutdown lasts. And about the people, many of them working, who rely on federal food aid and housing subsidies to make ends meet. She and her staff are trying to prepare for the flood of calls from constituents who need help.

“The Republicans like to demonize people who work for the federal government, but I worked for the federal government as a US Marine,” Moulton said. So do the air traffic controllers and TSA agents who make Logan Airport run, and the inspectors and engineers who protect our food and water supply. A shutdown will hang up the $13 million in federal money Moulton estimates would come into his district if the Republicans moved the appropriations bills — money that would go to Danvers, Rockport, Lynn, and other places, to fund improvements in water treatment, transit, housing, child care, and other projects people are counting on.

All of it will be held hostage by chaos agents who don’t even seem to know what they want from one day to the next, and to whom McCarthy keeps making impossible concessions to keep his job.

“Speaker McCarthy has a history of making conflicting promises to different people, and now it’s really biting him in the butt,” Moulton said.

The rest of us will have teeth marks, too.