Matt Gaetz is right about single-subject appropriations bills
Plus: Jewish space lasers, old houses, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
Matt Gaetz is right about single-subject appropriations bills
A small group of House Republicans, led by Florida’s Rep. Matt Gaetz, on Tuesday tossed out their own party’s House Speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California.
This has largely been reported as a reaction to McCarthy’s role in passing a bill to temporarily fund the federal government and stave off another budget-induced shutdown. Gaetz “forced the vote after McCarthy passed a bill to keep the government funded,” says a representative piece at NBC News.
It has also been framed by many as a reckless move toward further chaos and institutional degradation in Washington. “Congress, which ought to be a global beacon of liberal values, continues to succumb to self-inflicted paralysis,” said an unsigned New York Times editorial. “How else can it be that fewer than a dozen lawmakers from the outer fringes of the Republican Party are holding one of the world’s oldest democracies hostage to their wildest whims?”
I’m generally anti-chaos and not especially fond of government shutdowns, which create lots of opportunities for performative political grandstanding but solve nothing and actually cost more than just maintaining business as usual. Moreover, I have not been favorably impressed by Gaetz, and I’m sure I’d find plenty to disagree with if I examined his entire agenda in this ouster.
But on one significant point—a point that should be far more widely reported than it has been—he’s entirely right. Here’s a summary from CBS:
Back in January, when Republicans took control of the House, McCarthy was struggling to win the backing of a majority of the House to become speaker. A group of Republican holdouts led by Gaetz withheld their support to extract several concessions from him.
One of their most pressing complaints was the process by which Congress funds the government, which they say enables runaway government spending.
In theory, executive branch departments—like the Pentagon, the Justice Department, Homeland Security—are funded through a dozen individual appropriations bills that set spending levels for the year ahead. These bills typically must be passed by Congress and signed by the president by the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 to avoid a government shutdown.
In practice, Congress has missed that deadline with growing frequency in recent years. To buy more time, lawmakers pass what's known in Washington as a "continuing resolution," which funds the government at current levels for a certain period of time, usually until the holidays. They then use this time to lump all of the individual spending bills together into one massive piece of legislation called an "omnibus" that funds the various departments until the following October, when the cycle repeats again.
Gaetz and his fellow GOP holdouts wanted to put an end to that practice, and return to “regular order”—the consideration and passage of the individual, annual spending bills. This, the argument went, would allow them to extract deeper spending cuts than would otherwise be possible through an omnibus bill, which is often hastily approved with less popular provisions tied to must-pass items.
As that Oct. 1 deadline approached this year, McCarthy brought up and the House passed four individual spending bills but said a continuing resolution would be needed to avoid a shutdown. Gaetz and about a dozen other Republicans saw this as McCarthy reneging on the terms of their deal to support him in the speaker's election and refused to go along with a funding extension.
Gaetz is right here on two counts.
One is that Congress should indeed go back to single-subject spending bills crafted through an open debate and amendment process—instead of omnibus bills produced via private talks among a few powerful lawmakers and administration officials—as I argued three years ago at The Week. Our representatives managed to pass around a dozen separate appropriations bills on an annual basis as recently as the 1990s. Getting back to that model is hardly a call to ℝ𝔼𝕋𝕍ℝℕ.
And second, McCarthy really did break his word, as a more principled rules stickler, former Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash, has observed:
Sure, by the time September rolled around, it may have been true that a shutdown could only be averted with a continuing resolution which lumped together multiple types of spending. But you know when that wasn’t true? The previous eight months of Kevin McCarthy being speaker of the House of Representatives.
On his own head be it.
2. What I'm reading this week
Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild (2023)
I’m familiar with Rothschild’s work from his reporting on QAnon and am reading to review for CT … and also because I find the cover art delightful:
3. A recommendation
I am an old house partisan, so predictably I found this New York Times story about a couple who accidentally bought a derelict, four-unit Victorian villa in Scotland a fascinating read. It happened like this: They intended to buy an apartment at auction to flip and sell, but they bid on the wrong lot number and ended up with this instead:
But now, after nearly half a decade of work, most of it by the couple themselves, the building is transformed, wholly restored and serving as their home as well as rental units:
What is my recommendation here, precisely? Facially, I guess it’s that you read this pretty remarkable story (with equally remarkable photos), but really it’s to choose an older home with materials capable of restoration and worth preservation.
4. Recent work
Got a couple pieces publishing today and tomorrow at CT, but they won’t be live in time for this send.
Do not conform to the work habits of AI | Christianity Today
Against containment | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
5. Miscellaneous
I found this CT piece, “How Japanese American pastors prepared their flocks for internment,” a fascinating look at history I’d never before considered. An excerpt:
Shigeo Shimada grew up in Japan, where his father disowned him for believing in the “foreign” religion of Christianity. He immigrated to America for seminary studies with only his broken English and $200 in his pocket, yet he clung to the truth that the same God who saved him in Japan would provide for him in a distant land, he wrote in his book, A Stone Cried Out: The True Story of Simple Faith in Difficult Days.
At a farewell service on February 15, before being sent off to internment camps, Shimada exhorted Alameda Japanese Methodist Church in the San Francisco Bay Area to remember the sufferings of Christ, according to his book.
You and I are and will be suffering a great deal because of this war. This is an opportunity to test our Christian faith. Let us meet all suffering face to face and endure the coming tribulations patiently. Let us not give up hope, whatever our trial may be. … Remember, you are all Christians and you are all citizens of the kingdom of God. The Issei people are called enemy aliens, and unfortunately the Nisei are treated like aliens as well. However, we must not become enemy aliens of God. Please behave as children of God wherever you may go and whatever your situation may be.
Shimada refused to conceal the future suffering his people would face, relating the Nikkei persecution to that of the early church under the Roman Empire. Peter had written to Christians who were likewise dispersed from their homes and facing an uncertain future (1 Pet. 1:1). They, too, were subject to harsh authorities with little say about what would happen to them (2:18).
Read the rest here.
