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GOP Government Shutdown Continues, Increases, Intensifies

This article is more than 8 years old.

As I first posted last week, congressional Republicans have effectively shut down the federal government without admitting it.

They continue to come to work at least for a few days some weeks each month and are still being paid but, other than seemingly constant meetings of the House and Senate GOP caucuses, the Republican majorities in Congress not only aren’t doing much of anything, they’re also making it exceedingly hard for other parts of the government to do their jobs as well.

In other words, as some readers said to me last week, it’s a GOP-caused-and-led stealth federal shutdown.

Last week, for example…

Senate Republicans not only indicated they won't hold hearings or allow a vote on anyone President Obama nominates to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, they announced that they will also refuse to extend the standard courtesy of meeting privately with the nominee.

This extraordinary breach of congressional behavior is close to unprecedented and it has to make you wonder what the members of Senate Judiciary Committee will be doing the rest of the year.

The House Republican strategy to move ahead with a budget resolution this year ran into a huge road block last week when, as reported by Sarah Ferris in The Hill, the House Freedom Caucus, the same ultra conservative group that forced Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to abandon his post last year, joined with the Republican Study Group to oppose the leadership plan to maintain the existing caps on domestic and military spending. With any effort to reduce spending almost certain to be unacceptable to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and perhaps half of his GOP members, that significantly increased the possibility that, in spite of what McConnell and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) have said publicly, Congress won’t do anything on the budget this year.

In fact, in the wake of the Freedom Caucus and RSG stated positions, Ryan said last week that Congress didn’t need to do a budget resolution.

As a result, like the Senate Judiciary Committee, you have to wonder what the members of the House and Senate Budget Committees will be doing the rest of the year.

The GOP’s continuous push to cut the Internal Revenue Service’s budget was shown last week to have made it exceedingly difficult for the agency to do at least part of its job. As reported by my Forbes colleague Ashley Ebeling, the IRS said that the rate it was able to audit individual taxpayers had fallen to 0.84 percent, the lowest level in more than 10 years. Non-profit organization and large corporations,  saw similar drops in their audit rates.

On top of that, the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee admitted last week – informally and unofficially, of course  that Congress would do nothing this year on any aspect of tax reform. And with budget bills being few and far between and the opportunity to act on expiring provisions very limited, like the Judiciary and Budget Committees, you really have to wonder what the two tax-writing committees will be doing the the rest of this year.

Regardless of whether it was planned or inadvertent, all this continues to points to a covert, stealth, concealed and surreptitious GOP-produced government shutdown happening right now that will continue through at least the election.