One of the things about the Congress at a time of dramatic change is that there’s always the next thing you have to get done. The house just passed its version of the budget, a very narrow vote. Was real cliffhanger that’s now in the Senate, but now they have to work to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open so it doesn’t shut down. You do that when you haven’t passed all the appropriations bills, and in recent years, we’ve never had all the appropriations bills passed on time. And the challenge is simple.

If you make it conservative enough to get all the Republican votes, you can’t get the Democrats to vote for it, and in the house, we only have a one or two or three vote margin. On the Republican side, you can’t afford to lose anybody. And there are usually 10 or 15 or 20 people who hate voting for a debt ceiling. They hate voting for continuing resolutions. And so you’ve got to gradually win them over, one by one by one. Now to make it even more interesting, there’s talk now that they may take the savings from the Department of government efficiency and wrap them into this bill, and turn them into legislation so that they would actually have 50 or 100 or 100 and $20 billion in savings as part of the bill. The challenge for Speaker Johnson is you can’t really deal with the Democrats, because they’ll charge so much that he’ll lose most of his own base, and he might lose President Trump, on the other hand, if he’s going to pass it with only Republican votes, he literally can’t afford to lose more than one person and as you’ll remember, when they got around to passing the budget, he got within three votes of having a majority, given that he was one person, he was never going to get. Those three votes weren’t available, and until President Trump called them, personally, talked to them and got them to agree to vote yes, this could easily go the same way, but in order to avoid a government shutdown, it has to go through in a form that the Senate can adopt. And the Senate has a different set of problems these. This requires 60 votes, and I suspect the Senate is going to have to find some way to accommodate some Democrats at that point,

the question would be, if it came back, having been more spending, or whatever the Democrats cost, will they be able to get votes in the House? These kind of sort of cliffhanger events, almost like the old fashioned Saturday morning shorts, where people wondered whether or not the heroin would be saved or what’s going to happen? Will the hero arrive in time? That’s kind of what they’re going through. And Mike Johnson, who has shown just enormous endurance, is back once again. He wins one vote turns around, and 24 hours later, he’s working on the next vote. Hopefully in a few weeks, they’ll have special elections in Florida. They’ll pick up two Republican seats, and at that point his majority will be a little bit bigger. But you go from three to five, that’s really a narrow, difficult challenge. If I had to bet the government will not shut down, President Trump probably will intervene at the last minute, and they will get just enough votes. The bigger challenge, I think, is going to be the Senate, because of the rules of the Senate are different, and it’s virtually impossible for majority leader Thune to get this through only on Republican votes, so he’s going to have to find some way to get some Democrats to agree. Then that’s going to go back to the house. Then it gets a little bit more challenging. So stay tuned. This is not over. It’s not obvious, and I think that in many ways, it’s a it’s a very, very serious challenge