House Speaker John Boehner might have averted one crisis by sacrificing himself. By resigning before his hardliners could try to vote him out for passing a government funding bill with Democratic votes, he can get that bill passed and it looks like a government shutdown will be averted. For now. But what Boehner can't do before he leaves on October 30 is get everything else that needs to happen in the last three months of the year. This is going to be
one chaotic autumn.
"It is setting up a very major set of hurdles for the next majority leader come the middle of December," Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center who worked for the U.S. Senate for 25 years, told TPM. "How they make this silk purse out of a sow’s ear is going to be very, very difficult." […]
Immediately next on the agenda is funding the highway trust fund, the deadline for which comes at the end of October. The Congressional Budget Office has signaled that the debt ceiling will need to be lifted by late November or early December, which remains a particular flashpoint for conservative hardliners who see a possible credit default as an opportunity to extract spending cuts. […]
Lawmakers will also have a series of "tax extenders" in need of reauthorization on their hands by the year’s end. And there is also the debate around the reopening of the Export-Import Bank, which, to the delight of Tea Party politicians, expired over the summer but continues to be supported by business-aligned Republicans as well as Democrats.
That's all difficult enough, with the debt ceiling being the most dangerous flashpoint, but the current funding bill expires on December 11. Between Planned Parenthood and
Republican tricks to hike defense spending while keeping the sequester limits from the 2011 crisis agreement in place for the rest of spending, coming to a long-term budget agreement is going to be ugly, and ugly just before the Christmas recess. The most we can likely expect is another stop-gap funding that pushes the deadline to just before spring recess. Rinse and repeat until November's election.
This is all going to have to be navigated by a new speaker—likely Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). TPM interviewed Stan Collender, federal budget expert, who says, "[h]ow does a new speaker, who will be facing a Freedom Caucus in the Tea Party who think they just knocked off a speaker after knocking off a majority leader and can do it again if they want, how do you get a speaker who can go through that maze and come out looking whole?" How, indeed.