Brewing government shutdown? Blame NC’s Dan Bishop and his fellow GOP rebels | Opinion

Rep. Dan Bishop has been busy up in Washington, but to say he’s been engaged in actual governing is too generous.

Rather, the North Carolina Republican appears singularly focused on driving dysfunction.

Bishop and a small number of far-right House Republicans have chosen to play hardball on government spending, outright refusing to pass a budget unless it meets their tall demands. Those demands include funding for a border wall, cutting off aid to Ukraine and targeting the Department of Justice, whom they believe is “weaponizing” its institutional power.

Bishop and his colleagues also want to cut spending levels below those negotiated earlier this year by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden, which could mean slashing funding for Title I schools, affordable housing grants and nutrition assistance for low-income mothers, The Washington Post reported.

And they seem all too willing to shut down the government to get what they want.

“Among Republicans, there are those who don’t think we should make a change to anything that happens up here,” Bishop said, according to The Washington Post. “And I am going to cast every single vote to see to it that the direction changes. We’re going to change the way this institution functions, so far as I have any control of it.”

It seems his idea of changing how the House functions is to add to its dysfunction.

With a government shutdown just days away, Congress must at least pass what’s known as a continuing resolution — a short-term funding bill intended to keep the government running while lawmakers negotiate a longer-term plan. However, several Republican holdouts have said there’s no way they’ll vote for any short-term funding bill, no matter what’s in it. Instead, they’re pushing to advance individual spending bills that have little chance of making it past the Senate or the president’s desk, making a shutdown appear almost inevitable.

Of course, a shutdown could be avoided altogether if GOP leadership instead moved a bill that could pass with Democratic support. But Bishop and his cronies have threatened to oust McCarthy if he moves forward in a bipartisan manner. Because why work across the aisle to accomplish something when you can just do nothing instead?

Never mind that a shutdown would leave millions of federal employees and active-duty service members without pay — indefinitely — or jeopardize federal food assistance for young mothers and their children. Egged on by Donald Trump, Freedom Caucus folks like Bishop seem to view it as an acceptable sacrifice if it means achieving their ultimate goal.

That goal, in part, seems to be to create a spectacle. This far-right faction blasts the “swamp” for its gimmicks and political posturing, but their own brand is nothing but performance art. They’re far more interested in internet trolling and right-wing media appearances than actual legislating, and voters reward them for it.

What’s most disturbing is that Bishop and his pals have enough power that their antics cannot simply be dismissed. With Republicans barely clinging to a House majority, it only takes a few hardliners to, as McCarthy recently put it, “burn the whole place down.” Bishop in particular was at the center of a fight that risked the U.S. defaulting on its debt this summer, and he withheld his vote for McCarthy’s speakership in January until McCarthy caved to his demands.

Bishop claims he’s just trying to get Congress to — as he wrote on social media — “do something real.” What a great articulation of his vision for America. No one actually knows what “real” means, but it sure sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Throughout his political career, Bishop has consistently been someone willing to take extreme measures, regardless of the consequences. He may have been able to get away with that behavior in his solidly Republican district, but it’s an odd strategy for someone who is running for attorney general — a statewide office — in 2024. Shutting down the government doesn’t seem to be something an ordinary politician would want to take credit for, yet Bishop might be willing to do just that — a position so ridiculous that no other North Carolina Republican has joined him.

Perhaps sensing that a resolution is unlikely to happen in time, some of the hardliners have begun attempting to convince people that a shutdown is not that bad, actually, and might actually lead to something even better in the end. Not only is that nonsensical, that “something better” is actually a poison pill of spending cuts that will hurt the most vulnerable Americans.

Don’t let Bishop and the chaos caucus convince you that their guerrilla tactics make them good public servants. Threatening to go nuclear unless they get their way is the stuff of toddlers, not leaders.

This story was originally published September 28, 2023 at 1:57 PM with the headline "Brewing government shutdown? Blame NC’s Dan Bishop and his fellow GOP rebels | Opinion."