Three Republican congressmen
============================

While most commentary treated the Senate's shutdown agreement as the end of the fight, John Kiriakou pointed to a procedural inversion that he thought left it open.

The inversion

"This deal that may or may not be on the table today is not what the House passed," Kiriakou said. The original design had been for the House to pass the administration's budget and then go into recess, leaving the Senate to vote on the House version.

Instead the Senate produced an agreement of its own. "That means that the House is going to have to come back and vote on the Senate version, which is exactly the opposite of what they wanted to do."

The empty Capitol

Kiriakou emphasised how long the lower chamber had been gone. "The House hasn't been in session for a month. There's nobody on Capitol Hill." He cited a Washington Post report that day describing businesses going bankrupt "because there's nobody on Capitol Hill, between the shutdown and the recess."

The two thresholds

The substance of his point is a comparison of margins. The House minority leader had said the night before that he could speak for every Democratic vote in the House, and that every single Democrat would vote against a budget coming out of the Senate.

Against that, Kiriakou set the numbers: "the Republicans need seven Democratic senators to pass this thing. The House needs only three Republican congressmen to kill it."

His conclusion followed directly: "So I'm wondering now if attention should shift to the House, because this is not what Mike Johnson said he was going to pass."

The upshot

Ted Rall summarised the situation as one in which confusion reigns, and observed that confusion was the best hope of anyone who still wanted government-backed insurance. Kiriakou agreed, and recommended the spectacle to viewers whose civics education was some distance behind them: "watch this. This is how the sausage is made. And it's not pretty."

He was not ultimately optimistic. Asked later in the same broadcast whether the Democrats might yet hold, Kiriakou answered without hesitation: "No, they're going to cave. They're going to cave."

See also

- Whipping votes
- The nineteen-hundred-dollar premium
- Ted Rall
- John Kiriakou
