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Only an extremely shallow man would repeatedly wait until the last possible moment to do the right thing, no matter how obvious that thing might be. But in today's Washington, the Republican Party usually doesn't do the right thing at all, so House Speaker Kevin McCarthy deserves some credit for putting his job on the line Saturday to end the threat of a government shutdown.
Not a huge amount of credit. The deal he put together Saturday (which he had opposed for weeks) only lasts for 45 days, after which Congress will still struggle to perform its most fundamental task of paying for a year's worth of government operations. And there is no excuse for the damage this deal could do to Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression, by leaving out the military aid that the Biden administration was planning to send.
But if his gamble succeeds, McCarthy may finally do the country a service by proving that bipartisanship works, effectively shutting up the braying band of right-wing extremists who have been agents of chaos since the moment the current House took office in January. They opposed the deal to prevent a credit default during the debt-ceiling crisis in May, but McCarthy and a bipartisan coalition prevailed. He appeared to join them for a while in rejecting that deal during the shutdown crisis, but just hours before the government was set to close its doors Saturday, he put a stopgap measure on the House floor that drew the votes of most Republicans and all but one Democrat. The hard-liners were left in the cold.
The sin of working with Democrats has now led the loudest extremist, Matt Gaetz of Florida, to promise a vote this week to remove McCarthy as speaker. If McCarthy can survive that vote — and he will probably need the votes of a few Democrats to do so — the wrecking-ball caucus will have to slink into the shadows of defeat. No one would be more pleased with that outcome than the core of House Republicans, who are profoundly weary of being shouted down by the Matt Gaetzes of the world.
"The problem is, we are being dragged around by 20 people when 200 of us are in agreement," Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, told Carl Hulse of the New York Times a few days ago. "As long as we let those 20 drag us around, we are going to get these kinds of results. At some point in time, you've got to say, 'We're done.' "
For a while, it didn't look like McCarthy had the spine to say that. He betrayed the debt-ceiling deal he had personally negotiated with President Joe Biden, allowing House appropriators to begin setting two-year spending targets far below the levels he had agreed to. He backed a different stopgap measure that would have shredded the social safety net and revived Trump-era policies like building hundreds of miles of border wall and denying asylum rights to many desperate migrant families. But that measure failed on the floor Friday when the extremists voted it down, saying it didn't go far enough in cutting spending and vowing never to support any kind of stopgap measure.