House Passes Gov’t Funding Bill That Does Nothing To Fix Debt Crisis

Another funding bill, another can kicked so far down the road it needs its own zip code. The House passed something. Nobody in that building would tell you it fixes anything, because it doesn't, and most of them know it doesn't, and they voted for it anyway because the alternative was a shutdown fight nobody wanted to have this month. That's the whole story in a sentence: govern by exhaustion, not by plan.

We keep hearing "rule is an issue" tossed around like it explains the mess, and maybe it does explain part of it. Procedural fights over how a bill gets to the floor have become a convenient place to hide the real fight, which is that Washington has no appetite for actually confronting the debt. It's easier to argue about process than to argue about the trillion-dollar hole nobody wants to be blamed for filling.

Here's the part that should bother every taxpayer watching this: funding the government and fixing the debt crisis used to be treated as related problems. Now they're not even in the same conversation. You can keep the lights on in every federal building in the country and still be sprinting toward a fiscal cliff, and apparently that's fine, as long as nobody has to vote for anything painful before the next election.

None of this is a mystery. It's a choice, made repeatedly, by people who get reelected for making it. Until voters start punishing the vote instead of the shutdown threat, expect the same bill with a different date stamped on it next time.