Congress Perfects the Art of Governing by Crisis—Again

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Seventy-two hours before the federal government runs out of money, House Speaker Jake Morrison is doing what speakers do best these days: counting votes he doesn’t have while pretending he’s got everything under control.

Morrison’s latest headache arrived Thursday morning when the House Freedom Caucus—that reliably unreliable band of fiscal hardliners—announced they’d torpedo the $2.1 trillion omnibus spending package unless it includes their pet project: a complete defunding of the Department of Education’s new Climate Resilience in Schools program. Never mind that this program, launched just eight months ago, accounts for roughly 0.02% of federal spending. When you’re looking for a hill to die on, apparently any anthill will do.

“We’re not moving an inch,” declared Rep. Madison Crawford of Alabama, the Freedom Caucus chair whose definition of fiscal responsibility seems to involve burning down the government to save it. Crawford’s got 31 members behind her, which gives her exactly the leverage she needs to hold 330 million Americans hostage.

This is American governance in 2026: theatrical, predictable, and exhausting.

The Shutdown Playbook Never Changes

We’ve been here before. Seventeen times since 1976, to be exact, though most Americans probably feel like it’s been 170. The script never varies: Congress passes a continuing resolution to keep the lights on, kicks the real decisions down the road, then acts shocked when the road runs out.

The current mess started brewing six months ago when President Sarah Chen submitted her budget request to Congress. Chen’s proposal—a modest 3.2% increase in discretionary spending—landed with all the grace of a lead balloon in the Republican-controlled House. Defense hawks wanted more for the Pentagon. Deficit hawks wanted cuts across the board. And the Freedom Caucus wanted to relitigate every government program created since the New Deal.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats spent the fall pretending they had more leverage than they actually possessed. With their razor-thin 51-49 majority (thanks to the continued political resurrection of Joe Manchin’s independent streak), they’ve been playing defense on everything from climate spending to immigration enforcement funding.

The result? A six-month continuing resolution that’s about to expire, leaving Congress exactly where it started: broke, dysfunctional, and running out of time.

Morrison’s Impossible Math

House Speaker Morrison faces a mathematical reality that would make Euclid weep. He’s got 219 Republicans in a 435-member chamber, which means he can lose exactly three votes and still pass legislation—assuming every Democrat votes no, which they will.

But Morrison’s conference isn’t exactly a model of unity. The Freedom Caucus controls 31 votes. The moderate Tuesday Group has 43 members who get nervous when government employees start missing paychecks. And there are roughly 20 Republicans from purple districts who’d rather eat glass than explain to constituents why their Social Security offices are closed because Congress couldn’t do its most basic job.

“Jake’s trying to solve an equation with more variables than solutions,” one senior Republican aide told me Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because mathematics apparently requires confidentiality these days. “Every time he moves right to pick up Freedom Caucus votes, he loses moderates. Every time he moves center, the hardliners threaten to file a motion to vacate.”

That motion to vacate—the procedural nuclear weapon that ended Kevin McCarthy’s speakership back in 2023—remains the sword hanging over Morrison’s head. Crawford’s people have made it clear they’re not bluffing about using it again.

Morrison inherited this mess when he won the speaker’s race in January 2025, after his predecessor burned through political capital faster than a lottery winner burns through money. But inheriting dysfunction doesn’t make it easier to manage.

Senate Democrats Play Their Weak Hand

Across the Capitol, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to project strength while holding what amounts to a pair of threes in a high-stakes poker game. Democrats control the Senate, but just barely, and their leverage depends entirely on staying united—something that’s about as reliable as March weather in Washington.

Schumer’s got his own headaches. Progressive members like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders want to use the spending fight to push for expanded social programs. Moderates like Kyrsten Sinema (who somehow convinced Arizona voters to send her back for another term as an independent) keep making noises about fiscal discipline. And then there’s Manchin, who seems to delight in reminding everyone that his vote remains the most expensive real estate in American politics.

The Senate passed its version of the omnibus package two weeks ago with a bipartisan 67-31 vote, but that was before the House Freedom Caucus decided to blow everything up. Now Schumer’s trying to figure out whether to negotiate with Morrison or wait for the speaker to solve his own problems.

“Chuck’s playing a waiting game,” explains one longtime Senate Democratic aide. “He knows Morrison can’t deliver his conference, so why make concessions to a guy who can’t make deals stick?”

It’s a reasonable strategy, except for the minor detail that the government shuts down Monday if nobody blinks.

The Real Stakes Hidden in Budget Theater

Behind all this political theater lie real consequences that Washington seems determined to ignore until the last possible moment. A government shutdown doesn’t just mean closed national parks and delayed passport applications—though those certainly matter to the millions of Americans planning spring break trips.

Federal contractors stop getting paid, which ripples through an economy where government spending touches virtually every sector. Small businesses that depend on federal contracts face immediate cash flow problems. Defense contractors start furloughing workers. And the roughly 2.2 million federal civilian employees begin wondering whether they’ll receive their next paycheck on time.

More broadly, shutdown threats have become a cancer on American governance, training both parties to embrace brinksmanship over problem-solving. When the threat of chaos becomes a routine negotiating tactic, the inevitable result is more chaos and less negotiation.

The economic costs add up quickly. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 35-day shutdown in 2018-2019 cost the economy roughly $11 billion, about $3 billion of which was never recovered. That’s real money representing real economic activity that simply vanished because Congress couldn’t do its job.

But the political costs might be even higher. Every shutdown threat reinforces public cynicism about government’s basic competence. When Congress can’t manage to fund routine operations, why should voters trust it to tackle complex challenges like climate change, infrastructure investment, or economic inequality?

The Freedom Caucus Miscalculation

Crawford and her Freedom Caucus allies seem to believe they’re fighting some grand ideological battle, but their target choice reveals the hollow core of their strategy. The Climate Resilience in Schools program they want to eliminate provides grants to help schools upgrade heating and cooling systems, improve energy efficiency, and install better ventilation—hardly radical left-wing social engineering.

The program exists because extreme weather events have made school operations increasingly difficult and expensive. When Hurricane Helena knocked out power to 200 schools across Florida and Georgia last September, many didn’t reopen for three weeks. When the polar vortex hit the Midwest in January, aging heating systems failed in districts from Chicago to Milwaukee, forcing emergency closures that disrupted learning for 800,000 students.

Climate Resilience in Schools addresses these practical problems with practical solutions. But in the fevered imagination of the Freedom Caucus, it represents federal overreach that must be stopped at all costs—even if that cost includes shutting down the entire government.

This is political malpractice disguised as principle. The Freedom Caucus built its brand on fighting wasteful government spending, but they’ve chosen to make their stand over a program that actually saves taxpayers money by helping schools operate more efficiently.

Crawford’s miscalculation extends beyond policy to politics. Polling consistently shows that Americans blame Congress, not the president, when government shuts down. And within Congress, they blame whichever party appears most unreasonable. Holding the government hostage over school ventilation systems doesn’t exactly scream “reasonable governance.”

Biden’s Ghost Still Haunts the Process

President Chen inherited more than just the Oval Office from Joe Biden—she inherited a budget process that’s been broken for decades. The 1974 Budget Control Act created a framework that made sense when Congress could still function normally, but that framework has become a straightjacket in an era of polarized dysfunction.

The law requires Congress to pass twelve separate appropriations bills by October 1st each year. Since 2010, Congress has managed this basic task exactly zero times. Instead, lawmakers have governed through continuing resolutions and omnibus packages that compress months of deliberation into last-minute scrambles.

Chen tried to break this cycle by submitting her budget request early and engaging with congressional leadership throughout the fall. She held bipartisan meetings at the White House, dispatched her budget director to countless Hill briefings, and even agreed to several Republican priorities around border security funding.

None of it mattered. The budget process has become so divorced from actual governing that good-faith engagement can’t overcome structural dysfunction.

Chen’s team now faces the same choice that’s confronted every modern president: negotiate with extremists who can’t be trusted to keep their word, or let the government shut down and hope voters blame the right people. It’s a lose-lose proposition that reflects just how thoroughly Congress has abdicated its responsibilities.

The Omnibus Nobody Loves

The 2,847-page spending package currently gathering dust in Morrison’s office represents everything wrong with congressional budgeting. Nobody has read the entire bill—it’s physically impossible given the timeline. Key provisions were negotiated by a handful of senior appropriators behind closed doors. And the whole thing must be voted up or down without amendments, because there’s no time for the kind of deliberative process the founders actually envisioned.

This omnibus includes funding for everything from aircraft carrier maintenance to nutritional assistance for pregnant mothers, but members of Congress will vote based on a few hot-button provisions that cable news has chosen to highlight. It’s governance by soundbite, legislating by tweet, and budgeting by crisis.

The irony is that most of the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support. Defense spending increases satisfy hawks in both parties. Investments in medical research, infrastructure maintenance, and education funding poll well across the political spectrum. Even the Climate Resilience in Schools program that’s triggered this latest crisis has Republican co-sponsors from states that regularly deal with extreme weather.

But consensus can’t overcome the institutional incentives that reward obstruction over cooperation. Crawford and her allies get more media attention for blowing up deals than for making them. Morrison gets more support from his base for fighting Democrats than for working with them. And Schumer’s members prefer forcing Republicans to take blame for shutdowns rather than making the compromises that might prevent them.

Historical Echoes and Lessons Ignored

This isn’t the first time a small faction has held the government hostage, and it won’t be the last. The 2013 shutdown over Obamacare, the 2018 fight over border wall funding, and the 2019 battle over immigration policy all followed similar scripts: extremist demands, leadership paralysis, and eventual capitulation after maximum damage has been inflicted.

Each crisis teaches the same lesson: governing by hostage-taking doesn’t work. The shutdowns end, the government reopens, and the underlying policy disputes remain unresolved. Meanwhile, public trust in democratic institutions erodes a little more, and the next group of extremists feels emboldened to try the same tactics.

The difference in 2026 is that the stakes feel higher and the margins for error feel smaller. American democracy has spent the better part of a decade stress-testing its institutions, and those institutions have shown alarming signs of wear. Adding regular government shutdowns to an already fragile political system seems like a particularly dangerous form of civic Russian roulette.

But Congress seems incapable of learning from its own history. The same members who lived through previous shutdown disasters keep making the same mistakes, as if repetition might somehow produce different results.

What Happens Next

As I write this on Friday afternoon, Morrison is still hunting for the votes he needs to pass something—anything—that might prevent a shutdown. His latest proposal would fund the government through the end of September while eliminating the Climate Resilience program, but it’s unclear whether that satisfies the Freedom Caucus or whether it can attract any Democratic support.

Schumer has indicated that Senate Democrats might accept minor changes to the education funding, but they won’t eliminate entire programs to appease “extremist factions.” Chen’s White House has remained publicly quiet while privately signaling that the president would veto any bill that makes major cuts to climate or education programs.

The most likely scenario remains what always happens in these situations: a last-minute deal that satisfies nobody but prevents immediate catastrophe. Morrison will probably get his continuing resolution, Crawford will probably declare victory over some minor concessions, and Congress will probably set up the next crisis for later this year.

I could be wrong about the timing—maybe this shutdown actually happens, maybe Morrison’s speakership actually falls, maybe some adults finally enter the room and impose sanity on this process. But I’ve covered enough of these fights to recognize the pattern, and the pattern suggests that we’re watching a familiar play reach its predictable conclusion.

The real question isn’t whether Congress will solve this immediate crisis, but whether American voters will eventually get tired enough of this dysfunction to demand something better. Based on the last fifteen years of evidence, I’m not holding my breath.

But then again, I’ve been wrong before.