The Era Of Hostage Taking And Small Ransoms

Republicans made Ukraine aid the price of avoiding a shutdown. Where does it end?

Matt Gaetz sits with Marjorie Taylor Greene in the House Chamber during the third day of elections for Speaker of the House at the U.S. Capitol Building on January 05, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

While you were enjoying your weekend, House Republicans gave up the ruse, along with nearly all of their ransom demands, and allowed Congress to pass legislation to keep the government funded at current levels for another 45 days.

No border wall, no vast cuts to antipoverty programs, no obstructing investigations or prosecutions of Donald Trump. The only ground House Speaker Kevin McCarthy refused to yield was his opposition to funding Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion. The Senate wanted it, the White House wanted it, McCarthy said no, and everyone relented. 

Because the comedown was so steep, the pundit class has interpreted it as McCarthy’s surrender, and Democrats have declared total victory.

 And if you follow the central plot, that’s basically what happened. The most right-wing House Republicans threatened McCarthy’s speakership unless he held firm for a lengthy list of partisan ransoms (that is, unless he shut down the government). He tried, he failed, he buckled, government functions continue.

But there’s another story playing out this year. It places a bit less emphasis on the dramedy horror of internal GOP politics, and more on the way the rest of the system maneuvers to resist or accommodate them. And in that telling, Republicans keep seizing must-pass legislative items, screaming and leveling threats each time, aiming weapons every which way, including at their own heads, and then walking away with … something. So far, each time, it’s been something fairly small. But the pattern persists, and the precedents they’ve set should alarm all of us. 

The pundit class frequently uses the term “kabuki theater” to describe a stylized form of politics, where the overwrought words and actions of key actors mask some truer underlying dynamic that everyone understands, but most prefer to leave unsaid. 

When House Democrats impeached a president for inciting an insurrection, the politics were authentic and almost all on the surface—they were rooted in consensus and observable reality, which is why even some Republicans voted along with them. When House Republicans tried to deflect attention from their miserable government-shutdown scheme by pretending to believe Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) should be expelled from Congress for pulling a fire alarm—that was kabuki theater. 

But these recurring Republican hostage plots and the Democrats’ supposedly unflinching response to them, also contain elements of kabuki theater.  

There’s obviously much truth to the idea that the House Republican conference includes a large number of reactionaries who make aggressive demands of their leaders, and to the idea that Democrats haven’t responded to the ensuing “inmates taken over the asylum” vibe by caving to their demands in the hope of sparing the country worse punishment. 

But Republican leaders are also perfectly happy to walk into negotiations with Democrats saying “my guys are so crazy, I need to appease them with something,” and Democrats are perfectly happy portray the small ransoms they pay in the end as insignificant relative to the initial hostage threats—and thus evidence of their resolve and superior negotiating skills. That’s what the White House did back in June after President Biden paid McCarthy modest ransoms for raising the debt limit, and it’s what Hakeem Jeffries and his allies are doing now.

It all becomes much easier to see when you strip away the artifice: Ignore the (very real) bad blood within the GOP, the repeated threats (maybe real, maybe idle) to McCarthy’s speakership, and what actually happened over the past few weeks is Republicans (under the influence of Donald Trump) managed to disrupt Ukraine funding for the first time since the Russian invasion began last February, all in exchange for nothing. Or rather, in exchange for avoiding a government shutdown. 

Seven months ago, for the anniversary of the invasion, I recorded an episode of Positively Dreadful (RIP) with Rob Lee, an expert on the logistics of the war, to explore the question of whether Ukraine could expel Russia from its territory before budget season in the U.S. The point was to think ahead to something like what’s just happened. I understood that Republicans, with their legitimate claim on shared power, might cut, or even eliminate funding for the Ukrainian resistance. 

In an above-board, good-faith negotiation, this would not have been a huge concern. Republicans could reasonably demand significant changes in the U.S. posture toward the war, Democrats could reject their demands, and through the bargaining process the parties would meet in the middle. What I expected—and what has now come to pass, at least in temporary fashion—was for Republicans to threaten to harm the United States unless our government stopped providing Ukraine war assistance. That’s what they did, and they got what they wanted. 

And it could be really bad: Rob sportingly sent along this brief update, noting “foreign support is one of the key variables (including for Russia). If Ukraine receives enough ammunition, I think Russia will struggle to capture much more territory, but Ukraine needs more support to liberate the rest of its territory.”

Hopefully it’ll only amount to a hiccup. There’s still obviously more support than not for aid to Ukraine in the government. The bipartisan Senate leadership issued a rare statement announcing the “Senate will work to ensure the U.S. government continues to provide critical and sustained security and economic support for Ukraine.” House Democrats issued a statement of their own intimating that McCarthy has promised to allow a standalone vote on Ukraine aid when Congress reconvenes. 

But nothing is written. McCarthy is the least credible, most duplicitous congressional leader I’ve ever covered. And we have a track record of this kind of triumphalism coming to nothing. Earlier this year, when President Biden reneged on his promise never to negotiate a debt-limit deal with Republicans under threat of default, Democrats spun a tale of victory out of how little they'd ultimately conceded. They boasted that Biden had even managed to pre-empt a fall government-shutdown fight, and large cuts to discretionary spending, because the debt-limit deal set binding budget caps for House and Senate appropriators. 

Well, here we are, one shutdown narrowly averted, 45 days til the next. The debt-limit fight didn’t slake the GOP thirst for confrontation, and there’s no mechanism to assure that the majority, and its determination to restore Ukraine aid, must prevail. 

My admonition is for liberals, many of whom understandably want to root for the Democratic leadership, is to take these victory dances with a grain of salt, and ask—are Democrats really driving Republicans to surrender, or are they staving them off with concessions small enough to avoid blowback or crisis? 

Last month, after a lengthy standoff, Democrats forced the confirmation of the acting Marine Corps commandant. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has been blocking all officer promotions until the military begins denying servicemembers reimbursements when their health-care related travel is for abortion. In yet more Capitol vernacular, Tuberville has been exploiting the Senate custom of a “hold,” which is essentially a threat to filibuster a nomination or nominations that would otherwise advance smoothly: try to promote all of these officers simultaneously, and I’ll object to the unanimous consent you need to move swiftly; if you want to staff the officer corps appropriately, you can, but you’ll have to do it one time-consuming promotion after another. Confirming the hundreds of backlogged promotions on Tuberville’s terms would take several hundred days, at the expense of all other Senate business. Which is why I didn’t play along when Democrats portrayed the promotions of a tiny number of officers as some kind of victory over Tuberville. 

It is good that the Marine Corps has a confirmed commandant. It’s also good that Senate Democrats got him confirmed without stripping servicemembers of yet-more reproductive freedom. But it’s bad that they went around Tuberville instead of through him. It’s actually chilling when you realize there’s no principle limiting how Republicans might abuse this outmoded custom now that they see Democrats lack the political will to end it. There’s no rule stopping a senator with even less scruple or intelligence than Tuberville from “holding” literally every nominee unless and until Democrats yield to any imaginable demand. Without the will to change the filibuster rules, there’s no reason Republicans can’t turn the Senate, under Democratic control, into a slow, groaning factory for staffing the executive branch, leaving time to accomplish nothing else. 

And the thing is, they should have been able to see something like this coming for at least 15 years. 

I had the benefit of encountering the filibuster through babe’s eyes when I was a cub reporter. Twenty-three year old me would call Senate offices trying to figure out what was going on and I’d need tutorials from press secretaries and legislative aides on rudimentary process and the meaning of words like cloture. Over time, I pieced together the basics—they didn’t come to me filtered through the teaching of some jaded old editor who might’ve convinced me to accept that’s just how things are—and found them astonishingly senseless. They were goofy and ripe for abuse. Mitch McConnell knew it, too, which is why filibusters (delays of arbitrary length and supermajority voting requirements) exploded when he became minority leader back in the aughts. It’s why I knew Barack Obama would have a rough go of things, even with huge margins in Congress. And it’s why I’ve consistently supported filibuster abolition since before his presidency. Well over a decade later, we’ve only made incremental progress toward bringing an iota of democracy to the Senate. We still have this crazy situation where unless 60 senators haul even trivial measures up a hill, 41 senators (or even just one senator, almost always a Republican) can kick it back down. 

Yes, Democrats are, at the moment, hobbled by Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, but at no point in the past two decades have they made ending this state of affairs a top party-building priority. Their indulgence has been inexcusable; their gluttony for punishment, undignified—just as it’s undignified to pay ransoms to Republicans, even small ones, when they threaten to harm the country. It’s not unreasonable for rank-and-file liberals to expect Democrats to draw a hard line against extortion. It’s not unreasonable for rank-and-file liberals to puzzle over why Democrats haven’t reconstituted their majority (through persuasion and strategic recruiting) to support changing the rules if and when Republicans abuse them. Tuberville and McCarthy are each disgraced in their own ways, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that they walked through doors Democrats left open for them. And we should worry a great deal about what will be in their sights the next time around, perhaps just 45 days from now, when they come barreling through again.