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In October 2013, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) grew so tired of House Republican bids to shut down the federal government that he used a Kentucky colloquialism to issue a warning.
“There’s no education in the second kick of the mule,” McConnell said, in one of several interviews that week invoking the phrase. He had just negotiated a political surrender after a 16-day federal shutdown left Republicans battered.
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“We’ve seen that movie before,” McConnell told The Washington Post. “We know how it ends.”
Flash forward a decade later, and House Republicans are driving the GOP toward its “third kick of the mule” in 10 years — set to force another shutdown, starting Sunday, in which their Senate counterparts are pleading with them to abort the obviously bad mission.
Back in 2013, against the wishes of the vast majority of Senate Republicans, a hard-right contingent of House Republicans drove the government into a shutdown designed to thwart the launch of the Affordable Care Act. In late 2018, after the Republican majorities in the House and Senate had signed off on a broad funding plan, just a few House Republicans — led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the future White House chief of staff — persuaded President Donald Trump to block the deal and shut down the government in a bid to win border wall funding.
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Those efforts failed, spectacularly, and Republican veterans of past shutdowns are stunned that some House colleagues are forcing them into the same battle again, without even a clear demand.
“When we shut down in 2013? Yeah, that was a lot of fun,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), who was a first-year member in the House at the time. He shook his head angrily. “Not at all, that was horrible. I think all of us that remember that, remembers that was not a good place to be.”
Tyranny of extreme minority: House traditions allow just a handful to dictate agenda
That view is held almost universally across the Senate Republican Conference, with no public allies to the far-right faction that is pushing the shutdown strategy in the House.
“I’m a business guy, do we shut down my businesses? No, I mean that’s what crazy about this, you should never shut down the government,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), normally an antagonist of McConnell’s, told reporters Wednesday. “What we should do is, we should make it better all the time.”
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Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), who like Scott first took office in January 2019, amid a 34-day shutdown, said he thinks that tactic is pointless: “No, I don’t like them at all.”
While Scott and Braun oppose shutdowns as a strategy, they both voted against Tuesday’s procedural move to keep government open. Braun wants to instead pass a bill by Scott that would eliminate shutdowns by creating automatic stopgap bills. And Scott, usually a fiscal hawk, is demanding billions more in disaster funding to help states like Florida.
Publicly, and some say privately, McConnell does not have a dispute with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over how he’s handling things. On Wednesday, McConnell likened it to the traditional clash of the more fiery House and tactical Senate.
“Well, you know, for over 200 years the Senate and the House have been very different,” he said at his weekly news conference, spelling out that he is trying to send lifelines to the House GOP.
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“Look, I don’t want to give the speaker any advice about how to run the House, particularly through you,” he added. “And we’re going to concentrate on trying to do our job here in the Senate.”
For now the Senate is churning through a process that will end over the weekend, possibly just hours before the late Saturday deadline to avoid a shutdown. On a 77-19 vote, a vast bipartisan majority approved the first move Tuesday on legislation that will keep government agencies open at current budgets into mid-November; extend the authorization for the Federal Aviation Administration; grant more than $6 billion in support for Ukraine; and issue about $6 billion in domestic disaster recovery funds.
Some of those numbers could shift in the next few days, but that rough outline is what is headed toward McCarthy, who oversees a caucus with a handful of far-right rebels who thrive on chaos and others who are ideologically opposed to funding the government through piecemeal bills a few weeks at a time.
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The Senate bill would get an overwhelming bipartisan vote of support in the House, but just a handful of McCarthy’s antagonists could block the procedural vote to start the debate. And some firebrands are threatening to force McCarthy out as speaker if he allows legislation to pass with Democratic votes putting it across the majority.
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McCarthy has said publicly that he wants to avoid a shutdown, and friends say that he knows the last two ended poorly for the GOP’s political brand.
“Kevin has made it very clear that shutting down is not an option,” said Mullin, who spent 10 years in the House and is a close McCarthy friend. “So he’s trying to do the best he can with his conference to get the most conservative bill he can to us.”
But that strategy — trying to pass a conservative, Republican-only bill to keep government funded — has failed and failed. And, so far at least this time around, has failed again.
Republican vs. Republican: Senate seeks to wrest control of budget from House
It’s reminiscent, in some ways, of the 2013 position that then-GOP leaders faced, back when McCarthy was majority whip and John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Eric I. Cantor (R-Va.) served as speaker and majority leader, respectively.
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They cooked up several different plans to try to send legislation to the Senate that would keep the government open, but also at least symbolically block the ACA. Dozens of Republicans revolted against the House GOP leaders and the government shut down Oct. 1.
For days, House Republicans sent narrow bills to the Senate that would have opened small slivers of the government, only to eventually realize the party was suffering. McConnell went to Democrats and admitted he expected nothing much in return because the House couldn’t pass anything legitimate.
“I’m just going to talk about the facts. I’m in a weaker position when the House can’t act,” he told National Review in an interview.
In 2019, the 34-day partial shutdown only came to a conclusion after a dramatic Senate GOP luncheon in which senators yelled at one another — and Vice President Mike Pence — about how bad the Meadows-forced shutdown had gone.
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McConnell invoked the second-kick-of-a-mule analogy in the meeting.
Even in 1995, when the GOP first embraced the government shutdown strategy, House Republicans dragged their Senate counterparts into the more radical position, trying to win hundreds of billions in savings from federal entitlement programs.
The GOP lost then and the speaker, Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), turned into a political boogeyman in Democratic attack ads that helped President Bill Clinton win a second term.
Today’s House rebels are fewer in number than during any previous shutdown. They have no public Senate allies like their predecessors did in the 2013 shutdown, when Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), along with a cadre of outside conservative groups, worked hand-in-hand with the House GOP rebels to force the shutdown to try to thwart Obamacare.
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In late 2018, Meadows had Trump’s ear and persuaded him to reject the deal brokered by then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).
Now, today’s Senate GOP is trying to help McCarthy out of the jam, by sending him a bill that he can eventually turn to for reopening the government whenever he politically surrenders.
“We have to continue to move forward. And we’re going to give him a platform, an option, to keep the government funded as well,” Mullin said.
McConnell, meanwhile, has simply given up on trying to figure out the other chamber, exhausted from seeing Boehner, Ryan and now McCarthy get outflanked by a smaller and smaller faction of far-right rebels.
“I can’t have an impact on what happens in the House,” McConnell said Wednesday.
And on Sunday, the shutdown mule will be ready to start kicking the GOP for the third time in a decade.
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