Republicans are jeopardizing pretty much everything

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s bosses, aka the most active and obnoxious core members of the Freedom Caucus, have issued their ultimatums for allowing the government to be funded after Oct.1. Note that it’s not an official Freedom Caucus missive, because they are too fractured at this point to come up with official positions. Still, this group of 21 members has the power to sabotage everything because McCarthy and the 180 or so House Republicans who aren’t Freedom Caucus extremists are letting them.

Their demands won’t just cut the funding agreement that McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden by more than $100 billion, which is meant to tank the economy ahead of Biden’s reelection campaign. The extremists also don’t want any of the 12 necessary funding bills to advance to the floor until all of them are approved by the Appropriations Committee; they also want McCarthy to promise that he will not allow an omnibus funding package, where some of the bills are packaged together and voted on as one.

These things are not possible. There are 23 working days between now and the Oct.1 funding deadline. That would mean two days for each individual funding bill to be passed in committee, then by the full House, then by the Senate. That cannot happen, even in a Congress that is functioning normally. And this Congress isn’t! They aren’t even dealing with funding bills this week because of the bind the extremists have put them in when it comes to those cuts. And yet, they’re still calling the shots in the House.

Here are just a few of the things that are at stake in the very near future if House Republicans continue to allow the nihilists in their party to stomp all over them: