He, and only he, has the authority to bring an issue to the floor for a vote. He could ignore the bad ones. But he doesn’t.
He brings good ones too. He toys with the Senate. I say he is being a political animal with this one. My read of this, he didn’t want to head into campaign season with a government shutdown. It wasn’t going to get fixed right now, he needs to get to the next Congress and see what happens. And he calculated that GOP chances in November were worse with a shutdown than not. Live to fight another day sort of thing.
Is it’s up the voters and his caucus to go out and campaign correctly It’s a tough job in many ways but I said somewhere it’s worse for GOP leaders because he has half his caucus going for big government spending crap, and 100% of the Democrats asking for even more. The only way to even start fixing this is a clean sweep in 2024. Then get into the nitty gritty. But even then it’s likely to fail. There are no people with a vision to make big changes. There is no voting block in the country that is pushing to make structural changes even though it is obvious structural change is what we need. Our path is unsustainable but at best they tinker on the edges and at worst they pass ridiculous $7 trillion new spending bills every year.
Anyway, hold the line today and live to fight another day. For the next 6 months the GOP needs to figure out how to turn this around with voters.
“What do we want? Incremental Change! When do we want it? In due time…”.