Trump, Congressional Republicans need to buck up and govern
You'd be hard pressed to tell who is in charge of the government based solely on public statements these days.
Lately, it seems like elected Republicans have forgotten something important about the 2024 elections: they won.
The President is a Republican. The Senate and the House of Representatives have Republican majorities. Even the Supreme Court is stacked with Republicans.
These are basic and glaringly obvious facts, but somehow, when it comes to who is responsible for… well, anything the government does, our elected officials seem to forget just who is in charge.
Take Iowa’s Representatives. They harp on about what the Democrats will or won’t “let” them do, but the Speaker of the House, the Majority Whip and most Representatives are Republicans. And the person who made the call to adjourn the House in mid-September? Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson.
Or Iowa’s Senators. They have bemoaned the impacts of the government shutdown on air travel and healthcare. Our governor has tried to claim the mantle of the savior replacing food assistance by giving less than a day’s worth of funds to Iowa’s food banks. All of them have blamed the Democrats for the shutdown.
Funny how the people in charge of the government can’t seem to govern.
But wait, you say, what about the filibuster? Doesn’t it take 60 votes to pass a budget and reopen the government?
In a word, no. The Constitution has no rules about how many votes are needed to pass budgets.
In fact, with only a few Constitutional exceptions, the rules about how many votes are required to pass bills (or stop debate on bills) are made by vote of the Senate--meaning the majority party can control them. And the majority party can change the filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. The House of Representatives used to have a filibuster but got rid of it. In this year’s shutdown, Senate Republicans have not been willing to get rid of the filibuster on budget bills to reopen the government.
That still leaves Senate Republicans a tried and true option to pass a budget: negotiating with the other party.
But in the 2025 shutdown, there isn’t even a budget on the table. The House of Representatives, way back in mid-September, passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of the year. A continuing resolution is a bill that says “we can’t agree on spending priorities well enough to pass a budget, so we are just going to keep doing what we’re doing right now.” With a House Republican majority, that continuing resolution was a failure of the Republicans in the House to agree with one another well enough to pass a budget.
As soon as that continuing resolution passed, Johnson adjourned the House. House Republicans left Washington. It’s hard to say where they left to go, because in Iowa, at least, it certainly wasn’t to hold town halls in their districts.
And that continuing resolution? Well, the last time Congress passed a real budget was under President Biden in March 2024, with a Democrat-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House. They weren’t even continuing their own budget.
If this whole mess gives you a sense of déjà vu, you may be sensing the ghost of 2017-2019, when the Republicans last controlled the government–and shut it down three times. The party of victimhood just can’t seem to figure out how to keep the lights on when it is in power.
How times have changed. Our governing party’s mantra has gone from Democratic President Harry Truman’s “The buck stops here” to the current President dodging all responsibility with the constant refrain: “I know nothing about it.” Sad.
Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa.
Originally published in the Press-Citizen on November 8, 2025.