This week’s chaos in the House shows us what a second Trump term would look like

The 118th Congress will end not with a bang but a continuing resolution, just like it always has. Tonight, the House of Representatives will vote on a clean stopgap spending bill to keep the government open until after the election.

That will allow the House to, once again, avoid a government shutdown. And just like in every other time this past Congress, Democrats will bail out House Speaker Mike Johnson because extremists in his conference will say “Hell no.”

Just like other times, they will suspend the rules to pass the legislation, meaning it will not have to go through the Rules Committee because Johnson acknowledges that the far-right members of his conference would block it. That means the bill will go directly to the floor and only be able to pass with two-thirds of the vote.

Then, the Senate will vote on it and that will be that. And the House will be at the same place it was last year, when Republicans were on the brink of shutting down the government because then-House speaker Kevin McCarthy faced a mutiny from the far-right of his conference.

Lest we forget how it all played out back then: Matt Gaetz filed a motion to vacate McCarthy from the chair, which sent the House into chaos for three weeks. That chaos included Jim Jordan losing three votes on the House floor, George Santos pilfering someone’s baby, and Johnson ending up as the unexpected yet unanimous GOP choice.

But aside from all the humor and absurdity that has come with the Mojo Dojo Casa House of Representatives, this also offers a preview of what Washington under a second Trump presidency would look like. When a handful of extremists can completely reorient the government to its will and take government to the brink, here’s what you get.

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