It’s hard to say what’s more idiotic: The possibility the GOP could shut down the federal government, or the reason they’re threatening to do so. Lawmakers are facing a Friday deadline to fund the government, with Democrats and Republicans currently at loggerheads over how long to kick the can down the road. Democrats want to pass a continuing resolution, or short-term spending bill, that would push off a debate over funding until next year. But a group of Senate Republicans, with support from their House colleagues, are preparing to complicate things further. According to Politico, a cadre of conservatives are threatening to shut down the government to keep Joe Biden’s COVID vaccination requirements on businesses from taking effect.

“I’m sure we would all like to simplify the process for resolving the [continuing resolution], but I can’t facilitate that without addressing the vaccine mandates,” Republican Senator Mike Lee told Politico. “Given that federal courts across the country have raised serious issues with these mandates, it’s not unreasonable for my Democratic colleagues to delay enforcement of the mandates for at least the length of the continuing resolution.”

Biden announced in September that companies with 100 or more employees would have to require COVID vaccination or frequent testing, triggering a massive right-wing freak-out over what they described as an “authoritarian” mandate. In November, the administration announced it would implement the rules, under which more than two-thirds of the United States workforce would need to be vaccinated by January 4 or undergo weekly testing. But Republican-led states immediately challenged the mandate in court, and last month the conservative Court of Appeals for the Fifth District ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to halt its implementation, calling the mandate “staggeringly overbroad.” Then, this week, two separate judges appointed by Donald Trump blocked the administration’s requirement that healthcare workers be vaccinated—another blow to Biden’s vaccination goals as the pandemic drags into its second year, with the world on alert due to the newly-discovered omicron variant.

The court fights are sure to continue, but Capitol Hill Republicans are now looking to leverage a potential government shutdown to derail Biden’s mandate altogether. “There is leverage immediately in the Senate,” Republican Congressman Chip Roy told Politico, “and we think that House Republicans ought to be backing up any number of Senate Republicans...to use all procedural tools to deny the continuing resolution passage Friday night—unless they restrict use of those funds for vaccine mandates.”

The right has consistently hamstrung the U.S. response to COVID, warring against public health policies and turning vaccines—the safe, effective shots that are key to bringing the pandemic to heel—into a culture war wedge issue. That recklessness on the policy-level has reflected a similar recklessness in their personal approaches to the pandemic; according to an excerpt of a forthcoming book by Mark Meadows obtained by the Guardian, Trump himself tested positive for COVID before debating with Biden in October 2020—something that had been widely suspected but that the former president had denied. Not only did Trump put his opponent, a fellow septuagenarian, at risk of infection, he also exposed those around him, including reporters. At least one, Michael D. Shear of the New York Times, said he tested positive for COVID days after a press gaggle with an unmasked, apparently-infected Trump on Air Force One.

This careless approach to the pandemic has become GOP doctrine at this point, which is frustrating enough on its own for the majority of Americans who don’t like the idea of being exposed to the deadly virus by the unvaccinated healthcare workers. But with a potential shutdown looming, the GOP’s COVID culture wars are reaching a new level of absurdity. It’s possible, of course, that Lee and his allies will back down and fight Biden’s vaccine mandates on a new front line; Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell insists that a shutdown won’t happen, and Senator Mike Braun is expected to challenge the vaccine rules through the Congressional Review Act. “We have a lot of tools at our disposal over the next several weeks to force Democrats to have to come to the table,” Roy told Politico. 

But, as the outlet noted, it would only take one Republican to blow up the continuing resolution, and more than a dozen in the Senate—Lee among them—have promised to “use all means at our disposal” to block the administration’s vaccination requirements. “Senate Democrats are ready to pass this legislation, get it done as quickly as possible to avoid a needless shutdown,” Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. “If Republicans choose obstruction, there will be a shutdown entirely because of their own dysfunction.”

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