With the Federal Government only hours away from another government shutdown, the Senate has reached a deal that would essentially put the budget to rest until after the midterms, but its fate in the House of Representatives is unclear:
WASHINGTON — Senate leaders struck a far-reaching bipartisan agreement on Wednesday that would add hundreds of billions of dollars to military and domestic programs over the next two years while raising the federal debt limit, moving to end the cycle of fiscal showdowns that have roiled the Capitol.
The accord between Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Chuck Schumer of New York, his Democratic counterpart, would raise strict caps on military and domestic spending that were imposed in 2011 as part of a deal with President Barack Obama that was once seen as a key triumph for Republicans in Congress.
The deal would raise the spending caps by about $300 billion over two years. The limit on military spending would be increased by $80 billion in the current fiscal year and $85 billion in the next year, which begins Oct. 1. The limit on nondefense spending would increase by $63 billion this year and $68 billion next year.
But the accord was not without dramatics, and its passage in the House is not a foregone conclusion. As proof of that, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, took the House floor on Wednesday morning in opposition, protesting that the deal did nothing to bring lawmakers closer to protecting young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. She then delivered a record-breaking speech that tied up the House for the entire day and into the night.
The budget agreement, coming a day after President Trump threatened to shut down the government, would effectively negate Mr. Trump’s demands to broadly reorder government with deep cuts to nondefense programs like environmental protection, foreign aid and health research that were to offset large increases in military spending. Mr. Trump is to release his second budget request on Monday, but the deal — championed by the top congressional leaders from his own party — amounts to an unequivocal rebuke of many of the budgetary demands he has put forth.
The deal would give Mr. Trump military bragging rights. “The bottom line is that, thanks to President Trump, we can now have the strongest military we have ever had,” the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said on Wednesday.
At least for now, it could put an end to the fiscal crises that Mr. Trump has at times seemed to welcome.
Nonetheless, the president threw his weight behind the accord, writing on Twitter, “Republicans and Democrats must support our troops and support this Bill!”
If the deal passes on Thursday, lawmakers would then put together a long-term spending package over the coming weeks that would fund the government through September, granting a measure of peace to Washington as attention turns to the midterm elections in November. Heading into the midterm elections, it would also enable lawmakers to go home and claim success at delivering funding for pressing needs, like fighting the opioid epidemic.
By setting overall spending levels through September 2019, the deal would ease passage of spending legislation in the next fiscal year, as well.
The agreement will cause federal budget deficits to grow even larger, on top of the effects of the sweeping tax overhaul that lawmakers approved in December. But because the deal gives long-sought victories to both parties, the deficit effect appears to be of little concern. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin both quickly embraced it.
From the increase in domestic spending, Mr. Schumer said the deal includes $20 billion for infrastructure, $6 billion for the opioid crisis and mental health, $5.8 billion for child care and $4 billion for veterans hospitals and clinics. In addition, the deal includes almost $90 billion in disaster relief in response to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires.
The agreement includes an additional four-year extension of funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, on top of the six-year extension that Congress approved last month.
If the deal passes on Thursday, lawmakers would then put together a long-term spending package over the coming weeks that would fund the government through September, granting a measure of peace to Washington as attention turns to the midterm elections in November. Heading into the midterm elections, it would also enable lawmakers to go home and claim success at delivering funding for pressing needs, like fighting the opioid epidemic.
By setting overall spending levels through September 2019, the deal would ease passage of spending legislation in the next fiscal year, as well.
The agreement will cause federal budget deficits to grow even larger, on top of the effects of the sweeping tax overhaul that lawmakers approved in December. But because the deal gives long-sought victories to both parties, the deficit effect appears to be of little concern. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin both quickly embraced it.
From the increase in domestic spending, Mr. Schumer said the deal includes $20 billion for infrastructure, $6 billion for the opioid crisis and mental health, $5.8 billion for child care and $4 billion for veterans hospitals and clinics. In addition, the deal includes almost $90 billion in disaster relief in response to last year’s hurricanes and wildfires.
The agreement includes an additional four-year extension of funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, on top of the six-year extension that Congress approved last month.
The deal also lifts the debt limit until March 2019, pushing any future confrontation over that issue until after the midterm elections. The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that the Treasury would probably run out of cash in the first half of March if the limit were not raised.
“I hope we can build on this bipartisan momentum and make 2018 a year of significant achievement for Congress, for our constituents and for the country that we all love,” Mr. McConnell said.
Mr. Schumer was similarly effusive. “After months of legislative logjams, this budget deal is a genuine breakthrough,” he said. “After months of fiscal brinkmanship, this budget deal is the first real sprout of bipartisanship.”
Mr. Ryan urged his members to vote for it: “America will be safer and stronger because of this agreement.” His embrace boosted its chances in the House, where conservatives were cool to it, if not hostile.
While the deal is likely to easily pass the Senate this morning, the deal’s fate in the House remains somewhat uncertain. On the Republican side, the few remaining deficit hawks in the House are saying it’s unlikely that they can support the deal because of the manner in which it busts through spending caps, leads inevitably to a return of the trillion dollar deficits that we saw nearly a decade ago, and opens the door to future massive increases in spending. Many of these Republican doubters are members of the House Freedom Caucus, but it’s unclear whether they constitute a majority of that body and whether there would be a sufficient number of Republicans in opposition to the deal to pose a problem later today. On the Democratic side, the issue of the Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is posing a problem. While Senate Democrats have essentially delinked DACA and the budget, House Democrats are a different story. Yesterday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi used a somewhat obscure rules of the House of Representatives to hold the floor for nine hours yesterday to talk about DACA and demand that Speaker Paul Ryan do the same thing that Mitch McConnell did in the Senate after the last shutdown and guarantee that he’ll let a DACA deal get to the floor for a vote. Pelosi’s “filibuster” was the longest the House had seen since the beginning of the 20th Century and she used the time to tell the stories of DACA beneficiaries and urge action on the issue. It’s unclear, though, if House Democrats will use the DACA issue to withhold support from a budget deal.
Despite these last minute hangups in the House, I suspect that the deal announced last night will pass before the end of the day and be sent to the President for signature, something that is likely to happen based on Trump’s tweet about the deal yesterday evening. This is the case because it gives both parties enough to go back to supporters with and make the claim that they accomplished something, even though all they’ve really done is bring back the bad old days.
First of all, of course, it will stop the clock on the government shutdown that would have happened at midnight tonight had a spending bill of some kind not passed and been signed into law. After the brief shutdown last month and the polls that have followed, it’s clear that this is an outcome that neither party wanted notwithstanding the threat that President Trump made earlier this week to shut the government down unless he got his way on immigration, an issue that had already been detached from spending issues week ago.
Second, it essentially means that the thorny issues surrounding the budget will be put on automatic pilot until well after the 2018 elections, something that will clear a significant part of the legislative agenda for the rest of the year. While it’s unlikely that this will result in Congress addressing other, more controversial, issues such as immigration or entitlements between now and the election, it will give members of both houses more time for the important (mostly to them) tasks of fundraising and campaigning.
Finally, of course, the deal gives both parties something they want and something they can point out to members of their base as successes. Republicans get massive increases in defense spending that exceed even the substantial increases that President Trump and the Pentagon were asking for as well as increases in social spending that they can use to counteract Democratic attacks claiming that they don’t care about the middle-class and the poor. Democrats get yet another extension of the CHIP program, increases in social spending, and increased spending on things such as community health centers and other issues that they have been championing. For both parties, of course, the fact that the spending caps that were contained in the Budget Control Act of 2011, a deal that was reached after the showdown that summer over the debt ceiling which went a long way toward taming deficits in Federal spending during the remained of the Obama Presidency, will effectively be nullified means that they are now free to massively increase spending on their favorite projects going forward.
While this deal will be hailed as an example of the kind of bipartisan compromise that has seemingly been lacking on Capitol Hill for some time now, there’s plenty to be upset about in this deal. The primary problem, of course, is that the bill massively increases spending to the point where it’s virtually guaranteed that we’ll see the return of the trillion dollar deficits that we saw during the final years of George W. Bush’s Administration and the first couple years of Barack Obama’s Administration, and in the latter case the size of the deficit was largely attributable to massively reduced tax revenue due to the Great Recession. Factor into that the impact that the tax cuts passed in December are likely to have, with the Congressional Budget Office and other independent analysts have estimated to include an additional $1.5 trillion in budget deficits over the next decade, and it’s easy to see where we’re headed.
As The Washington Post’s Damien Paletta and Erica Werner note, this marks a complete reversal by the GOP when it comes to spending:
Republican lawmakers in 2011 brought the U.S. government to the brink of default, refused to raise the debt ceiling, demanded huge spending cuts, and insisted on a constitutional amendment to balance the budget.
On Wednesday, they formally broke free from those fiscal principles and announced a plan that would add $500 billion in new spending over two years and suspend the debt ceiling until 2019. This came several months after Republicans passed a tax law that would add more than $1 trillion to the debt over a decade.
With all these changes, the annual gap between spending and revenue in 2019 is projected to eclipse $1.1 trillion, up from $439 billion in 2015. And they are expanding the deficit at an unusual time, when the economy is growing and unemployment is low, a dynamic that often leads to shrinking budget gaps.
“I don’t think there’s any question but that there’s a bury-your-head-in-the-sand view of the deficit and the debt issues relative to this Congress and this administration,” said former senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), who once led the Senate Budget Committee.
The debt binge caps off a major reversal for the Republican Party, which has been swept up by President Trump’s demands for more spending and tax cuts at a time when the public seems to care less about debt than it has in years.
In 2011, Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), then chairman of the House Budget Committee, proposed a budget-slashing plan that would lead to a $415 billion deficit in 2019. Ryan is now speaker of the House, and the tax and spending plan he is helping advance through Congress would put the deficit at almost three times the amount he envisioned in 2011.
This deal should forever put to rest the idea that Republicans care one whit about controlling either Federal spending or the size, scope, and power and government. They don’t, and the lip service they pay to the idea like “fiscal conservatism” and “limited government” is betrayed by their actions once they actually achieve the power they have asked for since Obama took office in 2009. It’s rank hypocrisy, and it was all entirely predictable. It happened under Bush 43 and it’s happening again.
