by Jonathan D. Salant The New Haven independent
WASHINGTON — Congress often finds itself in the same situation after returning from its August recess: Pass legislation funding federal agencies by Oct. 1 or see the government shut down.
Republican and Democratic members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees spend the month trying to draft spending legislation that can clear the 60-vote threshold in the Senate, requiring members of both parties to make compromises to keep the government open.
But U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, wonders if there will be any talks on a spending bill, known as an omnibus, to keep the government running.
After all, President Donald Trump has withheld billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding, Republican lawmakers voted to rescind billions more in spending after first agreeing with Democrats to approve that funding, and Trump recently sought to cut even more programs that lawmakers approved, waiting to submit his proposal until it would be too late to do anything about it.
“What does that say about wanting to deal in good faith in a bipartisan way to help us get bills passed?” DeLauro, Democrat of New Haven, said outside the House chamber during a recent vote.
University of Connecticut political science professor Paul Herrnson said the traditional way of coming together and agreeing to compromise and fund the government may no longer exist.
“That’s what it was all about: Incumbents of both parties cutting deals to help their constituents and help their re-election,” he said. “Now it’s quite different.”
For example, Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, said there should be more partisanship because the current system leads to compromises that increase spending at a time of increasing deficits, even as Trump’s tax law was projected by the Congressional Budget Office to add $3.4 trillion to the federal debt over ten years.
“There is no voter in the country that’s gone to the polls and said, ‘I’m voting for a bipartisan appropriations process,’” Vought said at a recent breakfast with reporters sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. “The appropriations process has to be less bipartisan. We’re $37 trillion in debt.”
And that may lead the Democrats to do something they don’t want to do: Hold the spending bill hostage and deny the Republicans the 60 Senate votes they need to pass it, even if it means that the government will have to shut down.
“I think the Democrats are really torn about this,” said Ross Baker, a congressional expert and political science professor at Rutgers University. “The Democrats historically believe there should be an appropriations bill signed by the 30th of September. But the Democrats at this particular time are willing to risk it, particularly since the Office of Management and Budget is playing fast and loose with strategy on appropriations.”
For now, congressional Democrats continue to insist on bipartisan negotiations to keep the government open and ensure that some of their concerns are met.
“The fact of the matter is I will sit down at this moment and say, ‘Let’s negotiate,’ ” DeLauro said. “Democratic priorities have got to be met and we have to reassert the power of the purse.”
DeLauro said that if there’s a shutdown, it’s only because the White House and Congress – both controlled by Republicans – want one.
“They’re in charge,” DeLauro said. “If it goes in that direction, that’s because that’s what they have orchestrated. Where’s the legitimacy of it? My grandmother used to say, ‘The fish stinks from the head.’ In Italian, it sounds much better. They don’t want the government to work as it should for the benefit of the American people, which is what this is all about.”
Update: DeLauro on Tuesday criticized Vought’s proposal to continue existing funding to Jan. 31, providing White House and congressional negotiators more time to negotiate a spending bill. She said the proposal “makes it clear the White House wants to be able to continue stealing from American communities for another four months.”
“Any spending package must protect Democratic priorities and Congress’s power of the purse,” she said in a statement. “Delaying the critical work of funding the government until the end of January is only step one in President Trump and Russ Vought’s plan to never fund it at all.”
The longest shutdown in history — 35 days beginning in December 2018 — began the last time Trump was president and Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. The president refused to sign a spending bill without money for his southern border wall, and the GOP Congress couldn’t approve the money. Finally, after Democrats won the majority in the House, Trump caved.
This time, Democratic lawmakers are coming under increasing pressure from their supporters to just say no, especially after Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat New York, earlier this year provided the deciding votes from his caucus to pass legislation funding the government through Sept. 30, despite unanimous House Democratic opposition.
With the midterm elections just a little more than a year away and control of Congress hanging in the balance, Democrats need an energized electorate.
“Democratic voters are looking to congressional Democrats to show vital signs. One of the ways they can do that is vote against the omnibus,” Baker said. “That’s not what Democrats want to do but this might be the time for Democrats to get down and dirty. This is going to be a real test of the Democrats’ willingness to do something they don’t want to do to mobilize their base.”
Meanwhile, the majority Republicans already are gearing up to pin a shutdown on the minority Democrats.
“Democrats are focused on shutdown theater and cheap politics,” said Mike Marinella, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee. “Voters see through it, and they’re sick of Democrats putting the demands of their radical base ahead of America’s prosperity.”
Herrnson said the party in power will take the blame.
“Government shutdowns have hurt Congress,’’ he said. “They’re really in a position to claim credit for a lot of things but they would be blamed if there was a shutdown. They would try to demonize the Democrats but they have been ruling like the majority party in a parliamentary system.”
In the end, however, Americans are not going to care which side is blamed for a shutdown, DeLauro said.
“No one cares except for us about all the machinations surrounding this,” DeLauro said. “What people do care about is what happens when they need to be part of a clinical trial and there is no funding for that clinical trial any longer, what happens when they’re cutting back on all the biomedical research, what happens when their kid has asthma and they can’t get what they need. That’s what the public cares about and that’s what these bills do.”