Freud’s Government Shutdown Maybe it’s time to kill the filibuster for appropriations.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/freuds-government-shutdown-1493076073
Congress returns to work Tuesday, funding for the government runs out Friday, and seemingly all of Washington is promising high drama and an epic budget battle. Don’t fall for the hype. A more accurate term for this week’s scuffle is Freud’s shutdown, because the stakes aren’t much higher than the narcissism of small differences.
Congress is debating a stopgap omnibus that will last through Sept. 30, which is presumably when the next fake crisis will arrive. For now, talks between Republican and Democratic leaders in the House and Senate are deadlocked over funding for President Trump’s Mexican border wall, the Pentagon and Obama Care subsidies. But the politics on both sides are hotter than the policy details. Democratic obstructionism and Mr. Trump’s hyperbole are becoming an unvirtuous cycle.
Take the White House demand for funding border security. “The Democrats don’t want money from budget going to border wall despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS 13 gang members,” Mr. Trump tweeted over the weekend, while Nancy Pelosi averred Sunday that Democrats won’t approve a penny for this “immoral, expensive, unwise” exercise.
The House Minority Leader has a point that completing the wall—652 miles of the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border are already fenced—would be wasteful and unnecessary. The full project would run $15 billion to $25 billion, and there are better uses of scarce taxpayer dollars than antagonizing a neighbor.
Then again, the White House request is for all of—$1.5 billion. About $500 million would finance immigration enforcement with the balance going to the wall. This is pocket change in the $3.9 trillion federal budget, and in practice it might pay for logistical planning, site reviews and perhaps building a couple miles of fence after years of federal and state permitting and Nimby opposition.
Yet Mr. Trump is portraying these fiscal peanuts as the coming of the “great, great wall” he promised. Democrats have decided they’ll defy him anyway—though they know his policy is more moderate than his rhetoric and they were ready to spend $40 billion to militarize the border in the failed 2013 immigration bill.
Democrats have thus set up a game of political chicken, and Chuck Schumer has an eight-vote Senate margin to filibuster a deal. Either they box Mr. Trump into a retreat that demoralizes his voters, frustrates a White House impatient for legislative success, and energizes the progressive base. Or maybe their true goal is to force a partial shutdown that they can blame on Republicans.
Refusing to negotiate adds to disorder in Washington, which benefits Democrats, and a government work stoppage that Democrats caused would amplify the media narrative that Mr. Trump and the GOP can’t govern. Democrats think they can retake the House in 2018, and they’ll campaign as the party that at least knows how to run the joint.
Republicans have offered to compromise by passing an appropriation bill for a corner of ObamaCare in return for the border $1.5 billion and a defense supplemental bill of about $30 billion. So-called cost-sharing reduction subsidies offset out-of-pocket insurance costs for some individuals, and their spending formula was included in the 2010 law.
But the cost-sharing reductions don’t flow automatically like other entitlements. The Obama Administration asked for the money in 2014, Congress refused, and the Administration opened the Treasury spigots anyway. The House sued to stop this unconstitutional usurpation of Congress’s Article I spending power—an argument a district court upheld in 2015.
This litigation is now postponed in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as the Trump Administration debates the legal merits and the fate of the illegal subsidies. If Congress regularizes the payment with a bill, the move would likely moot the lawsuit and is a significant concession because the case could help restore the proper separation of powers.
The short-term cost of the cost-sharing payments is only about $7 billion for the rest of this year. The Democratic ultimatum is for a permanent appropriation, which would run about $90 billion over 10 years.
***
Amid these passing controversies—and ode to joy, there will be more—Congress ought to ponder how to better use the power of the purse. Most of the government has been on autopilot since 2010, lurching from one short-term funding bill to the next. The author of this dysfunction was the unlamented former Majority Leader Harry Reid, who shut down regular budget order to shield Senate Democrats from having to make spending choices. He carried the practice into the minority after 2014.
Republicans now control both chambers of Congress and the White House, yet the dysfunction is getting worse. Ending the Senate filibuster for appropriations is fast becoming a more appealing solution.
Lowering the threshold to 51 votes from 60 would reduce the incentive for hostage-taking and might even allow Congress to debate matters of more consequence than a billion dollars here, a billion dollars there. Who knows, maybe they’d even set priorities or pass serious reforms that reduced the federal government’s claim on the private economy.
Comments are closed.
