Tribune News Service/Washington
Despite promises that it won’t come to this, Congress and the White House are charging toward another government shutdown.
The next fiscal crisis could come as soon as Oct. 1 unless a new government spending plan is approved. But with House members having left on Wednesday for summer recess and senators soon to follow, that leaves only about 10 legislative days next month to fix the problem, and there are no viable solutions in sight.
President Barack Obama has signalled his intention to bust, once and for all, the severe 2011 spending caps known as sequestration. He’s vowed to reject any GOP-backed appropriation bills that increase government funding for the military without also boosting domestic programs such as Head Start preschools and others important to Democrats.
The new Republican-controlled Congress is also digging in. GOP leaders had vowed to run Congress responsibly and prevent another government shutdown like the one in 2013, but their spending proposals are defying the president’s veto threat by bolstering defence accounts and leaving social-welfare programmes to be slashed.
The 2016 presidential race is compounding the problem. Several Republican senators vying to become the party’s nominee are hoping to use the budget process to grab headlines and push their agendas – from Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s campaign to defund Planned Parenthood to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz’s attempt to stop the nuclear deal with Iran. House Republicans want to overturn Obama’s immigration actions. Any such policy rider attached to a budget would be deal-breakers.
GOP leaders are resigned to a showdown. House Speaker John A. Boehner on Wednesday allowed his majority to leave a day early for the long August recess, predicting Congress will have little choice next month but to pass a short-term budget extension to keep the government open. “We’ll deal with it in September,” he said.
And it’s not just the budget. A major highway funding programme is on a temporary fix that runs out Oct. 29. And the nation’s debt ceiling will need to be lifted by late fall to avoid a damaging credit default.
The confluence of these deadlines raises the prospects for an all-encompassing year-end accord that could resolve all or most of the issues, but it also increases the risk of a crisis. So far there has been no visible progress toward any big budget deal.
“We know it’s coming,” said Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican whip. “We’re going to leave that fight until September, October, November, December.”
Obama, in a private meeting with Democrats at the White House in early July, called on Democratic senators to filibuster the GOP’s spending bills and prevent him from having to veto them. While many of the Republican bills have passed the House, they have not yet been put fully to the test in the Senate. Only a defense spending bill has come for a Senate vote, and it was filibustered.
Democrats are portraying Republicans as skirting their responsibilities, recalling the highly unpopular 16-day government shutdown in 2013 when Cruz led Republicans in a failed attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“We know that Republicans are experienced in shutting down the government,” said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. “It has been clear for months that the only way Congress will arrive at a responsible budget is by Republicans and Democrats, Senate and House, sitting down together and finding a path forward. Now is the time to negotiate. Not in September, not in October – now.”
The fiscal impasse is infuriating to some lawmakers because it is so preventable. It has been long understood that at the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30, a fresh round of sequester cuts would take effect, cutting into virtually all areas of government spending.
The cuts were reluctantly agreed to as a last-ditch solution to the 2011 budget impasse between Obama and Boehner after Tea Party Republicans took control of the House. A subsequent bipartisan 2013 deal staved off the most painful reductions until this fall, but lawmakers have waited until the last minute to address the problem.
