Thursday was a wretchedly hot and humid day in Washington, capped off by a violent thunderstorm that battered the area early in the evening, providing only slight and temporary relief. It was, sadly, a metaphor for what the country can expect from D.C. this summer as Congress battles over government spending: a long, miserable slog, ending with a violent tempest of activity that doesn’t really make things better.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has promised to pass all 12 appropriations bills through regular order this year, meaning they will be debated and voted on individually rather than in an omnibus package as in recent years.
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McConnell on Thursday brought up a defense appropriations bill and senate Democrats promptly blocked the effort to begin debating it. Democrats have said that they will do the same with the other 11 bills that must pass to fund the government until the GOP opens negotiations on a bipartisan budget agreement that provides more funding for domestic spending.
Federal spending is theoretically constrained by the sequester -- budget caps placed on defense-related and non-defense-related discretionary spending as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. However, the GOP has engineered a workaround by which defense spending gets increased through an account dedicated to the unexpected costs of overseas military operations, which are not counted for purposes of the sequester.
The result is that discretionary defense spending is rising by some $38 billion in the proposed Republican budget, while non-defense-discretionary spending remains capped.
Democrats are not, in principle, opposed to increasing military spending. In fact, the total amount proposed for the military, including the off-budget account, is exactly in line with the president’s budget request. However, when the president recommended raising the spending caps, he was suggesting increases on both sides of the sequester divide, not just on defense.
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McConnell’s decision to bring up the defense bill first was not made at random. Among other things, the bill contains language giving members of the military a pay raise, and even before the vote to proceed with debate on Thursday Republicans were pillorying Democrats for abandoning the troops.
“There may be no priority that Americans take more seriously than supporting our military,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). “But later today, senate Democrats are planning to block a pay raise for our troops. Democrats intend to hold up troop funding in order to extract more money for the IRS, the EPA, and all of their other priorities … Senate Democrats should think long and hard before going through with this. I think it would be a grave mistake to stand in the way of funding for our troops.”
For their part, Democrats decided to risk being labeled as anti-military, on the assumption that they can make the argument to voters that the GOP’s fancy accounting is essentially an effort to shortchange them.
In a letter sent to McConnell on Thursday, senate Democrats said, “We write to urge you to immediately schedule bipartisan budget negotiations for next week to find a fair, reasonable and responsible path forward for funding key national priorities such as national defense and domestic investments in education, health, science, and infrastructure.”
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The response from McConnell was unenthusiastic. The Majority Leader called on Democrats to relent and allow the Senate to “start functioning” again.
The situation has a bit of a through-the-looking-glass feel. In the early years of the Obama administration, it was Republican obstruction that contributed to the inability of Congress to pass spending bills under regular order, and at the time Democrats routinely vilified the GOP for its tactics.
Republicans, for their part, argued that they were making use of prerogatives meant to preserve the rights of the minority in congressional debates -- something that sounds rather familiar in the mouths of Democrats today.
Unfortunately, the end game for this kind of political brinkmanship is well known. When Obama first took office, the government regularly ran up against funding deadlines and was funded by a series of continuing resolutions, except when a failure to reach agreement resulted in the government shutdown in October, 2013.
At the time, the party seen as blocking a spending deal -- the GOP -- paid a political price. Democrats now seem to be gambling that either the GOP will take the blame again or that the price won’t be all that high.
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