‘Blundering’ Trump Wins Budget Battle
Let's hope the next four years bring plenty of similar 'blunders.'
The Republicans once again stared at the abyss of a potential government shutdown last week. As always, the abyss stared back, and the House GOP leadership shriveled.
This time, however, President-elect Donald Trump intervened to point the way toward a reasonable outcome.
The government was scheduled to “shut down” on Saturday unless Congress passed a new short-term budget bill and President Joe Biden signed it. Republicans cowered in fear of being blamed for a shutdown. Trump argued that Biden and the Democrats would take the fall for a shutdown, since Biden is still president. Trump, of course, would be free of direct responsibility, as he has yet to take office. The House GOP, by contrast, was surely imagining awful stories about them in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest of the vast national network of propaganda outlets for big government.
Republicans have consistently backed down whenever a shutdown has “loomed,” giving in to Democrats’ demands for higher spending. Speaker Mike Johnson and his team initially agreed to a grotesque, 1,547-page continuing resolution laden with pork, further expansion of government power, and suborning of corruption, a mammoth, big-spending bill that amounted to a magnificent Christmas present for the Democrats. Trump told the GOP leaders to replace that with a bill limited to only (politically) necessary new spending and peremptory action to avert controversy over the debt ceiling in the first year of the new administration.
Specifically, Trump called for a clean continuing resolution accompanied by separate bills for $100 billion more of disaster relief money and $10 billion of farm-state political bribes under the guise of farm aid, plus a raise or elimination of the debt ceiling. Johnson came back with a slimmed-down version of 116 pages which Trump called a “very good deal.”
When the bill was presented on Thursday, nearly all the House Democrats voted no, predictably, and 38 Republicans also voted against the measure, largely because the debt ceiling provision was not accompanied by offsetting spending cuts.
Johnson went back into negotiation with other Republicans and the Democrats in search of a workable agreement. Realizing that they would have to take care of the debt ceiling problem, the Republicans promised Trump they would “raise the borrowing cap early next year by $1.5 trillion as part of a broad tax cut measure, and to compensate for the additional debt that would add by slashing future government spending by $2.5 trillion,” The New York Times reported on Friday.
That would constitute a spectacular victory for Trump and the Republicans if the congressional leaders keep their promise—a big if, of course. Spending cuts of that magnitude are just what is needed at present.
This promise got the ensuing $1.2 trillion, 118-page spending bill past the post, by a 366-34 vote in the House and an 85-11 tally in the Senate, and President Joe Biden signed it as expected. As with prior debt-ceiling and budget deadline fights throughout the Biden presidency, the House GOP leadership ended up relying on Democrat votes to gain passage, and all but two of the “no” votes in the Senate were from Republicans. All the “no” votes in the House were cast by Republicans, budget hardliners sending a message to the incoming administration that they expect agreement on serious budget cuts next year.
Democrats, of course, criticized the Republicans for their handling of the process. They did not stand their ground, however, and did not demand the reinsertion of all the “bells and whistles” in the earlier bill that they had negotiated with Johnson.
The lesson The Wall Street Journal took from this is that Trump “on the advice of Elon Musk blew up the end-of-session budget bill without a plan for getting another one passed,” and “There are bad omens here for 2025 and the ability of Republicans to govern.” The Journal’s editors mocked Trump as ineffectual and under the spell of billionaire entrepreneur and incoming Department of Government Efficiency co-director Elon Musk (see next item, below).
I disagree—and I am a steadfast advocate of bare-minimum federal spending and have continually called for huge spending cuts. The Republicans bought time for Trump and the narrowly Republican-led Congress to put together a budget for next year that extends the 2017 tax rate cuts, establishes new cuts, and reduces spending by, say, $1.5 trillion or so below the current level (and much farther below the projected levels). The Democrats went along with the end-of-year spending bill that creates this reprieve even though they did not get a significant fraction of the new spending they wanted. That is a terrific success for the Republicans and all Americans.
This all resulted from Trump urging the House GOP to show itself as willing to let the government shut down rather than impose massive, unnecessary spending increases. (Readers of this newsletter know that I have advocated this course throughout the current Congress, to no avail until Trump stepped in with the moral authority of his position as president-elect.) Trump’s intuition was right: the Democrats had no stomach for a government shutdown and were using the prospect solely to scare the Republicans into overspending on Democrats’ pet projects, obsessions, and client constituencies. The Democrats ultimately voted for whatever the Republicans were willing to offer.
The Journal’s editors closed their criticism of Trump by saying, “This week’s blundering won’t matter if Mr. Trump and his coterie learn the right lessons,” which are all about giving in to the Democrats because the latter are more determined about buying votes with other people’s money and much savvier about politics.
Again, I disagree: this was no blundering. To me the evidence of last week indicates that Trump understands better than the Journal editors what has been going on in Congress. Trump’s actions suggest he realizes that Republicans need to emulate the determination and shrewdness of the Democrats if they are going to govern successfully for the next two years and lay the foundation for a long-term political realignment in their favor.
I will welcome that kind of blundering any time.