President Trump sat at the inflection point of a horseshoe with Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell on either side of him and Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi just to McConnell’s left. A reporter asked him if he would support Congress bunching aid money for Hurricane Harvey relief with a three-month extension of government funding and debt limit dithering: a Democratic proposal Ryan called “ridiculous” earlier Wednesday. “We’ll see,” Trump responded softly. Pelosi and Schumer saw. According to the three of them, they conquered—conquered Trump’s own Republican party.
Communicating separately on Wednesday afternoon, the minority congressional leaders and the majority president said they agreed to the package during their meeting. Trump said he “think[s] the deal will be very good.” It’s doubtful any GOP leader is of the same mind. Ryan hadn’t briefed his top deputies on the sudden accord, The Hill’s Scott Wong reported, but the GOP leadership’s original intent was to raise the debt limit into 2019, ending Congress’s habit of legislating-by-deadline. It was already expected that lawmakers would take up a stopgap bill to fund the government beyond the end of the month; House majority leader Kevin McCarthy signaled on Tuesday it would be a three-month continuing resolution, or CR. But coupling it with the debt limit was a shock, much less over the same time frame.
Lawmakers knew they were in for a difficult month when they reconvened after Labor Day. Up front was the Harvey spending: The Trump administration had requested $7.85 billion, and the House followed through with a 419-3 vote on Wednesday. The Senate was expected to attach a debt limit hike to the bill and send it back to the lower chamber, at the urging of Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin. “If Congress appropriates the money, but I don’t have the ability to borrow more money and pay for it, we’re not going to be able to get that money to” Texas, he reasoned on Fox News Sunday. At first, a bill for short-term government funding was in the offing separately.
So was a fiscal year 2018 budget—which congressional Republicans must have if they want tax reform to enjoy privileged status in the Senate. A new budget could contain “reconciliation” language allowing the upper chamber to pass a tax bill with only 50 votes, the same framework Congress used on health reform earlier this year.
Because the Senate failed on that issue, the Senate health committee was to consider ways to stabilize the individual market before insurers have to notify the feds later this month of their intention to participate in the exchange. The committee began holding hearings on Wednesday.
Then there was DACA, which Trump was impelled to address in some fashion after several attorneys general threatened to sue the administration if it didn’t act to wind down the policy by Sept. 5.
Washington’s midweek progress report is brutal. Government funding? That looks like December’s problem, not September’s. The debt limit? Ditto. The 2018 budget? No progress to speak of. Tax reform? The president keeps pushing it, while those who know better doubt it; former House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp was just the latest person Wednesday to be bearish on Congress’s chances to approve an overhaul by year’s end. DACA? Republicans have ideas to do legislatively what President Obama did by executive decree—it’s just that they have about 50 of them. Democrats have one: “If a clean DREAM Act does not come to the floor in September,” Schumer said on Wednesday, “we’re prepared to attach it to other items this fall until it passes.”
But he should know better. In Washington, nothing passes.
