Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid announced that Democrats would filibuster Defense Department funding package in an attempt to extract policy concessions on other spending bills.
“We all know what they’re trying to do here: we have a defense bill, it’s an appropriation bill, once that’s done, the appropriations process will be wiped out and we’ll be at the mercy of Republicans in some form or fashion,” Reid said on the Senate floor Thursday evening.
That statement, and the filibuster vote that followed, brought an effective halt to the appropriations process in the Senate. In the immediate term, Reid is trying to force Republicans to revise a Zika crisis package that contains a number of House Republican-favored policy riders. But Democrats and Republicans have a number of policy disagreements on other spending bills, and the 2016 elections — including a series of crucial Senate races — loom over all of those fights.
“There’s no excuse to filibuster this bill,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in anticipation of Reid’s move. “Everybody in committee supported it.”
Reid wants the Defense Department bill to include funding for domestic spending priorities that could be construed as providing a national security benefit, in part because Republicans have pushed to provide extra money to the Pentagon through a special funding account.
He led the filibuster with an eye on a number of other issues, however. Senate Republicans and Democrats have had a number of fights, and compromises, over the last few months. They passed a $1.1 billion Zika crisis relief bill, for instance, and another bipartisan heroin epidemic relief bill — despite objections from Democratic leaders who wanted the legislation to include additional funding for the crisis.
Reid opposes the House versions of those bills, citing “poison pill” riders in the House-passed zika bill such as a provision to allow Confederate flags to fly on graves at federal government cemeteries. And so Reid demanded that McConnell pledge that “all appropriations bills that are considered in both chambers [of Congress] and sent to the president for his signature” pass without any of the controversial House-favored policies. “It’s just unfair to do anything else,” Reid said.
McConnell refused. “Now what the Democratic leader is saying is the Republican Senate needs to guarantee what the [Republican] House will do as a condition for passing a bill through the Senate that every single Democrat on the Appropriations Committee supported,” he said. “That’s not the way it works. The way you pass a law is the Senate passes a bill, the House passes a bill, and you negotiate with each other and with the administration.”
Reid launched this filibuster in order to demand changes to the Zika funding package, but several other spending issues are waiting in the wings. The negotiations between the House and Senate on bills to fund the Veterans Department and to address the heroin epidemic are dominated by Republicans, because they have a majority in both chambers.
Democrats dislike the products of those talks, and so they’re blocking a vote on the final version of the veterans bill. Reid has also instructed Democratic negotiators not to sign off on the final version of the heroin legislation — a bill that would represent a major policy accomplishment for two vulnerable Republicans facing re-election bids this fall — which has effectively stymied that legislation as well.
“Essentially Reid is setting up campaign talking points: 1) Republicans want a government shutdown; 2) Republicans won’t fund Zika; 3) Republicans won’t fund veterans; 4) Republicans won’t pass [the heroin bill] — they are putting their ideological agenda head of all of these things,” a senior GOP aide told the Examiner.
The back-and-forth showed that the top Senate lawmakers are clearly aware of the larger political stakes of these debates. “One thing my good friend the Democratic leader always used to remind me of when he was the majority leader is that the majority leader always gets the last word, so let me take advantage of that tonight,” McConnell said. “The Democratic Party ought to be renamed the dysfunction party. When they were in the majority they didn’t function, and when they’re in the minority they don’t function.”
“They’re the party of Trump, so don’t call us dysfunctional,” Reid retorted.
