Senate Democrats are pronouncing President Trump’s budget blueprint dead on arrival, arguing that its $54 million increase in defense spending with corresponding cuts to domestic programs in the same amount would never pass muster with their colleagues when it comes time to pass spending bills in Congress.
Presidents’ budgets have long been an exercise in setting spending priorities but have no enforcement mechanism when Congress passes appropriations measures. Republicans have enough votes in the House and Senate to pass Trump’s budget but no power to impose those spending increases and reductions on the Senate, where it will take eight Democrats to get past the chamber’s procedural hurdles on spending bills.
“There’s no way he’s going to get that blueprint through Congress” when it comes to the tough task of passing appropriations bills in the Senate, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told the Washington Examiner Monday night. “I can support increases in defense, but I’m not going to stand by while he guts our investments in education, innovation and infrastructure.”
“We need to have a balance between those requests for defense [increases] and for these important domestic economic investments,” he added.
The Trump administration outlined the broad terms of its budget Monday but only said spending reductions in non-defense spending would offset the increases without specifying exactly where the funds would come from.
In 2011 Van Hollen, the former top Democrat on the House Budget Committee who now serves on the Senate Budget panel, was one of the key lawmakers who helped negotiate the Budget Control Act to try to bring about the conclusion to that year’s debt-ceiling crisis. The law, also known as sequestration, imposed spending caps that both parties have complained about.
Any efforts to bust budget caps imposed in 2011 would lead to demands by Democrats to increase domestic spending as well.
Van Hollen said the Congress “had a balance over the last couple of years” between defense spending increases and boosts to domestic funding while trying to work around the spending limits.
“Many of us worked to try to remove sequestration – we thought it was counterproductive … but when you do it, you want to do it in equal parts,” he said.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., a member of the Appropriations panel, said he is “gravely concerned” about the intent of Trump’s rough budget outlines that the administration has disclosed so far.
While he said he has yet to scrutinize the details, he is worried that it “significantly increases national security investments” – areas he said he could “find my way to supporting” – but not by paying for them by “savagely cutting a wide range of areas critical to our education, innovation, diplomacy, development and security investments.”
“This is the beginning of what will be a complicated and difficult process …,” he said.
Even though Trump’s budget has no enforcement mechanisms and is unlikely to pass muster in the Senate with Democrats, when it comes time to pass spending bills, some Democrats are strongly opposing it and hoping Republicans join them.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, told the Washington Examiner he hopes the blueprint is dead on arrival but “you never know what Republicans are going to do with it.”
“I understand the assumption that it is dead on arrival because it usually is, but I don’t know with this crowd,” he said of his Senate GOP colleagues and the new Trump administration. “They are afraid of him. I don’t know what they do with this.”
Even if the blueprint has no teeth, Brown argued that Democrats will still fight it because it sets “the wrong tone.”
“You still don’t want a blueprint that is so far to the right and cuts everything from legal services to food stamps and the [Environmental Protection agency,” he said. “It matters because it sets the tone and then you have a legal document saying this is the position of Congress, you’ve got to appropriate it.”
“It doesn’t mean you have to, but it certainly puts the weight of precedent on your side,” he said.
