Congressional partisanship is at its worst, as Wednesday’s toxic impeachment debate showed. But here’s something even more harmful to the republic: bipartisanship.
Republicans and Democrats got together over the summer and hammered out a budget deal, which they consummated this past week in two bills to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year. The bills spend way too much money. Worse, they are packed from Left to Right with cronyist giveaways.
It’s typical bipartisanship: Politicians of parties hand out goodies, taxpayers foot the bill, and all the insiders are happy with it.
The bill appropriates $1.4 trillion for this year. That’s a 16% increase from 2016, the year Donald Trump ran for president, after you adjust for inflation. This isn’t anywhere close to spending restraint.
Foul ornaments are hung all over this swampy “Christmas tree,” to use the common Washington term for spending bills decked out with special-interest provisions. “A bucket of garbage,” the phrase used by budget watchdog Maya MacGuineas, was also an apt analogy.
Wall Street, Boeing, and General Electric win because the bill grants the Export-Import Bank a seven-year charter. Ex-Im subsidizes exporters by doling out taxpayer-backed financing to foreign buyers, such as China’s government. Ex-Im dedicates twice as much to subsidizing Boeing in the average year as it does to helping all small exporters in America combined. Ex-Im also consistently subsidizes factories in China and state-owned corporations in China and Russia. Nothing in this bill would change that.
“Tax extenders,” special-interest tax breaks that regularly expire or almost expire, are also renewed. This is a bipartisan racket that allows lawmakers to extract campaign contributions from the special interests that want them and so that their former staffers, now lobbyists for those companies, can earn their keep.
These extenders are not good tax policy. They do nothing for the economy. They make the tax code less fair. And some of them were “extended” retroactively, so they couldn’t plausibly be considered “incentives.” They’re just free money. Windmills, biodiesel, breweries, distilleries, and plenty of other special interests got their goodies.
The bill also extends the dreadful, deadly, costly, and unreformed National Flood Insurance Program, which gives builders incentive to build million-dollar beach houses in flood plains and hurricane-vulnerable coastal areas. Apparently, that’s what the voters were saying when they elected Trump in 2016 and Democrats in 2018: more subsidies for Outer Banks mansions.
Bizarrely (and we believe unconstitutionally), the bill voids all state smoking-age laws and sets a new national tobacco age of 21. That means millions of adults are denied a liberty, simply because of their age, that all other adults enjoy. Where does Congress get the authority to set a smoking age? And how is this equality under the law?
What’s more bipartisan in Washington than increasing federal regulation and trampling on constitutional rights?
So, what was the Trump administration thinking in supporting this deal? Russ Vought, a lifelong fiscal conservative and Trump’s acting budget director, gave us the White House’s reasoning in a recent editorial board meeting. “We agreed to a caps deal that increased spending so that we could get the debt limit that we needed, that we could get the Defense levels that we needed,” he said. “And importantly, the deal was no new riders that would foreclose our administration’s priorities.”
That is to say, Democrats agreed not to block or restrict wall funding, and Republicans agreed to the high price tag. Meanwhile, both parties love the corporate welfare.
Vought promised that one day, the White House would get to cutting appropriations. Maybe they’ll also one day get to the business of draining the swamp. Until then, I suppose we should congratulate both Republicans and Democrats for producing a big bucket of bipartisanship.
