WASHINGTON — Seeking to avoid another unpopular government shutdown, Senate leaders have hammered out a long-term, big budget deal that will deliver President Trump’s desired defense spending increases as well as the much higher domestic spending sought by Democrats.
The bipartisan package will also include additional funding for disaster relief, fresh infrastructure spending, fresh programs to address the opioid crisis and larger budgets for government departments and agencies.
When it became clear that no spending bill would pass the Senate without Democratic support, much less the support of the House, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky entered into an unholy alliance with Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York, leading to outcries from Republican budget hawks.
“This spending bill is a debt fiend’s dream. I’m not just saying no, I’m saying hell no,” complained Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala., who said the budget compromise would result in a trillion-dollar deficit.
“This is the wrong thing to do because it is not consistent with what we told the American people we were going to do and what they elected us to do,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
The situation was likely made worse by the fact that no budget bill at this stage would include immigration reform, which has essentially been dropped from budget negotiations.
“I don’t think we expect the budget deal to include details on immigration reform,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said. “But we want to get a deal.”
Trump also did not assist on the budget issue, saying Tuesday: “I would like to see a government shutdown if we don’t get these things done.” [on immigration]. If we have to close it because the Democrats don’t want security… then let’s close it.”
Trump wants to allow so-called “Dreamers,” the 1.8 million young children brought to the U.S. by their illegal immigrant parents years ago, to stay in the country, but he also wants to spend $25 billion on building a wall on the Mexico-U.S. border, as well as other security measures and ending family-based immigration.
Critics of the wall in Congress offer only a fraction of the funding he is seeking and oppose his plan to end immigration based on kinship and birthright citizenship.
“Any agreement on DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] “Anything short of STRONG border security and a desperately needed WALL is a complete waste of time,” Trump tweeted this week.
Still, he appeared to offer a compromise in his State of the Union address when he extended an “open hand” to allowing DACA immigrants to stay in the country.
As battle lines were drawn midweek, the most prominent pro-immigrant bill was a bipartisan bill by Republican senators John McCain of Arizona and Christopher A. Coons of Delaware.
In a conference call with reporters this week, Coons said, “I’m concerned that senators are now saying that the fallback should be to do virtually nothing, like passing a one-year DACA bill and a one-year border bill.”
The McCain-Coons bill “falls between those two poles,” Coons said.
The document stopped compact of approving $25 billion for Trump’s wall, but it did call for bolstering border security with high-tech systems and drones and tasked the Department of Homeland Security with developing a comprehensive border security plan within a year.
But for now, attention on Capitol Hill has focused on McConnell’s deficit-cutting spending bill, which has deeply divided House and Senate Republicans and their conservative supporters during the campaign.
Charles and David Koch, two billionaire brothers who have generously funded many conservative causes and GOP campaigns, issued a statement calling the budget deal “a betrayal of the American taxpayer and evidence of the absolute unwillingness of members of Congress to follow any principles of responsible budgeting.”
The conservative Growth Caucus, which rates lawmakers on their votes on spending and tax cuts, urged Republicans “to vote NO on the Schumer-McConnell deal.”
The caucus said the budget would destroy spending limits set in the 2011 Budget Control Act. “It’s clear that McConnell and the GOP establishment want to speed up the big government freight train with the help of big-spending liberals on the other side of the aisle,” he said.
“This is a bad, bad, bad, bad… deal,” said Rep. Jim Jordan. “When you put it all together, a quarter of a trillion dollars in increased discretionary spending – [is] “not what we should be doing.”
