WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate is expected this week to finally start tackling bills that will fund the government in 2020.
But the ongoing impeachment probe and border wall standoff between Democrats and the White House have cast a cloud of uncertainty over prospects that Congress and the administration will approve a spending plan and avoid a government shutdown before the holidays.
Senators began Monday taking action on the first package of appropriations bills funding the departments of Justice, Commerce and Science. That leaves Congress 11 working days to meet a Nov. 21 deadline to pass a budget plan for the entire government and avoid a shutdown.
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said if Congress stayed in session, rather than take more than two weeks off between now and Thanksgiving, it could pass a spending plan. “If we decided we were going to remain in session until we got it done, there’s no fathomable reason why we couldn’t,” he said. “I’ve been calling for this for years.”
But a tight time frame isn’t the main hurdle this year, Lee and others acknowledge. An impeachment inquiry consuming the attention of Congress and aggravating a standoff between Democrats and the White House over funding a border wall may be the bigger obstacles to finalizing a spending plan.
“This is all happening at a crucial time,” says Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan fiscal policy advocacy organization. “If you’re going to have some sort of cooperation on the budget, you’re not going to be negotiating appropriations bills while you’re trying the president for removal from office.”
Rising pressure to resolve the budget impasse could reveal whether the current Congress and White House can find any common ground while dealing with an impeachment of the president.
A major sticking point
Ideally, Congress would send the president a budget to fund government operations before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30. But that has become increasingly rare over the past 20 years.
“The process has sort of calcified to where they don’t even get around to negotiating these budget bills until after the fiscal year is over,” Bixby said. “There’s a lot less flexibility and a lot more ideological flag-waving and finger-pointing that makes it more difficult to compromise and come out with solutions.”
A major sticking point in the 2020 budget is the same issue that caused a record-long 35-day government shutdown earlier this year: funding construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
President Donald Trump, who is determined to fulfill his campaign promise of building the wall, eventually backed down and was able to cobble together his funding by declaring a national emergency and tapping into the defense budget.
And indications are Democrats and the White House are heading for another standoff over the border wall.
The Washington Post reported earlier this month that funding to complete the border wall is a “red line” the White House has drawn in the 2020 budget negotiations. But Democrats call it a “non-starter.”
That means until the White House and Congress can reach an agreement over border wall funding, the $200 billion that funds government agencies remains in limbo.
“That is the linchpin,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., told the Post about the border wall. Trump is “very interested in the wall, very adamant about it.”
Buying time
But whether Congress and the president would remain entrenched and bring a government shutdown remains uncertain.
Congressional leaders and the White House agreed last summer on defense spending overall and a top-line budget to fund other departments, but House and Senate appropriation leaders are still negotiating how to allocate those funds.
Politico reported that Senate leaders want to deal with the noncontroversial appropriations bills so they don’t get caught up in the more fraught debate over the Defense and Homeland Security budgets, where funding for the wall will be addressed.
That would shield the less controversial agencies from being affected by a shutdown, should that happen. Bixby explained that last year’s partial shutdown furloughed employees of agencies whose budgets had not been passed. If Congress and the White House can’t agree on a 2020 spending plan, this shutdown would impact more than just a few agencies.
The partial shutdown that started three days before Christmas and lasted until Jan. 25, 2019, didn’t go well for the president. Polls at that time found a majority of voters — 54% — blamed Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, compared to 35% who blame Democrats.
“Presidents usually get blamed for shutting down the government,” Bixby said. “But, the other thing here is that Republicans in Congress, particularly in the Senate, do not want a government shutdown. So I think they would be going to the White House strenuously arguing that he should agree to a funding bill.”
The likely solution being pitched to the White House, Bixby said, would be a continuing resolution that would freeze funding at last year’s levels until Congress gets past the impeachment process, which House Democrats say they are expediting.
Lee said if the House votes to impeach the president in the next few weeks, that would further delay dealing with budget matters. “If the House were to pass articles of impeachment, the Senate has to turn almost immediately to an impeachment trial,” he said. “There is some ability to legislate on other things, but it’s pretty limited.”
Continuing resolutions are often used to give lawmakers time to resolve differences over spending. They passed one in September to fund government into the new fiscal year to Nov. 21. House and Senate appropriations leaders have reportedly estimated a new resolution could extend government operations until February or March.
“I would always prefer no CR. But what’s staring us in the face is Nov. 21. That’s not far off,” Shelby told Politico.
Trump may not agree
Bixby agrees that the continuing resolution is the best short-term solution to avoiding a shutdown. But that assumes, he noted, that the president would agree to it.
“He may not necessarily think that it’s in his best interest. He might want to have (the border wall funding) as a fight during impeachment to rally his base,” he said. “I don’t know.”
No one really knows how the president will manage the pending budget negotiations under the cloud of an impeachment proceeding.
“The Republican leadership is watching this very closely and anything really can happen, and that does give him the ability to express himself and he has done that before,” said Ron Bonjean, a former Republican congressional leadership aide who has also worked with the Trump White House. “Could (a shutdown) happen again? Absolutely. And especially when everything is so personal.”
When the possibility of impeachment surfaced after the Russia investigation, the president notably cut short a meeting on a bipartisan infrastructure initiative with Democratic leaders, saying he couldn’t work with Democrats who wanted to investigate him. Earlier this month, after the impeachment inquiry began, Democratic leaders walked out of a contentious meeting with Trump in the White House, after exchanging insults, the Post reported.
The same article cited an advisory from Cowen Research Group that listed several other issues to be addressed by year’s end, including health care tax breaks that will expire Dec. 31. “From a domestic political perspective, (Oct. 16) events in Washington are likely to cast a negative pall over the remainder of the year,” the Cowen analysts wrote of the flare up in the White House.