From Isaac Saul over at Tangle. A long read, but I think it hits on a lot of key points:
"When I first saw the news that Republicans were going to push through a CR, my immediate instinct was
why wouldn’t Democrats vote for this?
After all, a continuing resolution — almost by definition — mostly
continues the spending from a previous appropriations bill. That means Democrats would ensure the Trump administration starts by largely extending Biden’s budget, and doing so with help from Republicans.
That’s one legitimate lens through which to look at the House’s spending bill. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the lone Republican to break ranks in the House and one of the few truly principled spending hawks left in the chamber,
has been hammering this exact point.
Massie’s viewpoint has been historically correct. Trump and the GOP are claiming they want to balance the budget, yet they are doing the same thing Republicans have been doing for years now: passing short-term spending deals because they can’t agree as a caucus on the path forward to balancing the budget. It’s a cop out, one they have repeatedly promised not to take — and
a promise they’ve repeatedly broken.
And, with this CR, they’re breaking it again. The House’s stopgap bill
actually increases spending by $10 billion from 2024, and is projected to reduce the deficit by just $8 billion (or, 0.02% of the current national debt) over the course of the next 10 years. The larger spending bill House Republicans tried to push a few weeks ago would increase the debt and deficit by
trillions of dollars. The latest effort from congressional Republicans appears to be an attempt to offload their fiscal responsibility to DOGE, which simply does not have the constitutional power to fix our spending problems.
That’s not a tinfoil hat theory, either; Republicans said it themselves. “I think for a lot of people back home, they’re wondering, why isn’t this just the same thing that Congress always does?” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH)
told The New York Times. “This is how the president has asked us to fight now, so that they can do what they’re doing with DOGE.”
It is still mindboggling to me that
this is how the administration is planning to usher in an era of responsible government spending. Consider
these numbers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which show exactly where each $100 you pay in federal taxes actually goes:
$24 to health insurance programs
$21 to Social Security
$13 to defense
$13 to servicing our debt
$8 to benefits for veterans and federal retirees
$7 to economic security programs
$5 to education
$2 to transportation
$1 to natural resources and agriculture
$1 to science and medical research
$1 to law enforcement
$1 to international programs
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, DOGE’s efforts have
focused almost exclusively on areas that add up to roughly two dollars and change — and, in many cases, they haven’t actually addressed perpetual spending but simply laid off workers. As we’ve said over and over and over, the only way to actually address our spiraling debt problem is to reform Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending in a lasting way. Republicans say they want to do that but can never agree on a plan, while Democrats mostly
propose modest reforms.
So, should Democrats just vote for this bill to lock in the bulk of their spending priorities and highlight how little Republicans are actually doing to find a long-term solution? Actually, I’m not so sure.
David Dayen (
under “What the left is saying”) makes the case better than I could, and his argument rests on two pillars: 1) This bill cuts funding that most Democrats and progressives support. 2) This bill effectively hands the power of the purse over from Congress to the president, and it will further erode the balance of power between the different branches of government.
The second argument is much more salient to me. Trump wants to allow Congress to appropriate funding he never intends to spend, then use that money as a slush fund for whatever he wants, all while allowing the unelected, anonymous, and dishonest bureaucracy
that is DOGE to run roughshod through the federal government — cutting all manner of important, bipartisan, and valuable programs without offering any sensible explanations for their decisions (or their mistakes). And, again, he’s doing all that
while not actually balancing the budget, the North Star that is supposedly guiding all these decisions.
To put it differently: I don’t just think Trump’s plan is bad in the immediate term, I think it will do lasting damage to our government by becoming a blueprint for how a president can wrest control of spending from the legislative branch. Ed Kilgore rightly
described this as “institutional suicide” by the party controlling the legislative branch. Along the way, the president wants to
add billions in spending to the bloated and wasteful military,
undo funding for tax enforcement,
and cut a $23 billion appropriation to a fund that includes care for veterans exposed to burn pits and other carcinogenic chemicals. Trump promised a balanced budget and a booming economy, and so far I can’t see the path to either based on his actual actions.
Once again, I’m left looking at two parties and wondering what the heck has gone wrong. On one side, Republicans (despite what they’re saying) are now backing
another CR that would raise the debt and deficit, but this time they’re also endorsing a reduction of their own spending power. Remember, only a year ago these same Republicans
ousted Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for pushing through a CR, and that was when
they didn’t even control the Senate or White House.
On the other side, we have the feckless Democrats, who I believe will roll over and fold for fear of facing a government shutdown. Insider reporting
indicates Senate Dems are scared of what Trump and Musk will do during a shutdown (i.e. which programs they’ll target for furloughs), but if they balk at a shutdown, they’ll be ceding that kind of power to Republicans for at least the next two years — DOGE will get free reign, and Republicans can pass an omnibus bill without any Democratic support. Then, the courts will be the only place where Democrats have much of a chance of slowing this administration down until 2026. So, yes, I think Democrats should stand up and save Republicans from signing away their own power — but I sincerely doubt they will.
Now every Republican in the House (except one principled Kentuckian) is ceding their stated values out of fealty to Trump, every Republican in the Senate (except one principled Kentuckian) is set to do the same, and Senate Democrats appear ready to toss aside their only bit of power and fade to obscurity because they’re afraid of losing a messaging war over a government shutdown. The result, for the rest of us, is that we’re left hoping DOGE — which
can’t even accurately itemize its purported savings — will somehow keep the government functioning while also finding trillions of dollars of savings.
I gotta say, I’m not feeling hopeful about that."
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