Congress yesterday
enacted a continuing resolution (CR) to fund the federal government through the
six-plus months remaining in this fiscal year.
The measure cleared the House 217-213, essentially on party lines (with
one Member on each side voting against their parties). It passed the Senate 54-46, with two senators
that caucus with Democrats voting “yes” and one Republican voting “no”. To reach the Senate floor, however, it needed
eight Democratic votes on a procedural motion and received ten.
Crucial was Senate
Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s announcement that he would support the
procedural motion. House Democrats and
progressive activists have fiercely condemned him since then. This post analyzes the Democrats’ actions
relating to the CR. It finds that
Senator Schumer made the correct move at the end in allowing the CR to pass but
that he and other congressional Democrats badly mishandled the process leading
up to that point. The criticism of him
is misinformed, but leadership’s ill-considered rhetoric contributed to that
misinformation.
A bit of
background is in order. Last Spring,
Congress and President Biden reached bipartisan agreements on all twelve
appropriations bills necessary to fund the federal government for the fiscal
year ending September 2024. These bills
included the substantial cuts required by the agreement President Biden
negotiated with former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in exchange for raising the
debt limit. They did not, however,
include the further reductions in domestic discretionary spending that House
Republicans had sought.
Like other modern
appropriations acts, these bills were accompanied by joint explanatory
statements providing considerably more detail on how funds were to be allocated
beyond that in the statutory language.
Administrations have consistently treated these joint explanatory
statements as binding to avoid appropriators’ bipartisan wrath. This tradition has caused appropriators to
become almost indifferent as to which directives go into the bills and which go
into the joint explanatory statements.
With partisanship
at its zenith a few weeks before the November election, Congress was in no
position to agree on new appropriations bills last September. It therefore passed a short-term CR,
essentially allowing agencies to continue spending at the 2024 rate for
October, November, and part of December.
When this short-term CR expired, Republicans wanted to give the incoming
Trump Administration a say in crafting year-long appropriations bills. Accordingly, they insisted on another
short-term CR, to last through March 14.
Republican negotiators then began discussions with their Democratic counterparts
on crafting year-long bills.
About two weeks
ago, Republicans walked away from the table and indicated that they would move
to pass a CR to continue spending at the 2024 levels for the remainder of the
year. Because of inflation, this
represents a significant real cut: agencies
must eliminate some activities to free up funds to pay higher prices for others. Republicans declined to work with Democrats
on writing this CR but promised it would be “clean”, i.e., devoid of
substantive policy changes. Both parties
agreed that some “anomalies” would need to be addressed: positive or negative changes in the cost of
government activities under current policies.
(For example, when appropriators write CRs near the end of a decade,
they must include “anomaly” funding for the decennial census.)
As the March 14
deadline approached and Republicans still would not release their proposed CR,
Democrats and independent budget experts began to wonder why it was taking so
long if the CR really was “clean”. Some
Republicans fanned these fears by urging their party’s leaders to incorporate
the cuts Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was making in a
plethora of programs.
Democratic
appropriators, completely frozen out of the process, concluded reasonably that
the only way they could influence these budgetary decisions would be to defeat
the CR that the Republicans were drafting and force a resumption of bipartisan
negotiations. They hoped that, once they
got Republican appropriators alone in a room, they could work out some additional
specificity on how appropriated funds should be spent, perhaps by moving some
of the detail that previously had been in joint explanatory statements into
legislative language. With Republicans only
able to suffer one or two defections if House Democrats held together – and numerous
Freedom Caucus Members on record with “principled” objections to CRs — defeating
the CR seemed potentially withing reach.
So far, so
good. Unfortunately, attacking a CR one
has not seen is not easy. Some Democrats
decided to attack the entire concept of a CR.
They said that the CR must be defeated because it would give President Trump
and Mr. Musk more flexibility to slash the government. This line was picked up by rank-and-file
Members and by activists.
Left unaddressed,
however, was the comparator they had in mind when speaking of “more flexibility”. A year-long CR likely would give the
Administration more flexibility than the year-long appropriations bills
Democratic appropriators hoped to negotiate.
A year-long CR would not, however, give the Administration more
flexibility than the existing part-year CR did.
And nothing inherent in a clean CR would give the Administration more
flexibility than the bipartisan appropriations bills from 2024. Finally, with the Republicans exerting remarkably
tight party discipline, it is far from clear that any actual full-year
appropriations bills Republicans would actually have accepted would have
imposed further limitations.
When the Republicans
finally released their CR proposal last weekend, it was not “clean”. Under the guise of adjusting for anomalies,
they shifted a not-insignificant amount of funds from human services to the
Administration’s priorities.
Structurally, however, the CR provides that “[e]xcept as otherwise
expressly provided in this division, the requirements, authorities, conditions,
limitations, and other provisions of the appropriations Acts [from 2024] shall
continue in effect”.
Having demonized
the very concept of a CR, congressional Democrats and activists proved unable
to recalibrate their message to target the real but more subtle shortcomings of
the Republicans’ proposal. They did such
an effective job of promoting the CR-as-slush-fund message that reporters simply
would not believe that that message did not match the actual legislation. This unified, if misleading, message kept
House Democrats together, but when House Republicans, too, stayed
uncharacteristically unified, Senate Democrats were in a bind.
Republicans have
repeatedly demonstrated the folly of causing a partial government shutdown
without a clear, coherent plan. Had
Senate Democrats defeated the CR, they surely would have demonstrated the same
thing again. This is what Senator
Schumer tried to communicate, but his remarks were less than crystalline. And too much of the party was too invested in
over-the-top criticisms of the CR to hear him.
A partial
government shutdown is particularly ill-suited as a response to the current
crisis. A partial government shutdown prevents
spending – which is precisely the opposite of what Democrats are trying to
accomplish. Past government shutdowns
ended because both parties had programs to which they were devoted. For example, Republicans did not want to be
blamed for interrupting funds for disease research. Today, the National Institutes of Health are
a major focus of the Administration’s attacks.
Indeed, it is difficult to identify any programs that Republicans care
about enough to gain concessions. (The
only plausible candidate would be immigration enforcement, but Democrats are
badly splintered on all things relating to immigration and so are
ill-positioned to hold enforcement funds hostage to force a deal.)
President Trump would
have had some ability to shield his preferred activities from a partial government
shutdown by manipulating what he declared to be an essential government
function. Republicans also could have
brought up bills restoring funding only to some parts of the government – such as
restoring pay for armed servicemembers or federal law enforcement officers –
and dared Democrats to vote against them.
Activists might wish congressional Democrats would shrug off voters’
anger over “abandoning our men and women in uniform”, but that is not
realistic. Thus, had Democrats killed
the CR, Republicans might not have simply left crucial programs unfunded for
several weeks or even months and denied Democrats another chance to vote to
fund those programs at any level.
Democrats
triggering a partial government shutdown by withholding their votes also would
have confused the picture for low-information voters about who is responsible
for the deteriorations in public services that are resulting from DOGE’s chaotic
cuts and mass layoffs. To the extent the
President’s polling numbers have eroded modestly, it appears attributable to this
chaos and fears about public services; Democrats would have been foolish to confuse
that story.
This episode
offers at least two lessons. First, as
difficult as it may be to formulate and communicate effective messages with Republicans
constantly serving up surprises, progressives are unwise to succumb to the
temptation to characterize technical legislation in ways likely to cause
misunderstandings by journalists and grassroots activists. Today’s bitter recriminations result from allowing
the desire to win the next vote to overcome the long perspective. More importantly, candor ought to be
progressives’ trademark.
And second,
progressives will accomplish little until they leave their comfort zone of fighting
intramural battles. Members, and
leadership, feel such relentless pressure to “do something, anything” that they
keep floating short-sighted, counter-productive initiatives.
The country is in
this position because too many voters rejected progressives and wanted to give
President Trump another chance to lead. Very
little will change until a significant number of those voters’ views
change. That will happen when they
understand the destructive and gratuitously cruel actions the Administration is
taking in their names. Anyone troubled
by the Administration’s actions – from top congressional leaders to grassroots
activists and across the political spectrum – needs to shine a light on what
the Administration is doing. Persuasion
is the only kind of “fighting” that will make a difference. Performative acts of defiance may hearten
activists but they are unlikely to persuade the voters whose views matter – and
could push those voters in the other direction.
The vulnerable people suffering from the Administration’s callous and
reckless actions cannot afford the self-indulgence of reflexive combativeness lacking
a plausible path forward.
@DavidASuper1 @DavidASuper.bsky.social