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Nip it in the budgets
Good morning readers. I’ll take member questions in comments and during this afternoon’s live chat. Subscribers can expect an invitation later today.
On my mind today: It seems as though the story of the illegal capturing of the U.S. government will break one way or another in March. If you’re a regular reader, you know I have my eyes on the March 14 deadline to fund the government, and whether Democrats will provide votes to do so without securing any mechanism to assure Donald Trump’s compliance with the law—effectively sanctioning his criminality.
But we’ll also soon learn a lot about the judiciary’s posture toward all this lawbreaking. Short version: Wednesday night was supposed to be the drop-dead date for the Trump administration to disburse the foreign aid it had frozen, or to send officials to testify under oath about their failure to do so. The administration had, for almost two weeks, failed to comply in good faith with a restraining order requiring disbursement of the funds. So this week the judge in the case granted a request to enforce the order—deadline midnight last night.
The Trump administration scrambled all day to pause that enforcement order. The circuit court declined the request, but Chief Justice Roberts obliged—for a few days at least.
Naturally I suspect Roberts, out of cowardice or partisanship, gave Trump special treatment—e.g. that if the Biden administration had flouted a TRO and sought relief from enforcement, Roberts would have offered no stay at all. But he ordered the parties to brief him on the matter by noon tomorrow. I suspect if Roberts exempts Trump from enforcement of this order altogether, Trump will never willingly comply with one again. By contrast, if SCOTUS says comply, Trump will have to decide whether to comply, or to assert the dictatorial power to ignore the entire judiciary, and see what happens. There may be middle ways for Roberts to rule between that binary, but in either case this is coming to a head quickly.
So will the Trump administration be hemmed in by Congress, the courts, or both? We’ll find out very soon.
Then, in no particular order:
House Republicans adopted a budget Tuesday night. Juuuust barely. But they got it done. That is step one in a confusing and multi-step process that could end with House and Senate Republicans passing a “reconciliation bill” (read: a filibuster-proof bill) to give rich people a huge tax cut, and offset part of the cost by throwing millions of poor people off of Medicaid.
I’ve seen readers and even some professional commentators refer to what Republicans passed Tuesday as a “bill” (it’s not a bill, it’s a non-binding resolution), and conflate this budget-reconciliation process with the appropriations deadline (that is, the government-funding deadline) two weeks from now.
This kind of confusion is extremely common, even in newsrooms. Both processes are deep in the parliamentary weeds, and both pertain to budgeting. It’s easy to conflate them, especially when Republicans are out there lying to their constituents about what they did. But, generally speaking, they’re distinct.
So Republicans in Congress need to pass legislation by March 14 to avoid stave off a government shutdown. The deadline is firm, and that bill will be subject to filibuster.
Then, separately, and on a lengthy timeline, Republicans will try (but are in no way obligated) to pass another bill pertaining to taxes and spending. That later bill, if it materializes, will be immune from the filibuster.
Obviously it will be terrible if Republicans cut $800 billion from Medicaid. But it’s worth keeping in mind that this week’s vote was the easiest step of the reconciliation process, and Republicans came extremely close to failing. And this is the one fight Democrats are excited to wage.
My recommendation: put the vote Republicans took this week out of your mind for now. It’ll be a big story eventually. But at the moment, the fights that matter pertain to the rule of law. We’re fast approaching make-or-break moments in those fights. And they’re the ones Democrats are waging more clumsily.
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