Senate Democrats Dodge Last Pre-Election Opportunity To Fight Trump
They won't take a big stand to protect the election, or resist Trump's broader lawlessness, before the midterms.
This was expected, but it’s madness.
Over the weekend, Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator in Congress—and, crucially, as we’ll see, one of Washington state’s two senators—cut a deal with Susan Collins (yes, that Susan Collins) that would extend the annual budget past its September 30 expiration into December. The House passed a similar measure last week, making it clear that Congress’s intent, on a bipartisan basis, is to punt a longer-term budget until after the election, when Collins may actually be a lame duck.
This is mostly bad for the reasons I’ve screamed about since March of last year. In the context of an attempted authoritarian takeover of the United States, normal minority-party participation in the federal budget process is akin to passing enabling legislation. It’s not one-to-one with the Enabling Act that transformed Adolf Hitler from a parliamentary leader into a dictator, but it’s analogous—a message to Donald Trump that says, ‘you’re intent on taking power away from us, you keep asserting the right to do so, and we’re going to assent. At best we’ll try to claw that power back after the fact, in litigation.’
Trump is violating criminal and civil laws flagrantly, including the terms of these very budget agreements. And yet every time funding for the government has lapsed or has neared expiration, Democrats have provided votes required to end debate and even to actually pass new funding. That decision conveys a lack of controversy, and thus sends a related message to the public: all’s well. Nothing to worry about here.
Early on, Democrats might have argued that withholding their votes for these interim budgets, precipitating an interruption of government services, might turn the public against them. That excuse doesn’t fly anymore. The one time they held out for a few weeks—not to resist Trump’s lawlessness but to seek renewal of expiring health care subsidies—the public supported them, and blamed Trump for the shutdown. (Naturally, they caved anyhow.)
But it’s extra infuriating this time around, because the backdrop is different in three key ways. Here, by declining to fight, Democrats have: 1) aided Collins’s re-election effort, 2) bypassed an opportunity to grind Trump’s election subversion schemes to a halt, and 3) left blue states struggling to rebuild from natural disasters without needed federal help, as Trump abusively withholds disaster support from states that didn’t vote for him.
I wrote about the kinds of demands Democrats could have demanded in order to prevent federal interference in the midterms here. They could have essentially made free and fair midterm elections a condition for their votes, raising the salience of Trump’s multifaceted subversion schemes, and revealing Collins to be a complicit and unreasonable Republican partisan. They instead made no demands along these lines, and few of any kind, allowing Collins to boast about “work[ing] with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle” to prevent a “damaging government shutdown.”
The agreement Democrats struck also does nothing to address this problem:
Trump keeps abandoning Americans in blue states in their times of greatest need, and their elected representatives are ducking opportunities to protect them. Remember how Murray represents Washington? A wildfire just devastated the city of Spokane. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated, entire neighborhoods have been destroyed. On Sunday, the state’s Democratic governor, Bob Ferguson, issued a formal disaster declaration request to Trump. As of this writing, it remains unsigned.
FEMA officials told Ferguson Monday morning they are already deploying resources to Washington state in anticipation of the disaster being approved by the Trump Administration.
“The federal government’s not waiting around for a decision; they are, as we speak, moving resources into Washington state,” Ferguson told reporters.
Will he? Won’t he? Trump may decide not to mete out more abuse here, insofar as he knows Murray could still walk away from this funding agreement. But earlier this year, without explanation, he denied flood mitigation aid to Washington “after a historic deluge hit the state late last year.”
The one concession Democrats did secure will pause the advancement of a proposed Trump administration rule that would assert more partisan control over federal grant provision. It is important that this rule never take effect; but the concession doesn’t proscribe the rule. It simply delays it for the two-month term of the budget extension. And it gives Collins one more thing to brag about.
“I am also pleased that this bipartisan agreement prevents the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)’s proposed rule regarding federal financial assistance from taking effect,” Collins said. “I advocated for significant changes to the proposed rule in a July 6 letter to the agency, citing its potential to politicize grants and harm small, rural communities, families, and biomedical research.”
We know, because government lawyers admitted it in court, that the Trump administration canceled hundreds of Energy Department grants to blue states based solely on whether the state had voted for Kamala Harris and had two Democratic senators. This is petty tyranny; budget standoffs are the natural place to resist it; but Senate Democrats just…don’t.
Democrats will thus, apparently, be voting to fund Trump’s dirty tricks. If those tricks prove successful, it could cost them control of one or both chambers of Congress, driving another stake through the abdomen of American democracy.
If you were to ask them why, they probably wouldn’t admit outright to being afraid. They’d cover their shame by claiming they didn’t want to “distract” from their “affordability message.” This is how they and their consultants and strategists try to alchemize weakness into savvy. How many extra crimes will Trump get to commit, so that Democrats don’t get distracted from their affordability message?
Even if the election proceeds without major incident, and Democrats win, do we really think they’ll turn on a dime and embrace fighting that “distracts” from their “affordability message”?
The election will be behind them, but the criminality will continue. Are they likelier to insist on accountability measures—like voiding Trump’s insurrection slush fund and the indefinite grant of immunity he’s given himself from all tax-law enforcement—when they’re in the majority? When they have to ask Republicans for their votes, not the other way around? If avoiding shutdowns is so crucial to this caucus, aren’t we poised for at least two more years of capitulation?
I should note that Democratic leaders weren’t exactly defying the left here.