Posted on 08/25/2017 1:14:10 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
As a candidate, US president Donald Trump insisted he’d make Mexico pay for a wall on its border. As president, he’s trying to strong-arm lawmakers into funding it. “If we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall,” he said (paywall) at a rally in Phoenix on Aug. 22.
Even in normal circumstances passing a spending package is steeped in complexity, and when Congress returns from summer recess on Sept. 5 it will have less than a month to do it. Simultaneously, it must agree to lift the federal debt ceiling by Sept 29 to stop the country defaulting.
What’s more, Republicans are deeply divided on what should be in the spending package, and not least on the wall itself. A Texan congressman whose district has 800 miles (1,300 km) of border has called it the “most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.” Throw in the fact that they need support from at least eight Democrats in the Senate to prevent the opposition party filibustering the spending bill, and the task looks gargantuan.
So what can Trump do? Here are some options.
1. Paralyze Republicans in the House
Trump does has a serious mandate from voters for the wall, which was his loudest policy promise throughout the campaign. To force it onto the table, the White House should start with the House of Representatives, says Jon Lieber, US practice head at Eurasia Group and a former senior advisor to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. “He’ll have to rally conservatives inside the House to insist on having border wall funding or they won’t vote for a spending deal,” he said. If he gets enough people on board, the theory goes, House speaker Paul Ryan would have to consider some money for the wall.
But it’s a big “if.” Trump has been hemorrhaging support in Washington and lawmakers are highly aware, as Lieber puts it, of “how bad Trump is for the Republican brand.” So there’s little incentive for most of them to join forces with him.
Further, the Republican leadership has been held hostage to hardliners before—and it didn’t work out well for the hardliners. In 2013, the conservative Freedom Caucus forced a shutdown over Obamacare spending. The result: the leadership did a deal with Democrats, passing a bipartisan package that largely ignored the right-wingers’ demands.
“[The episode] drove Republicans’ approval ratings into the ground. It would be even worse now because back then they could share the blame with president Obama, calling him unreasonable—now there’s no way to spin this as the Democrats’ fault,” says Jason Roberts, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of four books on Congressional politics.
Faced with a similar threat from conservatives, therefore, the party leadership is likely to turn again to the Democrats to avoid punishment in the polls, says Sarah Binder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t believe McConnell or Ryan wants to preside over a period of Republican control when the government shuts down,” she said. “That would be highly counterproductive in showing voters that Republicans know how to govern.”
2. Blackmail the Democrats
But if Republicans need the Democrats to get the spending bill through, they shouldn’t count on much support for what House minority leader Nancy Pelosi this week called “president Trump’s multi-billion dollar border wall boondoggle.”
In anticipation of this, the White House is rumored to be preparing a bargaining chip: the 800,000 young people who came to the US illegally as children but are protected from deportation by Obama’s “dreamers” executive order. So far, Trump has left the executive order intact, but he could threaten to nix it if Democrats don’t agree to wall funding.
Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute think tank, says he “very, very much doubt[s]” Democrats would go for that, but speculates they might settle for “some modest amount of funding for a wall that will be much more like a fence than a wall, and would have sizeable gaps because of private property on the border.”
Even that might be a stretch, though. If Trump pledges to keep the “dreamers” order in exchange for Democrats approving wall funding, the Democrats “don’t have any reason to believe he’ll keep his word,” said one House Democratic staffer.
3. Bribe the Democrats
If blackmail doesn’t work, why not mix it with bribery? Find a policy the Democrats are so passionate about that they’ll fund the wall in exchange for that and a pledge to protect the “dreamers.”
One thing that might entice them: funding to fix parts of Obamacare, say Ornstein and Lieber. “Democrats might say that to pay for the border wall—because border security actually polls pretty well—they want to appropriate money for cost-sharing reductions on the Affordable Care Act,” says Lieber. (Cost-sharing reductions are government subsidies on health insurance plans for the poor. The Trump administration has been threatening to cancel them, which would make insurance prohibitively expensive for many of the people Obamacare was supposed to help.) “That would be a win for all sides.”
The problem? “I’m not sure if Trump is capable of negotiating something that’s a win for all sides,” Lieber says. And it wouldn’t be easy to persuade Congressional Republicans, who have spent most of the last decade railing against Obamacare. Giving it more money in exchange for a wall that they’re not very fond of anyway won’t make them happy. “There is not a lot of political excitement within Republicans in Congress to fund the border wall, and to fund it at the cost of shutting down the government because they can’t get Democrat votes,” says Binder.
4. Veto the bill
If it looks like there’s not going to be a compromise on the wall, Republicans may pass a package excluding the wall and dare Trump to veto it. (This would probably done by first passing a three-month extension to current spending levels and then passing a new funding package, sans wall, on Dec. 15.)
If Trump vetos the bill and Congress can’t get a two-thirds majority in both houses to override him, the government would shut down. The last time that happened was when president Bill Clinton nixed soaring budget cuts put forward by a Republican Congress in 1995. It worked out well for the president then; the GOP essentially caved in (paywall).
This time it would be different, however. When the presidency and Congress are held by different parties, as they were in 1995, blame for shutdowns is divided between the two—and, in recent history, Congress has come off worse. This time it’s all held by one party, and “by now threatening to shut down the government…[Trump] owns the shutdown,” Ornstein says.
What would happen? Who knows. Any solution would have to thread a needle between Trump’s desire for a “big, beautiful wall,” Democrats’ hatred of that idea, Republican budget hawks’ opposition to any massive spending project, and many Republican border representatives’ fears that building a wall would cause flood damage and mean expropriating huge swathes of private land.
Whatever the outcome, a shutdown isn’t going to make Trump and his wavering party look competent. As Ornstein put it, “Trump has stepped on his own private parts and those of his party by threatening to shut down the government.”
The wall, and global trade imbalances, are the two reasons I supported Trump even before he announced his candidacy.
THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES OF ALL, in my view. The wall, and global trade. Sure I also support him for a number of other reasons, but building the wall, and supporting AMERICAN businesses, were the two which won me over. Very early.
Stand firm on these two issues Trump. They were the reason a LOT of people, voted for you.
I didn’t read the article, but as a matter of principle, I’ve always wanted to shut the government down. Sounds like a win win to me.
> must agree to lift the federal debt ceiling by Sept 29 to stop the country defaulting.
That’s bunk.
<> Simultaneously, it must agree to lift the federal debt ceiling by Sept 29 to stop the country defaulting. <>
Max de Haldevang has no credibility.
The issue here is it takes a 60 vote majority in the senate to pass a tax on Mexico/Mexican trade/remittances/ect to pay for the wall. But it only takes a 50 vote majority to pass funding for the wall because the wall’s already been approved by congress 15 years ago. So all Trump needs it the GOP congress to fund it. We can make Mexico pay for it after getting more GOP senators in the midterms. Of course they’ve refused to do so. They won’t even hold a vote on the issue because their voters would murder them when they vote against it.
So Trump is going to use the budget and the debt limit increases to force their hand to include the wall funding. The GOP counter will probably consist of cutting a deal with the dems and passing a 2/3 majority bill to override Trump’s veto. However the optics will look horrible for the GOP. They will have betrayed Trump and he he’ll be able to nail them to crosses in the primaries so the GOP might not be able to get enough votes to override Trump.
I say have the army start building the wall...use defense dept $$$
Let them take it all the way to SCOTUS claiming that building a wall to keep out an invasion of aliens has nothing to do with defense.
The way things are working out Trump will have to use SCOTUS to kill Obamacare and build the wall.
He needs to start talking about taxing remittances at 20% to fund the wall...in essence to pay back the defense dept $ used to have the army construct the wall.
A bunch of rallies touting this sort of plan would be a great idea.
Trump’s voting supporters looking to keep out the alien hoards to both increase jobs for Americans and raise wages and cut welfare to aliens is a winner! It will further lock in the rust-belt states.
The ONLY opinions that matter to Trump are the opinions of his VOTING supporters, especially in the rust-belt.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.
Less welfare doled out.
Rising wages.
These are what matter to the rust-belt voters that used to be Dems until they stabbed ‘em in the back with a hoard of illegal-alien welfare freeloaders.
Build the wall or shut down the federal government. Pick one. Thank you.
JoMa
But the government workers get back pay, so we do not save as much as we could.
He needs to talk about it,so people know their representatives are voting against a wall. Hopefully Trump will criticize Ryan and McConnell. With the health care repeal and replace, there wasn’t any debate over Obamacare. Mitch McConnell didn’t plan to repeal it. He said at first that the House bill is DOA in the senate.
A variation of 3 while standing by the principles he ran on: Work with Democrats in the blue states that voted for him. Votes for border wall funding should be tied to more infrastructure projects for these states.
Regarding DACA: No deal unless DACA continuation is temporary while the wall is being built. No more idiotic deals where Democrats get what they want immediately while Republicans get a vague promise for the future.
“But the government workers get back pay, so we do not save as much as we could.”
Want to frost the establishment? If the government shuts down because congress won’t pay for the wall then all back pay will be used to pay for the wall.
That ship has sailed. About a dozen states are threatening to sue unless DACA is eliminated and the Administration is already talking about doing away with it rather than fight the battle in the courts.
Not going to happen.
I think this idiot writer and those whom he/she interviewed misunderstand the Trump coalition.
Most of us who support Trump conservative, or other, have NO PROBLEM with a government shutdown! Most of us KNOW that the government is over budgeted and it is nothing a but tax-dollar sucking vampire!
SHUT IT DOWN! Is NOT going to hurt Trump!
>> I didn’t read the article
Funny. The Quartz article is enumerated into 4 sequential sections.
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