Wall Street Journal
By Kristina Peterson
March 18, 2018
Congress will enter its last major fiscal battle before November’s midterm elections this week, as lawmakers prepare to debate a mammoth spending bill that offers them the last chance to settle dozens of long-running policy fights.
Lawmakers are expected to unveil Monday a bill funding the government until October at ramped-up spending levels agreed to last month in a two-year budget deal. Over the weekend, congressional leaders were still haggling over a handful of policy issues that have divided the parties for weeks.
Democrats and Republicans have fought over whether to restore subsidies aimed at shoring up the Affordable Care Act and bar subsidies for insurers who cover abortion services. Also at issue are funding for immigration enforcement, a host of tax provisions and funding for a new rail tunnel into New York City—a fight that pits President Donald Trump against some Republicans from his region.
With the midterms approaching, lawmakers were widely expected to reach an agreement on the spending bill so that they could turn their attention to the intensifying battles for control of the House and Senate in November.
The spending bill must clear both the House and Senate before 12:01 a.m. on Saturday, when the government’s current funding expires, to avoid a partial shutdown. Last month, delays in the Senate caused Congress to briefly shutter the government before passing the spending bill needed to reopen it.
Congressional leaders are hoping to avoid another shutdown, but it isn’t clear that they have allotted enough time to pass legislation that likely will draw some opposition from both sides of the aisle. In the Senate, any lawmaker can hinder the chamber from speeding up its time-consuming procedures, as Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) did last month.
Conservatives, including Mr. Paul, have balked at the bill’s boost in funding above limits that Congress established in 2011 to try to rein in federal spending. The budget deal passed in February lifted overall spending levels above those limits for both military and domestic spending by almost $300 billion over two years, in addition to nearly $90 billion in disaster aid for states and territories hit by last year’s destructive storms and $140 billion in emergency military funds.
“Republicans don’t know how to stop spending money,” said Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs for FreedomWorks, a conservative group that is expected to oppose the spending bill.
Mr. Trump is urging GOP leaders to exclude $900 million in funding for at least one project: a tunnel under the Hudson River, the centerpiece of Amtrak’s proposed $30 billion Gateway Program. The president’s push has alarmed House Republicans from the region but pleased conservatives upset over the bill’s funding levels.
“Our hair should be on fire about the overspending,” said Rep. Mark Walker (R., N.C.), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 150 conservative House Republicans. “We’ve got to do better than this.”
Meanwhile, Democrats faced disappointments of their own in the bill, as it isn’t likely to include any extension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Mr. Trump ended the program, which shields young undocumented immigrants from deportation, in September and gave Congress until early March to pass a replacement.
Democrats tried to use their leverage on a spending bill in January to demand protections for the immigrants, often called Dreamers. But the resulting three-day government shutdown ended without any legislative deal over immigration and left Democrats wary of using such a tactic again.
Asked Sunday on Fox whether Democrats are abandoning DACA beneficiaries by not forcing a government shutdown over the issue, Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.) said, “We’re not going to have a shutdown, but I’m urging leaders to come together and understand there’s an emergency here. We have to move on a bipartisan basis.”
Federal judges have blocked the administration from winding down the DACA program for now, easing the pressure on lawmakers to reach an immediate deal.
Some Democrats in both chambers are likely to vote against the spending bill because the Dreamers’ fate remains unresolved. But many Democrats are likely to support legislation, because it includes funding for many of their other priorities, including child care assistance, medical research, infrastructure and combating the opioid epidemic.
“We got about 80% of what we were trying to get, and if you can’t accept 80%, then the system can’t function,” said Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, in an interview for C-Span.
Passage of the spending bill would mark the end of lawmakers’ practice in recent years of funding the government with a series of short-term patches.
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