There are now 13 calendar days left before the next government shutdown deadline of February 8. The House and Senate are both out until Monday afternoon. Meanwhile, if you search for news about the pending shutdown, all you get are stories about who is blaming whom for the last one.
All we've got today is Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (excuse me, Dr. Rand Paul) showboating about preventing shutdowns. I know—you're shocked.
Instead of government shutting down operations over stalled funding in the future, the bill would institute a one percent cut to then-current funding levels for any agency, program, and activity that Congress failed to fund by the start of the fiscal year (October 1). Every 90 days thereafter, funding would be reduced by another one percent if an agreement is still not enacted.
Yes, that's silly. But it's Rand Paul, so you already knew that. Still, a review of how we got here in the first place demonstrates just how big of a fail it is to suggest the basic problem of a broken Congress can be solved by applying some sort of punitive trigger mechanism.
Because that's what we've got now. It's called the Budget Control Act. Let's go all the way back to 2011 when the Affordable Care Act had passed and Republicans were apoplectic and doing everything they could in their power to deny President Obama anything, and that included government spending. Because back then it was all about the deficit. So they created the Budget Control Act which created a Super Committee (remember that?) of six Republicans and six Democrats charged with finding $1.5 trillion in savings over the next decade. To make certain that the Super Committee would really work, they included dire consequences for its failure—the sequester! It would impose strict spending cuts, across the board in both mandatory and discretionary spending, to achieve that $1.5 trillion in savings over 10 years. By the way, Republicans just pissed away $1.5 trillion in tax cuts to the rich (just a fun coincidence).
Of course the Super Committee failed. Of course the threat of automatic spending cuts—which we've now lived with for six years—was not enough to make Republicans play together like good boys and girls and work in a concerted way with the Obama White House and Democrats to govern. So we've got the sequester and the automatic cuts that are slowly suffocating government.
It’s popular to dismiss the BCA caps as a shell game. And certainly the 2011 agreement never lived up to its promise of a larger deficit reduction package combining new tax revenue with savings from government benefit programs not subject to the annual appropriations process.
But since 2010, when Democrats last controlled Congress and the White House, the drop in non-defense spending has been significant.
For example, the current BCA cap for 2018 is about $130 billion, or 20 percent, below the adjusted baseline for spending in those 2010 appropriations bills if projected forward to this year. And even under some of the compromises being discussed now, non-defense appropriations in 2018 would end up well below a second, more conservative marker: the 2011 continuing resolution enacted after Republicans took back control of the House in the 2010 elections.
The BCA and the sequester are now just business as usual, a way for the Republican-controlled Congress to keep cutting domestic spending and a thorn in the side of defense hawks, who nevertheless are consistently able to find budget gimmicks to lessen defense spending cuts. But it's all coming to a head with the hawks losing patience and the Democrats holding the line on parity between domestic and defense spending. Democrats have some power here with the 60-vote threshold requirement for spending bills in the Senate.
The BCA set the Congress up to govern by crisis, to keep funding government through continuing resolutions that last months or weeks or days, and to spend the interim squabbling. And of course, passing massive tax cuts that will make the whole problem even worse. So here we are. And Rand Paul is probably the last person with the seriousness and ability to deal with it.