House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin have reportedly reached a deal to raise spending levels for both defense and nondefense programs and extend the debt ceiling for two years.
A source close to the negotiations told Politico that the negotiations "are down to some technical language issues." The outlines are for $75 billion in offsets, half of what the administration was initially demanding. Those cuts are being characterized as "new spending cuts," meaning they wouldn't actually affect any current programs, but would apply to future spending and eventually could be reversed by Congress entirely.
The deal is reported to be $1.3 trillion total in spending, a $320 billion increase over the 2011 limits, with parity in increases between defense and nondefense programs. Significantly, the deal would permanently end the automatic cuts included in the Budget Control Act of 2011, the sequester requirement that would require $125 billion in automatic cuts when a budget deal isn't reached. That's big. Maybe next time around they could repeal the law entirely. And remove the debt ceiling entirely, since it isn't a real thing and is pretty much only a political hostage-taking tool. A blogger who has to write about it every time can dream, anyway.
What the deal also does, and this could be a problem in the House, is set aside hot-button issues such as the Hyde Amendment and Trump's border spending. Democrats wanted to end Trump's ability to shift money around to spend on border atrocities and to lift the Hyde Amendment preventing any federal funds from being used for abortion, but it looks like that's not going to happen. That likely will cause some Democratic defections.
The larger problem is, as always, Trump, who will have his acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney whispering in his ear to reject it all, provided the rest of the staff can't keep Mulvaney away. It's not just Mulvaney, though. His old maniac colleagues in the House have been talking to Trump, telling him to demand deeper cuts and to "be prepared to walk away from this if necessary." That's according to Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson, who says, "I'm encouraged after speaking with the president." They're the only ones, except maybe Trump, who want another government shutdown and who don't see any danger at all in the country defaulting on its debts. It seems like it's all going to depend on whether Trump is too consumed by his current race war to devote any of his meager brain cells to messing with this.