There's so little urgency being displayed in Washington right now that you'd never imagine the nation is facing another government shutdown in two-and-a-half weeks. The popular vote loser is off swanning with the billionaires in Davos, and the Senate's been occupied with having to break tie votes on horrible nominees. But there's some movement happening—and that movement seems to be a result of Senate Democrats’ willingness to drop their demand for a solution for Dreamers.
“We’re viewing [immigration and spending] on separate terms because they are on separate paths,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Tuesday.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “procedural concession means we’ve got a deadline and a process,” Durbin added. “That to me is a significant step forward. It’s not everything I wanted, that’s for sure, but it’s a step forward.”
But House Democrats have signaled they are not ready to go along with a long-term budget deal without a fix to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that President Donald Trump is ending.
Go, House Democrats.
Looking at the separate budget track, that's where the Republican civil war kicks in. All those deficit peacock Republicans who were thrilled to pass a $1.5+ trillion tax giveaway are now balking at an increase in spending of $250 billion over two years. The defense hawks want to increase military spending over existing caps by at least $70 billion for fiscal 2018 and $80 billion in fiscal 2019. Democrats are insisting they won't let that happen without at least a $60 billion increase in domestic spending.
One way Republicans are considering meeting that demand is by deeming many domestic spending increases as "emergency" funding that doesn't count against caps set by the sequester. For example, Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole says that opioid funding would be included "for sure" outside of the caps.
But the immigration debate still hangs over discussion—particularly for the House, where Speaker Paul Ryan has completely ceded to the racist Freedom Caucus. "In some way, the most important budget negotiations are the negotiations on DACA," says Cole. "The phrase used to me [is], 'We're six inches away from a spending deal.' It's just simply the DACA issue and the immigration question."