Congress comes back to work next week to clean up loose ends, push through a few more horrendous judges, pass a farm bill, and take care of that little matter of avoiding a government shutdown in the middle of December. The whomping House Republicans took Tuesday, even though they knew it was coming, might just have leadership and the maniacs in a nasty mood that they'll be tempted to take out on their favorite targets. In Mitch McConnell's words, "the three big entitlement programs that are very popular: Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid."
"There's been a bipartisan reluctance to tackle entitlement changes because of the popularity of the programs," he continued. "Hopefully at some point here we’ll get serious about this, we haven’t been yet." A lame duck session, the last days of united Republican rule, is his opportunity. It's also House Speaker Paul Ryan's "last hurrah," Nancy Altman of Social Security Works tells David Dayen. Nobody has been more focused on destroying the social safety net than Ryan. Here's their chance, and they've laid the groundwork.
There's still a budget sitting in the House that they could cut and paste from in a last ditch bill. It sets out $5.4 trillion in cuts over the next ten years from healthcare programs, from Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—$1 trillion from Medicaid, $537 billion from Medicare, and $4 billion from Social Security. But the most dangerous part of it is that it has reconciliation instructions that require $302 billion in mandatory program spending cuts, instructions that could allow the Senate to pass the legislation with a simple majority vote and avoid a Democratic filibuster. That has not passed in the House, but it's sitting there like a little time bomb for a soon to end Republican majority that might just feel like blowing everything up. Certainly, Trump would be happy with that. Don't forget his budget which goes directly after Medicare with a $237 billion cut, in one year.
Trump is going to prioritize his border wall funding over everything else in this last big budget fight for the year, which is a double-edged sword. The fight over that could be distracting enough that attacks on the safety net slip through while everyone is looking the other way. Or that might be what Republicans count on.