Popular vote loser Donald Trump's plan, cooked up with his "guy" in the House, for a budget do-over has hit a big snag—Senate Republicans. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has been working with the administration on a package of rescissions, parts of the $1.3 trillion spending bill they just passed last week that they want to now defund. It's perfectly legal, but also controversial.
So while it requires just a simple majority in the Senate, two Republican senators whose votes are essential for it to pass are saying not so fast.
“I’d obviously have to look at what’s in it, but I do not understand reopening a hard negotiation on a budget package that has just been completed,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who chairs the subcommittee on transportation, housing and urban development, and related agencies. “To me, the administration would be better advised to focus on this coming fiscal year. We’re just starting up the hearings in the Appropriations Committee, and that would be a far better approach.”
Asked Monday if appropriators were throwing cold water on the notion of pursuing rescissions, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said, “Well, this one is.”
“Just off the top, my initial response is no,” said Murkowski, who chairs the subcommittee on interior, environment and related agencies. “You know, we worked hard. It’s not a perfect package. Nothing is. But as individual appropriators, I know we all worked hard on our accounts and tried to get the priorities that we could.”
As Senate appropriators, these two have a very big say on what happens with spending. They could stop this on the Senate side even before it got to the floor, provided Majority Leader McConnell allowed regular order on it. And if he didn't, there would be even more reason for these two to withhold their votes.
This makes Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), incoming chair of the committee after the retirement of Thad Cochran, also reluctant to take it on. But also, despite that he's going to be the chair of the goddamned committee it would have to go through, the White House hasn't talked to him about it. At all. "I would like to see the particulars," he said. "It might be something serious. It might be something debatable. It might go nowhere. But I don't know. I haven't seen anything."
He's also concerned, with good reason, that opening up this can of worms would make it impossible to come up with a spending bill everyone could agree on for the next fiscal year. Which starts in October. "If we cut a deal with somebody, we want to honor it, okay?" Even Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the Republican whip, is skeptical, saying "I think there are a lot of our members who feel like we litigated these issues over the last couple of years. We came up with budget numbers and everybody agreed to ’em." It would be a "tough vote," he says, for some of his members.
This makes it unlikely that the big plan to undo a chunk of the spending bill will make it past the House. There are probably plenty of House Republicans urging the Senate to just go ahead and reject this thing now in hopes of the whole thing going away before they have to take a tough vote on it. It all depends on how much Speaker Paul Ryan feels the need to appease the hard-liners. Senate rejection doesn't mean, however, that Trump will give up on it and it doesn't mean he won't just go rogue and refuse to use the funding appropriated on programs he doesn't like.