The potential for a government spending crisis and shutdown is our new normal, even when we have a supposedly unified government with Republicans controlling everything. It's so normal, that leaders in Congress are treating it as a given and are now scrambling to try to prevent it. That, at least, is improvement. We're five months away from the next deadline (though they'll be out from late July through Labor Day) so they're almost ahead of the game.
With Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) taking over the Senate Appropriations Committee, members of that panel are schedule to hold a private meeting Monday afternoon to discuss ways to move spending bills quickly to the Senate floor, according to GOP and Democratic aides.
Shelby and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking member on Appropriations, also want to meet with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) later this week to try to hash out a plan for moving those bills, Senate sources said. […]
On the House side, GOP leaders are planning a special Republican Conference meeting on Friday to discuss strategy for quickly moving annual spending bills. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and other top House Republicans want lawmakers to get behind their strategy to approve as many spending bills as quickly as possible, and then pass a continuing resolution in early September that will extend past Election Day.
They're moving forward, interestingly, without any input from either the House or Senate budget committees, which seem to be boycotting the whole process of creating a budget for the fiscal year beginning October 1. Never mind they're required to do it by the Congressional Budget Act—they aren't. It's actually more like the Republican congressional leadership is stopping them: "It is refusing to allow the budget committees to develop a fiscal 2019 budget resolution so there's no way the full House and Senate have to take a vote on the $1 trillion-plus deficits the Congressional Budget Office now projects will occur through 2028."
A vote on a budget resolution would either force congressional Republicans to go on record in favor of the bigger-than-life deficits or vote against a budget that authoritatively projects the impact of the tax cuts and spending increases most of them just approved, both of which would be politically problematic. Their third choice—vote for a budget with greatly reduced deficits because of proposed cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—would be even more politically unpalatable.
Wonderful. Meanwhile, Trump is still working with Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California (who wants to be the new speaker) to make them all re-vote on the budget they passed in March and cut something like $60 billion out of. They expect to have that rescissions package done next month, even though the entire Senate, from Majority Leader Mitch McConnnell on down, have said "no way."
No matter how much Republican leadership think they are be preparing for what's to come and averting disaster, they aren't. Trump won't let them.