With just hours to spare before a midnight deadline and after two days of gridlock in the U.S. House, Democrats have agreed to back a pared-down stopgap spending bill. This happened after Republicans accepted a pared-down version that doesn’t include Donald Trump’s demand for an immediate increase in the public debt limit. With the measure easily passing a two-thirds threshold for fast-track consideration of House bills (all 34 “no” votes were from hardcore Republican fiscal hawks who typically oppose any spending measures that don’t include deep cuts in domestic programs), there’s no doubt the Senate (still controlled by Democrats for a couple more weeks) and the White House (where President Biden is in office for another month) will approve the agreement. Even if the delay in getting the bill onto Joe Biden’s desk causes a technical government shutdown, it won’t last long enough to matter.
The whole series of events went in a strange direction after Elon Musk blew up a bipartisan spending agreement via a savage social-media campaign and then Donald Trump complicated everything by demanding an immediate debt-limit increase. But Democrats showed they haven’t lost their fighting spirit even though they will soon lose some of their leverage when Trump’s presidency and a Republican-controlled Senate arrive next month. After Trump’s version of the stopgap bill went down dramatically on December 19 when all but two Democrats and 38 Republicans opposed it, House Speaker Mike Johnson was backed into a stripped-down bill with no debt-limit increase and some Democratic-supported spending provisions added back in from the original bill. Though most Republicans (including Musk) interpreted the series of events as two steps forward, two steps back, and thus a non-defeat, it’s pretty clear Democrats blocked the Musk and Trump maneuvers that might have brought an early start to a Trump-dominated Washington. The enacted bill means the blame game over an unnecessary shutdown is no longer an issue, so the two parties can start the New Year fresh.
But there has been one related development of deep concern to Democrats going forward: Johnson and other congressional Republicans got Trump to agree to the deletion of debt-limit language in exchange for a “handshake agreement” that the GOP will address that issue in a budget-reconciliation bill Congress is expected to take up early in the 2025 session. Because a lot of conservative Republicans hate the idea of a debt-limit increase without a guarantee of big domestic spending cuts, the “handshake agreement” has some scary promises on that front:
That “first reconciliation package” (Republicans are planning two in 2025) was originally supposed to be devoted strictly to steps needed to initiate the mass-deportation plans for undocumented immigrants and to shift the nation’s energy policies into a “drill drill drill” posture focused on fossil fuels. Now, it looks as if Trump has been promised that it will include his debt-limit fetish along with massive cuts in entitlement spending. Since Trump has repeatedly promised not to cut Social Security and Medicare (though he has been known to abandon his promises when they are inconvenient), that could mean, early in the year, the GOP will go after Medicaid, Obamacare subsidies, and other programs affecting poor or unhealthy people with a claw hammer. That’s aside from the big cuts in non-entitlement domestic programs sure to come along with the current stopgap spending bill expires in March, plus still more spending cuts in a second reconciliation bill later in the year to offset tax cuts.
The programs saved from a shutdown or immediate cuts this week have a shaky future ahead, and Democrats will have to show the kind of strategic chops they displayed this week again and again.
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