WASHINGTON: After Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took the extraordinary step today of appearing at the White House to praise the just-announced Senate budget deal, the first thought that came to mind was — can this pass the House?
Mattis was asked if he knew whether the House Republican leadership was enthusiastic about Senate deal. He was suitably cautious, saying he was “optimistic” the two chambers could come together and approve a two-year budget plan.
The deal apparently would raise the budget cap on defense spending by $80 billion for fiscal 2018 (this fiscal year, which we’re already four months into) and $85 billion for fiscal 2019 (the president’s request for which will probably be announced around Feb. 12).
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders touted the agreement, saying it achieved the administration’s “top priority: a much-needed increase in funding for our national defense.” She said it increases budget caps, ends the sequester, and provides certainty for the next two years.
But let’s be honest. It doesn’t end the sequester, because that is part of the Budget Control Act, which remains in force. If passed, the deal is a Get Out Of Jail Free pass for the next two years — only. “The bottom line is that, thanks to President Trump, we can now have the strongest military we have ever had,” Sanders claimed.
Key to getting this agreement was a simple thing: Republicans gave Democrats what they have wanted since 2011, more domestic spending. The cap on non-defense spending would lift by $63 billion this year and $68 billion next year, which Todd Harrison, budget expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says gave Dems as much “as they could have wished for in their wildest dreams.”
It does the same for defense hawks in the GOP, basically giving Sen. John McCain and Rep. Mac Thornberry, who led the fight to boost defense spending, a complete and utter win.
McConnell and Schumer acknowledged McCain’s role today. “I want to join the Republican Leader in saluting Senator McCain,” Schumer said. “We wish he were here because he has fought so valiantly and so long for a good agreement for the armed forces.”
“This puts defense spending at the maximum level anyone thought was possible for the next two years, quite frankly,” Harrison said. It is $54 billion above the spending caps and $26 billion more than the president requested in his 2018 defense request. “This is line with what McCain and Thornberry have been pushing all along.”
Expect the White House to crow once this bill passes. President Trump declared during his State of the Union that he would “ask” Congress to kill the defense sequester. In typical Trump fashion, the president was addressing something that doesn’t really exist — a defense sequester — and he didn’t commit any presidential capital to getting rid of the Budget Control Act — which sets the budget caps that the sequester mechanism enforces.
So, given the lack of White House guidance, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer got together and hammered out a deal they’re pretty sure the 100 individuals who sit in the Senate could support.
This is not a surprise to Breaking D readers who read Mackenzie Eaglen’s brave and prescient prediction before Christmas that there would be a two-year budget deal. She predicts passage, despite House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s taking to the House floor to convince members not to support the deal.
Eaglen, a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, is sanguine about the bill’s passage, notwithstanding the putative opposition of budget hawks in the Freedom Caucus.
“I’d say more than half of the Freedom Caucus will oppose the deal, but not all. Plus, defense hawks vastly outnumber fiscal hawks in the House and they will carry the day along with a sizeable chunk of Democrats,” she says in an email. “The question is not what the House will do but whether it can pass the Senate, and the answer is yes. Which means enough Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate will hold their nose and vote for it for a variety of different reasons.
“It will pass (eventually).”
What does this agreement demonstrate to the American public?
“Democrats were never actually opposed to the defense increase; they were just using it for leverage,” Harrison said. “And the Republicans, as much as they moan about busted budgets and the like, they were really just using it to get more defense spending.”
But there are larger forces at play, Harrison points out. “They (Congress) just passed a massive tax cut bill and the projected deficit of 2018 is going up. This bill will provide more stimulus for the economy on top of an economy that was doing just fine. You ask an economist what does this do — higher inflation, higher interest rates, and some of the gains in the stock market may evaporate.”
The national security effects of that are hard to predict.
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