Donald Trump has been at war with Democrats over spending cuts.
It is now to the point that Senator Schumer (D-N.Y.) is vowing to shut down the government during the next CR bill.
Speaker Johnson (R-LA) is brushing it all off, however, vowing that Trump is not nearly done pushing through megabills to fix what Democrats broke.
Schumer caved during Trump’s first CR spending bill, allowing the GOP to pass a procedural bill that would allow them to need only a majority to pass the CR bill.
After the BBB passed, Schumer says he will not cave this time.
The New York Democrat stated, “If Republicans cave to Donald Trump and gut these investments agreed to by both parties, that would be an affront — a huge affront — to the bipartisan appropriations process.
“It is absurd to expect Democrats to play along with funding the government if Republicans are just going to renege on a bipartisan agreement by concocting rescissions packages behind closed doors that can pass with only their votes, not the customary 60 votes required in the appropriation process.”
Donald Trump has threatened to pull back funding many times, but realistically, those threats are empty.
The only way previously approved funding can be cut is to pass a rescissions package, which is about to go through Congress now.
That package will be a challenge, however, as not all Republicans are on board for the bill to pass through.
For instance, Senator Collins (R-ME) stated, “I want to strike the rescission of funds for PEPFAR, which has an enormous record of success, having saved some 26 million lives over the course of the program, as well as preventing nearly 8 million infants from receiving AIDS from their infected mothers. So I can’t imagine why we would want to terminate that program.”
According to Speaker Johnson, the BBB was just the first spending bill that the GOP will push through Congress via reconciliation.
They now appear set to use reconciliation multiple times to, as he says, fix what Democrats screwed up in the government. The BBB was just the “first big step” in making this happen.
Johnson stated, "We have long planned for at least two, possibly three reconciliation bills, one in the fall and one next spring, that would continue to allow us to [enact our agenda] on a partisan basis, where we only need Republican votes, and we don't have to drag Democrats along.”
I am just trying to figure out how spending more is going to fix the mess that Democrats made over the last four years. The BBB is likely to add trillions to the national debt, something the GOP said it would cut into during the election season. I would imagine this announcement has people like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) cringing.
