Republican members of Congress returned home from the recent short recess, and many of them walked into a hornet's nest when holding town halls.
Many constituents expressed anger at some of the cuts made by Elon Muk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
“It’s easy to be critical, but the people voted for change in November, and that’s exactly what they’re getting,” California Rep. Jay Obernolte said in an interview.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “that the other party’s chosen to turn this into a political stunt.”
Indeed, many GOP members reported organized Democratic and liberal groups showing up at their town halls, heckling and catcalling.
“I think they were uninformed people, so I really kind of discount that,” said Rep. Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin. “I think once you’re informed you realize that we’ve got a lot of financial problems.”
“I’ve not heard anybody say they didn’t want to cut anything, it’s just they don’t like Elon,” Rep. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma told reporters.
Indeed, Congress is in the process of trying to come up with a budget that cements many of Musk's cuts for the next fiscal year. Congress is bumping up against a deadline of March 14 before the lights begin to go out in Washington.
According to Budget Chair Tom Cole, the two sides are very close.
“I think we've moved a long way on the numbers. We're very close. I would say essentially there,” Cole told reporters. “The real question is conditions on presidential action. And look, there's no way a Republican Senate and Republican House are going to limit what a Republican president can do.”
Unfortunately, this is just about the time when a trap door opens beneath your feet, and you plunge into oblivion. And the Democrats have fashioned a doozy of a trap door. Democrats insist on adding conditions to stop Trump from withholding funding that Congress already appropriated.
Dictating to the president how he should interpret his powers is a "poison pill" that Democrats know will be a step beyond what the GOP is willing to do and, almost certainly, would elicit a sure-fire veto from Trump.
“It really is now down to presidential powers,” Cole said. He added that “nobody can make a deal if our leaders don't support the deal” and that he is “certainly not interested in sending a bill to the president that he's not willing to sign.”
Across the Capitol, the Senate’s top appropriators met privately Monday night. “We’re making good progress,” Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the chamber’s top Democratic appropriator, said as she left Appropriations Chair Susan Collins’ office. The Maine Republican delivered a similar readout.
Congress will likely need at least a short-term stopgap to extend the funding deadline, Collins said, even if leaders can reach an overall deal this week. From there, appropriators would need to reach a bipartisan agreement on a dozen totals for each of the individual annual funding measures and then hash out the specifics of those bills, a process that usually takes at least a month.
Some Democratic members would prefer a full-year stop-gap funding bill, taking the government through September 30. The problem with that is it's a budget of Biden priorities. It's also a budget that is running a $2 trillion deficit. It's an unacceptable alternative.
Some may look forward to a partial or total government shutdown. That attitude ignores the historical reality that every single Continuing Resolution (CR) that's been passed in the last 30 years has resulted in trillions of dollars of additional spending in the budget out years.
The budget includes data for the current year, the previous year, and the nine years after the budget year. Any increases in the current year are baked into future budgets. It makes budgeting a sham when having to cut based on numbers unrelated to the current year.
Passing a budget is the one, constitutional duty that Congress absolutely has to do. It's been 27 years since Congress was able to complete the entire budget process, passing all 12 appropriations bills in regular order.
It looks like it will be 28 after the next shutdown drama is complete.
