GOP won’t have long to enjoy tax bill win

WASHINGTON — After nearly a year of frustration, dysfunction and infighting, Republicans feel they are on the cusp of demonstrating that they can govern, with final approval of a massive tax-cut plan possibly just weeks away.

The legislation, which passed the Senate early Saturday, has become deeply unpopular, in part because Democrats have portrayed it as a giveaway to multinational corporations. But everyone in the GOP — from President Donald Trump to the lowliest rank-and-file Republican — has been desperate to show they can win, at something.

Even the biggest Republican critic of the tax plan thinks this legislation gives the party something to brag about. "On our side of the aisle, I think most people will certainly tout it as a win. You know, it's an accomplishment," Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee said a few hours before casting the only Republican no vote against the proposal, because it would add $1 trillion to the debt.

Yet, if they're not careful, Republicans could easily stumble into a separate chaotic, year-end negotiation on government funding. All that talk of knowing how to govern, because Republicans did something they like to do — cut taxes — could get swept aside by a partial shutdown of the government during the holiday season, fueled by an issue that has bedeviled their party for more than a decade: immigration.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is standing firm against quick passage of a bipartisan plan to provide permanent legal status for about 1 million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. "This doesn't have to be addressed in the next two weeks," McConnell said Saturday in a telephone interview from Kentucky, where he was taking a victory lap after the passage of the tax bill.

He vowed that there would not be a government shutdown but appeared to be daring Democrats into a showdown over an issue that does not face a deadline until March — when Trump has ordered the end of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave temporary legal status to the "dreamers."

Now, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D, have to decide on their next move. On Friday, after The Washington Post reported that Trump is telling friends he would win a showdown with Democrats, Schumer criticized the president for his brinkmanship.

"It's disappointing but maybe not surprising that President Trump appears to be putting politics before the well-being of the American people," Schumer said.

Falling into a government shutdown would violate the first political principle that McConnell expressed just days before Republicans took control of the Senate and House in January 2015: Don't be "scary."

Back then he did not want to do anything that would alarm voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Now that Republicans have both the presidency and full control of Congress, his lieutenants have taken up that mantra.

"There's still a lot of work to be done on other things," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a member of the GOP leadership team, said before the tax vote. "I think it's important to keep the government open and functioning."

This next negotiation is different. The tax bill is using fast-track rules reserved for certain fiscal bills and is therefore allowed to pass with a simple majority — which happened Saturday when 51 of 52 Republicans supported the tax plan.

Now, on the spending legislation, McConnell needs at least 60 votes to clear a filibuster and keep the federal agencies funded. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., knows he has a block of several dozen rebellious conservatives who regularly refuse to vote for government funding bills.

That means the GOP leaders need to do business with Schumer and Pelosi this time around. But the two already backed out of one meeting with Trump, Ryan and McConnell because the president preemptively declared that the Democrats were "soft on crime" and saw no "deal" possible on funding because of the immigration standoff.

Back in September, Trump agreed to a December deadline for government funding in a deal with the Democratic leaders, telling them that he also would support their position on the dreamers. That deadline is Friday.

The year-end spending bill became the focal point for Democrats and some Republicans looking to resolve the dreamer situation, the most politically charged aspect of the immigration debate. Now, the spending bill is caught in a tangle of issues that has prompted McConnell and other senior Republicans to say immigration will be dealt with next year, before the March deadline.

But an influential list of Democrats, from senior Hispanic lawmakers to 2020 presidential aspirants, have vowed to oppose a spending bill if it does not resolve the DACA issue, which will put pressure on Pelosi and Schumer to get something more ironclad than Trump's word from back in September.

McConnell could not say how he could assure the Democratic leaders that it would be dealt with early next year. Barrasso went a step further, daring Democrats to block the spending bills and shut down the government over "people who are here in our country illegally."

"If that is the rallying cry of the Democrats, I think that they will clearly be blamed," he predicted of a potential shutdown.

Instead, Republicans would like to set up this sequence of events: pass a two-week extension of agency funding with Dec. 22 as the new deadline; negotiate a long-term budget framework with Democrats that allows for more defense and domestic spending; then approve a longer-term stopgap funding bill into late January or February.

"There isn't going to be a government shutdown," McConnell proclaimed.

That might be up to Schumer and Pelosi to decide.