Big budget: Last act of an anti-spending GOP Congress?
Is a budget-busting bill boosting just about every federal agency really the last big act of Congress before the November midterms?
This is, after all, a Congress controlled by a party that swept into power eight years ago on an anti-spending, anti-big-government wave.
“You know, there are a lot of discussions about the fact that maybe the Republican Party has lost its soul,” Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., who is retiring, said in a floor speech hours before the early Friday morning vote.
There is no rule that says they can’t do more this year. But this week’s $1.3 trillion spending bill is probably their last major achievement, as Congress observes what has become a tradition in these hyperpartisan times, settling into gridlock and girding for the midterm elections.
The more than 2,200-page spending bill passed — and not vetoed — gave the Pentagon its biggest spending increase in 15 years, a top GOP priority. But it also included full funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, despite President Donald Trump’s initial proposal to slash their funds from $465 million to $15 million.
Rep. Tom Reed, R-N.Y., who also opposed the bill, pointed to the Federal Reserve’s hike of a key interest rate last week. He warned that the benefits from the additional spending will hit taxpayers with larger debt and the financing of the more than $20 trillion debt.
“You’re going to eat that up in an interest payment in seconds given the nature of where the rates are going,” Reed said.
Plenty of Republicans disagreed with that sentiment. More than 60 percent of Republicans in the House and Senate voted for the legislation, a sign the GOP might be returning to its big-spending ways of early last decade.
Back then, amid a major rampup in defense spending at the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, Republicans accepted big increases in domestic spending as well and created a new entitlement within Medicare. GOP leaders at the time exploded the earmark system, allowing even the lowliest rank-and-file lawmaker to direct millions and millions of dollars to pet projects in their districts. Republicans believed the big spending helped shore up their incumbents’ standing back home.
By 2006, however, several lawmakers got caught up in FBI corruption probes involving earmarks-for-favors allegations, one of several factors that helped Democrats win the congressional majorities in midterms that year.
Republicans changed their stance when Barack Obama won the presidency, disavowing these pet projects and fully embracing the issue of slashing the debt. After winning the House majority in the 2010 midterms, GOP lawmakers forced a major fiscal showdown with Obama that ended with the Budget Control Act of 2011. That law was supposed to cut federal spending by nearly $1 trillion through a decade of spending caps to federal agency budgets.
Now, the Republican-led decision to bust those caps for the next two years raises the specter that the tough talk on deficits applied only when Democrats held the White House.
“Had the 2016 election gone a different way and we had a Democratic president, and we controlled the House and Senate, I can’t imagine us being in a situation where we would vote tonight or tomorrow for a bill that’s going to add $2 trillion in debt,” Corker said.
This time, though, most Republicans embraced the big spending, with one invoking Trump’s name as the main reason for his support: “House Passes President Trump’s America First Government Funding Bill.”
That was the news release headline from the office of Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia, a staunch conservative whose appointment to the Appropriations Committee earlier this decade seemed to signal that the days of big spending were coming to an end.
Republican after Republican issued news releases touting victories worth millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to local projects.
The political question going forward is whether this spending can help Republicans in the fall as they face an angry electorate. They’re the sorts of projects that might help with middle-of-theroad voters who want to see the government function.
But the conservative base has spent more than a decade railing against big government spending.