Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump surprises GOP with deal
President stuns GOP with move on debt ceiling, Harvey aid bill
President negotiates Harvey aid bill and debt ceiling extension with Democrats.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump overruled congressional Republicans and his own Treasury secretary Wednesday, to cut a deal with Democrats to fund the government and raise the federal borrowing limit.
The immediate goal was forging an agreement to speed money for Hurricane Harvey relief, but in the process the president brazenly rolled his own party’s leaders.
In the course of a relatively brief negotiating session at the White House, Trump appeared to be in deal-making mode, siding with the Democratic leaders — “Chuck and Nancy,” as he amiably referred later to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — as they pushed for the three-month deal, brushing aside the urgings of GOP leaders and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin for a much longer extension to the debt limit.
Republicans want that longer allowance to avoid having to take another vote on the politically toxic issue before the 2018 congressional elections.
Trump then boarded a plane to North Dakota with Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, in an effort to garner bipartisan support for tax legislation that Republican leaders are crafting on a partisan basis.
“We had a very good meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, not bothering to mention House Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who also were present. “We agreed to a three-month extension on debt ceiling, which they consider to be sacred, very important.”
Trump said: “We had a very good meeting, we essentially came to a deal, and I think the deal will be very good.”
The deal promises to speed the $7.9 billion Hurricane Harvey aid bill, which passed the House 419-3 with 12 members not voting Wednesday, to Trump’s desk before disaster accounts run out later this week.
Reps. Justin Amash, RMich., Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., voted no. The Harvey measure now moves to the Senate, where leaders plan to hold a vote by the end of the week.
The move also buys almost three months, until Dec. 15, for Washington to try to solve myriad other issues, including more funding for the military, immigration and health care, and a longer-term increase in the government’s borrowing authority to avoid a first-ever default.
Trump cut the deal at the White House just hours after Ryan had slammed the idea of the three-month extension sought by Democrats as “ridiculous.”
The session painted a vivid portrait of discord at the highest ranks of the Republican Party.
After an angry August that Trump spent lobbing attacks at fellow Republicans, specifically targeting McConnell for the failure of health care legislation, the president wasted little time once Congress came back this week in demonstrating his disdain for the GOP House and Senate leaders charged with shepherding his agenda into law.
At first, in Wednesday’s Oval Office meeting, the Republicans lobbied for an 18-month debt ceiling extension, then 12 months and then six, but Trump waved them off. As Mnuchin continued to press an economic argument in favor of a longer term, Trump cut him off mid-sentence.
At another point, the meeting lost focus when Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump entered to raise an unrelated issue on child care tax credits. Details of the meeting were disclosed by several people briefed on the proceedings who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
McConnell did not sugarcoat what happened when he addressed reporters later.
“In the meeting down at the White House, as I indicated, the president agreed with Sen. Schumer and Congresswoman Pelosi to do a three-month CR and a debt ceiling into December, and that’s what I will be offering based on the president’s decision,” McConnell said. “CR” refers to a continuing resolution, which will extend existing government funding levels into mid-December.
Asked whether he was surprised to see the president side with Democrats against his own party leadership, McConnell responded: “Look, the president can speak for himself, but his feeling was we needed to come together, not create a picture of divisiveness at a time of genuine national crisis, and that was the rationale.”
Trump achieved the opposite.
“The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad,” Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said over Twitter.
“Hopefully we’ll realize that negotiating with Democrats doesn’t normally produce outstanding results,” said Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus.
Schumer was as pleased in the aftermath as McConnell and other Republicans were dour.
“Today was a good day in a generally partisan town,” he said. “The bottom line is, the president listened to the arguments. We think we made a very reasonable and strong argument. And, to his credit, he went with the better argument.”
Not all Democrats were so thrilled with the deal.
Some were upset it did not include protections for the estimated 800,000 socalled Dreamers, who Trump threatened with deportation Tuesday when he announced his decision to end the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival program that covers young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
“So Trump attacks our Dreamers and the next day the Democrats walk in there and say, ‘Oh, let’s just have a nice timeout,’ while they’re all suffering?” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill. “That is what is wrong with Democrats. They don’t stand up.”