Government shutdown needed, Trump says
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday called for a government shutdown later this year and suggested the Senate might need to prohibit future filibusters, threatening to fracture Washington’s basic underpinnings to make progress on his legislative goals.
His latest outbursts could cast a shadow over how Congress approaches numerous bills this year. Trump wants Congress to overhaul the tax code, approve a $1 trillion infrastructure package and raise or suspend the debt ceiling before the government begins falling behind on its obligations.
He has made little legislative progress in any of these areas, and he could be on the verge of being dealt another stinging defeat as House Republicans again splinter on a health-care bill. Trump’s new threats suggest he will jettison attempts at compromise and instead use the bombastic partisan warfare he employed during his campaign.
The threats come after White House officials said they were furious at what they viewed as gloating by Democrats over the terms of a short-term spending bill that funds government operations through Sept. 30. In morning Twitter posts, Trump said he had to make concessions because Senate rules require 60 votes to pass legislation and Republicans control only 52 seats in the 100-seat chamber.
He wrote that Republicans needed to pick up more seats in the 2018 midterm elections or consider changing filibuster rules so that the Senate’s minority party cannot block bills.
“Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ in September to fix mess!” he wrote.
Trump could easily trigger a partial government shutdown in October by directing Republicans not to negotiate with Democrats or by refusing to sign a spending bill that Congress sends him for approval.
White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Tuesday that Congress needs to return to the practice of passing one-year appropriations bills and sending them to the White House for approval, not continuing the recent practice of lurching from one stopgap spending bill to the next.
“This is a change-agent president, and he’s going to change Washington, D.C.,” Mulvaney said. “And if it takes a shutdown, that’s what it’s going to take.”
Mulvaney added, though, that a shutdown is not “desirable.”
Mulvaney plans to release a full-scale budget in midMay that is supposed to help lawmakers craft their 2018 budgets.
The White House did win numerous concessions during the recent negotiations with Congress over the stopgap spending bill. Democrats agreed, for example, to $1.5 billion in new money for border security and roughly $21 billion in new defense spending, two of Trump’s priorities. But, Mulvaney said, Democrats tried to “spike the football” because they blocked new funding for a wall along the Mexico border.
Trump’s suggestion that spending bills should be able to pass with a simple majority was quickly dismissed by numerous top Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
And Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he was “deeply disappointed” in Trump’s calls for a shutdown.
“It is truly a shame that the president is degrading it because he didn’t get 100 percent of what he wanted,” Schumer said.
Top White House officials are hopeful that Trump can reach a deal with lawmakers to overhaul the tax code later this year, but budget rules will make that difficult without Democratic support. Democrats have so shown no willingness to accept the large-scale tax cuts that Trump proposed last week.
The last government shutdown, in 2013 when Republicans controlled Congress, lasted more than two weeks. During that partial shutdown, the Obama administration said that at one point 850,000 federal employees were furloughed without pay. Many other federal employees continued to work but were not paid until the shutdown ended. In total, the furloughs accounted for 6.6 million days of lost work. The lost productivity cost the government $2 billion, the Obama White House said at the time.
Many government functions, such as law enforcement and national security, continued, but national parks closed.
Once government shutdowns end, federal employees typically are repaid for the time they were on furlough.