Shutdown closer with each tick, tick, tick
WASHINGTON – Congress has until Friday to reach agreement on a thicket of thorny issues, and the talks haven’t been going very smoothly.
That means President Trump and lawmakers on Capitol Hill are hurtling toward shutdown of the federal government.
Funding is set to run out at midnight Friday.
Here are four major obstacles lawmakers face in their efforts to forge a deal:
Spending caps
Lawmakers are faced with tight budget caps, agreed to in 2011, that limit how much they can spend for the rest of fiscal year 2018 and beyond.
Republicans and Democrats want to lift those caps — GOP leaders want a big boost for defense; Democrats say any defense increase should be paired with an equal hike for domestic programs.
House and Senate leaders have been negotiating over how much to increase the caps and how to divide the pot between defense and domestic spending. They insist the talks are going well, of- fering no details.
“We think the solution is in sight,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Thursday.
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., offered a similarly rosy assessment, but he noted that once they have settled on a top-line number, lawmakers on the appropriations committees in the House and Senate will need time to craft a bill that sets specific funding levels for every government agency and program.
In other words, Congress will almost certainly have to pass another short--
term measure before Jan. 19 to buy more time. Whether such a stopgap funding bill could pass is unclear; opposition to a short-term deal is bubbling up from conservatives and liberals alike.
The DREAMers
The partisan debate over how to deal with the DREAMers — 800,000 immigrants who were brought to the USA illegally as children — grew acrimonious last week after President Trump allegedly disparaged Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations and suggested the United States should encourage more immigration from countries such as Norway.
The remarks sparked an uproar, and condemnation poured in from Capitol Hill and around the globe. Trump and several Republicans who were at the meeting denied the president insulted the countries or couldn’t recall his exact words. Trump said he used “tough” language during the session. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said Trump’s comments were “vile” and “racist.”
Sunday, Trump tweeted that any deal to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protected DREAMers “is probably dead because Democrats really don’t want it.”
Durbin and several other lawmakers went to the White House on Thursday to pitch an agreement they’d reached on immigration — granting the DREAMers a path to citizenship, allocating $2.7 billion for border security and tweaking a visa program open to applicants from countries with low immigration rates to the USA. Trump rejected the deal, declaring it “outlandish” and a “setback” in a series of tweets Friday morning. He accused Democrats of wanting to shut down the government.
Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer of New York insisted on attaching a DREAMers compromise to the spending bill, saying it’s the only viable path to getting it done. Otherwise, he said, it will never pass the House, where many conservatives are opposed to extending protections to the DREAMers.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Thursday that any immigration measure “will not be a part of any overall spending agreement.” That leaves the two sides divided over substance as well as process.
Disaster aid
As if the negotiations weren’t fraught enough, there are sharp disagreements over a disaster aid package for Texas, Florida and other places devastated by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.
The House approved an $81 billion bill that would help Western states recover from wildfires and help Southern states and U.S. territories rebuild from the hurricanes.
The Senate declined to take up the measure because Democrats were concerned that it wouldn’t go nearly far enough to help Puerto Rico, where more than a third of the island remains without electricity.
Lawmakers from Florida and Texas have been adamant that their support for a spending bill to keep the government open could be contingent on a deal that helps their battered region recover.
Health programs
The least controversial part of the negotiations is funding for community health centers and a children’s health insurance program called CHIP.
CHIP is a federal-state matching program that serves nearly 9 million children whose families would not be able to afford insurance. Funding for the program expired Sept. 30. Congress approved a short-term patch, but it’s not clear how long that money will last.
Lawmakers agree on the need for a long-term reauthorization of CHIP, but they disagree over how to cover the $14.5 billion annual cost.
The same goes for community health center funding. It ran out Sept. 30, and lawmakers have been bickering ever since about how to pay for a reauthorization that both parties say they want.
If Congress doesn’t act soon, the National Association of Community Health Centers said, 28,000 sites could close, more than 50,000 staffers could be laid off, and 9 million individuals could lose access to care.
House and Senate leaders have been negotiating over how much to increase the (spending) caps. They insist the talks are going well, offering no details.