Trump signs bill to aid victims
WASHINGTON—When President Donald Trump convened congressional leaders this week to negotiate disaster aid and avert a month-end fiscal crisis, the Oval Office conversation quickly turned to what Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called “the currency of the realm”: votes.
Republican leaders wanted to avoid a short-term accord, and Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin argued that financial markets would prefer a deal to push the next deadline out 18 months, past the midterm election. At every step in the negotiation, Pelosi raised a simple question: Do Republicans have the votes?
Pelosi, perhaps the most skilled vote-counter in Congress, knew they did not. Back and forth it went until Trump cut off debate, stunning all sides by agreeing with Democrats on a stopgap measure to fund the government and lift the nation’s borrowing limit only until Dec. 8, and provide Hurricane Harvey aid.
“The president has been in a business where knowing your numbers has been essential,” Pelosi said Friday in an interview with reporters. “He saw they didn’t have the votes. And we had the plan.”
Congress gave final approval Friday to the surprise package, which Trump swiftly signed into law, giving Democrats momentum over Republicans in the battles ahead over tax cuts and deportation protections for young immigrants known as “Dreamers.”
The outcome was unexpected even a few days ago, but it shows the power that Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., are still able to wield in a Congress controlled by a Republican majority unable to present a unified front and with a political newcomer in the White House willing to make deals.
More Democrats than Republicans backed the package, which provided $15.2 billion in disaster assistance and temporarily ended the standoff over government funding and the debt limit.
For Trump, still frustrated by the collapse of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, it was a lesson that his agenda may have more success if he reaches across the aisle to broker compromises with Democrats.
Democrats—who had been largely ignored or attacked by Trump as “obstructionists”—are seizing on the opening, pushing for a seat at the table for Trump’s tax overhaul. They also seem to have won his support for legislation to provide protected status for the young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, despite his decision announced this week to terminate the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA.
“Now we have a lot more to get done, and we hope we can work in the
same bipartisan way on the issues that remain before us,” Schumer said this week.
Republicans grumbled, sometimes angrily, at the quick turn of events. On Friday, ahead of the House vote on the aid and fiscal deal package, Mnuchin and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney were met with audible unrest during a private meeting with House Republicans upset at being asked to take on more debt and spending without offsets.
“Everyone was moaning and groaning
and grunting, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’” complained Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, after voting against the deal. “Not good.”
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., has tried to maintain his hold on the majority, but lawmakers are increasingly worried about facing voters back home with little to show for the first eight-plus months in office. After early stumbles, confidence is slipping that Ryan and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., have a strategy
for success on tax reform and the spending issues ahead this fall.
“Here we are, backed into a corner— it doesn’t take a genius” to see the outcome, said Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., another Freedom Caucus member.
Conservatives don’t blame Trump for the disarray as much as they do their own House and Senate leadership, who they do not believe sufficiently sketched out a legislative game plan to accomplish the goals of a health care overhaul and tax reform they promised voters.