Little legislative action expected before November
WASHINGTON» When Congress returns Monday, lawmakers will confront numerous critical issues — including trade, immigration and digital privacy — but they will be hard-pressed to act.
An absence of hard deadlines and the political realities of an election year mean the $1.3 trillion spending bill that President Donald Trump begrudgingly signed into law last month is probably the last significant legislation to pass Congress before voters go to polls in November.
Instead, the House is preparing to take a largely symbolic vote on a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget and try to reverse some spending while also finishing up a banking deregulation bill and drafting legislation to address the opioid crisis.
The Senate, meanwhile, is likely to spend much of the rest of the year trying to confirm Trump nominees including more judges as well as the president’s picks to lead the State Department and the CIA after last month’s Cabinet shuffle.
The lack of high-stakes legislating — compared with last year’s all-handson-deck GOP efforts to undo the Affordable Care Act, which ultimately failed, and pass a landmark tax overhaul, which is now law — is prompting grumbles from rank-and-file Republicans eager to do more with their majority at stake in November’s midterm elections.
“It was a darn good year taxes were down, regulations were down, the economy was growing,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-ohio, a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, describing 2017. “But 2018? We’ve done one (spending) bill that the American people strongly dislike, and certainly Republican voters strongly dislike . ... So, yeah, we got to do more this year.”
But there are obstacles to taking decisive action on key GOP agenda items over the next seven months. A razor-thin Senate majority, deep intraparty divides and a limited Democratic appetite for bipartisan cooperation are limiting what Republican leaders are entertaining for the months ahead.
The Trump administration’s plans for an ambitious infrastructure initiative has generated little enthusiasm on Capitol Hill.
Immigration talks have come to a complete standstill after a frantic effort to cut a deal that would protect young immigrants living in the country illegally from deportation fell short last month in a flurry of sniping between the parties. With Trump’s cancellation of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in court-ordered limbo, probably until next year, there is little appetite to rekindle talks before the election.
And while Trump’s recent decisions to slap tariffs on foreign goods has made scores of lawmakers anxious about an emerging trade war, GOP congressional leaders are loath to rein in the vast powers Congress has delegated to the president to set trade policy. The House Ways and Means Committee will hold a hearing Thursday to examine the tariffs but efforts to roll them back have not gained significant traction.
Instead, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., appears to be gearing up to grind through confirmations, including potentially tricky fights to install Mike Pompeo as secretary of state, Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson as secretary of veterans affairs and Gina Haspel as CIA director.
Pompeo could face a confirmation hearing as soon as this week, where he is likely to get pointed questions about the Trump administration’s foreign policy objectives — particularly with regard to North Korea. Jackson, meanwhile, is facing widespread skepticism about his qualifications to lead VA after serving as White House physician.
Haspel’s nomination has generated fierce opposition from many Democrats and tough questions from key Republicans over her role in post-9/11 “enhanced interrogation techniques” that critics have described as torture.
The bulk of the public attention on Capitol Hill this week, however, won’t be focused on lawmakers, but on Mark Zuckerberg.
The Facebook founder and chief executive is set to testify before Senate and House committees in separate appearances Tuesday and Wednesday to address the company’s privacy practices in the wake of revelations that a political firm employed by the Trump campaign accessed the private data of 87 million Facebook users.