From WaPo:
The Senate on Wednesday rejected billions in spending cuts proposed by the Trump administration as two Republicans joined all Democrats in voting no.
The 48-50 vote rebuffed a White House plan to claw back some $15 billion in spending previously approved by Congress — a show of fiscal responsibility that was encouraged by conservative lawmakers outraged over a $1.3 trillion spending bill in March. …
Nevertheless, Wednesday’s outcome was startling because one of the opposing votes came from Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who does not normally buck the White House or GOP leadership. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate and one of the Republicans who most frequently side with Democrats, cast the other GOP vote against the cuts.
Burr claimed to be unhappy about cuts to the U.S. Forest Service. In this we see the abnormal amount of power wielded by just a couple of Senators these days, and apparently Senator Flake is also starting to figure out that he has a lot of influence, just so long as he’s willing to say and mean No! But just how big a deal was this bill in and of itself?
Democrats had accused Republicans and the Trump administration of targeting important programs with the rescission cuts, but Republicans countered that most of the money was sitting unspent, in some cases in expired accounts that couldn’t be tapped.
Independent analyses said that since most of the money would not have been spent anyway, the actual spending reduction in the package was closer to $1 billion. That’s a tiny fraction of the federal budget. But in a midterm election year conservative lawmakers saw the rescissions package as a way to show Congress’ commitment to reining in spending at a time of drastically rising deficits and debt.
To my eye, it looks like the Democrats just wanted to say No! to any Republican initiative, and to their surprise got a little help from the other side. While it may seem petty, they have precedent in the six years of Republican obstructionism during the Obama Administration.
More importantly, a statement was made by rejecting this rescission bill. A deal is a deal, and this sort of thing is reneging on it. Not that I’m surprised that Trump would renege on a deal, as that appears to be the story of his life. But I suspect the bill was put together with zero Democratic input, and they were quite right to vote against it in that scenario. Let the third-rater Republicans rot in their little hellhole of broken immigrant families and and tax breaks for the wealthy.
