Democrats are Setting the Stage for Another Government Shutdown Showdown

On Tuesday, The Daily Signal was the first to report that the White House would be sending another rescissions package—the same mechanism that President Donald Trump and Republicans just used to defund NPR and PBS—to Capitol Hill that focuses on education. With the Sept. 30 government funding deadline fast approaching, Democrats are threatening a government shutdown. 

“We Democrats want a bipartisan deal,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said Tuesday. “The bottom line is Republicans are making it much harder—rescissions, impoundment, pocket rescissions directly undoes this.”

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, is intimately involved in the current effort to fund the government and answer the American people’s call for a return to fiscal sanity in Washington. He joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss how Democrats—and even some Republicans—might try to railroad President Trump’s agenda in the coming weeks.

After Democrats suffered defeat at the hands of Trump yet again, Cloud “thought there would be at least some moderation by the Dems. Maybe not in true heart, but at least in presentation, when it came to how they would approach this term.”

As another shutdown showdown takes shape, it’s becoming increasingly clear that has not happened. “They’ve continued to double down, and radically so, on the same principles that lost them the hearts and minds of the American people,” Cloud told The Daily Signal.

That’s especially been the case on the appropriations committee. “We started having these committee hearings and they kept doubling down,” Cloud explained. “We’re not where we were a generation ago, where it’s like the political discussion was you wanted the same things for the country and the conversation was what’s the best way to get there.”

When it comes to appropriations, that means a return to normalcy is all the more difficult because, unlike budget reconciliation, Republicans will need Democrat votes to get past the Senate filibuster and send appropriations bills or a continuing resolution to the president’s desk by Sept. 30.

Cloud explained how appropriations—by statute—is supposed to work: “The appropriations process is how the government is supposed to be funded, and that’s split up between 12 different bills that each have a different area of jurisdiction.”

For decades, however, Congress has failed to do things by the book. Year after year, “we get to September 30th and Congress acts like that’s a date that was new, like ‘September 30th is here! Oh my gosh!’” Cloud said. “And then, too often we end up with this big, huge, massive omnibus bill—thousands of pages long—on Christmas Eve or Christmas Eve-eve, and that’s a recipe to getting to 37 trillion in debt.”

It’s not just the Democrats’ fault — establishment Republicans share the blame, as well. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for example, is the appropriations committee chair in the Senate. There’s an old saying in Washington: There’s Democrats, Republicans, and appropriators. 

As appropriators draw up plans for discretionary spending levels, Cloud suggested they are not keen on cutting. “When you talk to the appropriators, they’ll say, ‘Well, you know, most of that spending is on the mandatory side,’” Cloud said. “‘Mandatory [spending]—that’s where the real savings and fiscal change needs to happen.’ There’s a little truth to that, but it’s our job to right-size a bloated government.”

“Sometimes, you know, we’d say, ‘Well, we need to cut this department,’” Cloud continued. To which these squeamish appropriators would reply, “‘If we do that, we’re going to have to fire people.’”

“Well, that’s kind of the goal,” Cloud would reply. “This is about getting back to the core functions of what a constitutional republic is supposed to be doing, and you do a lot of that through how you manage the checkbook, which is our number one task as Congress.”

Because of these dynamics in years past, Republicans would enter shutdown negotiations with an incredibly weak hand. “Too often we negotiate with ourselves,” Cloud said of the House appropriations process. Whether it’s appropriations bills or a continuing resolution, “we pass what we think the end product should be, and then we show up to that with the negotiating table, and then it moves even further away.”

Cloud says House Republicans are working to make sure things are different this time. “We’ll get to the negotiating table with the strongest negotiating position possible,” he said.

Trump, Cloud suggested, is taking a similar approach. “He’s a reformer. He’s not just coming in and saying, okay, we’re gonna do the same thing as last year,” the congressman said of “The Art of the Deal” author.

Republicans will likely try, and fail, to move appropriations bills through the Senate because of Democrat obstruction. Which sets the table for yet another gamble with government funding leading up to Sept. 30.

Cloud remains confident.

“People have doubted what we’ve been able to do in the Republican conference, and yet at every hurdle, we’ve been able to get through it,” he told The Daily Signal. “We realize that this is a unique moment in history with a transformative president and a unique opportunity and window of time to actually make a difference and save this country.”

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