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Senate Democrats Dodge Last Pre-Election Opportunity To Fight Trump
They won't take a big stand to protect the election, or resist Trump's broader lawlessness, before the midterms.
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This was expected, but it’s madness.
Over the weekend, Patty Murray, the top Democratic appropriator in Congress—and, crucially, as we’ll see, one of Washington state’s two senators—cut a deal with Susan Collins (yes, that Susan Collins) that would extend the annual budget past its September 30 expiration into December. The House passed a similar measure last week, making it clear that Congress’s intent, on a bipartisan basis, is to punt a longer-term budget until after the election, when Collins may actually be a lame duck.
This is mostly bad for the reasons I’ve screamed about since March of last year. In the context of an attempted authoritarian takeover of the United States, normal minority-party participation in the federal budget process is akin to passing enabling legislation. It’s not one-to-one with the Enabling Act that transformed Adolf Hitler from a parliamentary leader into a dictator, but it’s analogous—a message to Donald Trump that says, ‘you’re intent on taking power away from us, you keep asserting the right to do so, and we’re going to assent. At best we’ll try to claw that power back after the fact, in litigation.’
Trump is violating criminal and civil laws flagrantly, including the terms of these very budget agreements. And yet every time funding for the government has lapsed or has neared expiration, Democrats have provided votes required to end debate and even to actually pass new funding. That decision conveys a lack of controversy, and thus sends a related message to the public: all’s well. Nothing to worry about here.
Early on, Democrats might have argued that withholding their votes for these interim budgets, precipitating an interruption of government services, might turn the public against them. That excuse doesn’t fly anymore. The one time they held out for a few weeks—not to resist Trump’s lawlessness but to seek renewal of expiring health care subsidies—the public supported them, and blamed Trump for the shutdown. (Naturally, they caved anyhow.)
But it’s extra infuriating this time around, because the backdrop is different in three key ways. Here, by declining to fight, Democrats have: 1) aided Collins’s re-election effort, 2) bypassed an opportunity to grind Trump’s election subversion schemes to a halt, and 3) left blue states struggling to rebuild from natural disasters without needed federal help, as Trump abusively withholds disaster support from states that didn’t vote for him.
I wrote about the kinds of demands Democrats could have demanded in order to prevent federal interference in the midterms here. They could have essentially made free and fair midterm elections a condition for their votes, raising the salience of Trump’s multifaceted subversion schemes, and revealing Collins to be a complicit and unreasonable Republican partisan. They instead made no demands along these lines, and few of any kind, allowing Collins to boast about “work[ing] with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle” to prevent a “damaging government shutdown.”
The agreement Democrats struck also does nothing to address this problem: