End the destructive budget brinkmanship

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Republicans already wield the gavel in the House. Soon, the Senate will also be led by the GOP. And with incoming President-elect Donald Trump and six of nine justices on the Supreme Court selected by GOP presidents, by Inauguration Day the federal government will be under full Republican control.

But full control might not necessarily mean in control, as recently evidenced by brinkmanship budget negotiations between Capitol Hill and Mar-a-Lago (the current White House occupant, President Joe Biden, played a minor role in the melodrama that almost led to a meltdown).

While the government did not shut down, Democrats were depended on for the third and final vote, taken just hours before the deadline, demonstrating the differences between governing and campaigning — something that veteran leaders like Trump, House Majority Leader Mike Johnson, and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune should already know.

But knowledge and wisdom are distinct. And Trump’s instinct for chaos instead of cohesion soon took precedence over presidential leadership. He scuttled earlier versions of the bill by trashing it on Truth Social, which he owns, and allowing Elon Musk, whose early emergence as the most prominent presidential influencer is already problematic, to trash it (often with immediately identifiable inaccuracies) on X, the social network he owns.

A president-elect taking such a leading role in a congressional debate before taking office is clearly “unusual,” said Kathryn Pearson, a University of Minnesota associate professor of political science. Regarding Musk, “What’s happening now is unprecedented and alarming, because of course Musk was not elected by the voters.”

And the worst may be yet to come.

“A faction within the Republican Party is going to make governing difficult for a Republican speaker, even in the context of unified party control,” said Pearson. “It’s going to be particularly challenging on budget issues; tax cuts will be easier for Republicans than passing appropriation bills, continuing resolutions and increasing the debt limit.”

And yet the very same tax cuts are likely to deepen the deficit and hasten the need to raise the debt ceiling yet again, something that about three dozen Republican representatives refused to do despite Trump’s popularity and public prodding.

Don’t look for Democrats to rescue Republicans again. Which means that Johnson’s already tenuous, albeit tenacious, hold on the House may not last.

Previous Speakers Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan and John Boehner were similarly squeezed, Pearson said, adding that while “the Republican Party is Trump’s party to a much greater extent than it was the first time he was elected,” that “still doesn’t mean that they were willing to vote with a bipartisan coalition to pass a continuing resolution.”

Unfortunately, the Fiscal Commission Act of 2023 languished in the House, just as the Fiscal Stability Act of 2023 did in the Senate. Both were based on previous successful models, including the mid-1980s Greenspan Commission tasked to stabilize Social Security, the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission in 2005 to right-size resources in the Defense Department, and even the ill-fated but well-intentioned National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reforms, known as Simpson-Bowles, in 2010.

Congress may not be ready. But the people they represent just might be, according to a recently released poll from the nonpartisan Peterson Foundation, whose mission is “to increase public awareness of the nature and urgency of the key fiscal challenges threatening America’s future and to accelerate action on them.”

Using both a Republican and Democratic polling firm, the foundation found that 55% of voters “oppose extending expiring provisions of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) if it would add to the debt.” That majority jumps to 64% after respondents heard that “borrowing for tax cuts could contribute to higher inflation.”

Other poll data demonstrate more public resolve than is commonly considered, including 92% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats urging Trump and Congress “to begin addressing the $36 trillion and rising national debt in the first 100 days of the new administration.”

For his part, Trump seemed more focused on the current administration, writing amid the wrangling that “If there is going to be a shutdown of government, let it begin now, under the Biden administration, not after January 20th, under ‘TRUMP.’ This is a Biden problem to solve, but if Republicans can help solve it, they will!”

In other words, the gavel — which is shaped like a hammer, a tool that can be used to build or destroy.