By Thomas Binion
While they may not be able to admit it
publicly (or even to themselves), it’s clear that the Democrats have
deliberately manufactured a government shutdown.
Banking on a complicit media and a confused electorate,
they have now fully embraced a political tactic they decried for eight years
under President Obama.
Charges that this shutdown is the fault of Republicans,
or that Democrats haven’t been part of the negotiations leading to the spending
bill they rejected, are not true.
Instead what’s obvious is that Democrats
methodically engineered a situation where the government could shut down over
the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Here are the steps they employed to get us here.
Step one: Democrats have yet to agree to a long-term
spending deal that would allow Congress to appropriate funds on an annual basis
instead of passing short-term continuing resolutions.
This fiscal year began
three and half months ago, and under ordinary circumstances the funding
question would have been resolved long ago, and the opportunity to shut down
the government wouldn’t even exist.
However, Democrats blocked a necessary increase in
Pentagon funding in a naked attempt to leverage national security to win
more funding for domestic programs.
For that reason, Congress passed three
short-term bills. Democrats blocked passage of the fourth.
Step two: Democrats rejected numerous offers
to get just want they want, which is a permanent solution for DACA.
While DACA is not in any way related to government spending, the Democrats
have taken spending hostage in an attempt to force Republicans to deal on DACA.
There’s just one problem: Republicans are
perfectly willing to deal on DACA.
Trump and even the most conservative
Republican leaders have proposed a true compromise and even written legislation
that reflects it. Reps. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Michael McCaul (R-Texas)
proposed legislation that grants permanent amnesty to DACA recipients, in
addition to common-sense border security and enforcement provisions.
Having
rejected this proposal, Democrats are claiming they’ll block government funding
until a more favorable compromise to them emerges.
Step three: The Democrats distracted from the
reality of the negotiations by creating a media circus around a comment that President Trump allegedly
made during a private meeting — a comment the president denies.
Step four: The Democrats have used the
alleged comment to confuse people, charging that the president
is a racist rather admitting the truth, which is that he sincerely wants a DACA
deal. Otherwise, their manufactured shutdown wouldn’t make any sense at all in
the face of a president who wants to give them what they want.
Step five: Having refused a long-term deal
(step one), the Democrats then turned to refusing a short-term stopgap.
This is the step that really brings the shutdown into play. The House proposed
and passed a four-week continuing resolution that would have kept the
government running while the two parties continued to hash out DACA and the
long-term spending bill. Instead, Democrats rejected that offer of more time
and instead opted to all discretionary spending lapse.
Step six: Democrats have cranked up the blame
machine. Republicans have majorities in the House and in the
Senate. This is a fact that Democrats believe makes them blameless in the
Senate, but anyone who buys this line is ignorant of the Senate’s rules.
Any
spending bill must have 60 votes to pass the Senate. That means that
while Republicans enjoy the majority, they don’t control the outcome by
themselves.
Almost every Republican senator is ready to support a
short-term spending bill. It is only the Democrat senators that are blocking
its passage. If Republicans really did “control” the Senate, as Democrats are
saying, the government would have remained open.
As has been the case in each and every policy debate so
far, compromise between the parties has been elusive. A quick review
of the facts reveals exactly why.
Democrats, exerting the leverage they have
over what can pass the Senate, will block any compromise.
While feigning
interest in a compromise, they continue to block any proposal that doesn’t
give them exactly what they want and only what they want.
In short order, we’ll all find out whether
the American people are clued in to this brand of brinksmanship.
Thomas Binion is the director of
Congressional and Executive Branch Relations at The Heritage Foundation.
