WASHINGTON — The Senate passed a long-overdue, $209 billion bundle of bipartisan spending bills Thursday, but a bitter fight over funding demanded by President Donald Trump for border fencing imperils broader Capitol Hill efforts to advance $1.4 trillion worth of annual Cabinet agency budgets.
The 84-9 vote sends the measure into House-Senate negotiations but doesn’t much change the big picture. There has been little progress, if any, on the tricky trade-offs needed to balance Democratic demands for social programs with President Donald Trump’s ballooning border wall demands.
To amplify the point, Democrats shortly thereafter filibustered a much larger measure anchored by the $695 billion Pentagon funding bill, protesting Trump’s plans to again transfer billions of dollars from the Pentagon to the border wall project. The mostly party-line vote triggered a familiar round of finger-pointing.
“This delay is because they insist on including in this bill authority for President Trump to raid American tax dollars from our military — money that is intended for specific military priorities — to pay for his wall, which he promised that Mexico would pay for,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. “And that is unacceptable.”
Passage of the annual appropriations bills is one of the few areas in which divided government in Washington has been able to deliver results in the Trump era, despite last winter’s 35-day partial government shutdown. Trump has only reluctantly signed the measures, however, and the White House has been unyielding so far on its wall demands during this spending round.
A sense of optimism in the aftermath of a July budget and debt deal has yielded to pessimism now, and the poisonous political fallout from the ongoing impeachment battle isn’t helping matters. The budget pact blended a must-do increase in the government’s borrowing cap with relief from the return of stinging automatic budget cuts known as sequestration that were left over from a long-failed 2011 budget deal.
At issue are the agency appropriations bills that Congress passes each year to keep the government running. The hard-won budget and debt deal this summer produced a top-line framework for the 12 yearly spending bills, but filling in the details is proving difficult.
While it appears likely that lawmakers will prevent a government shutdown next month with a government-wide stopgap spending bill, the impasse over agency appropriations bills shows no signs of breaking.
