Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
House Republicans passed a bill on Tuesday night to keep the federal government funded beyond March 14 only after Vice-President J.D. Vance promised that the Trump administration would ignore the bill and make its own unilateral funding decisions. Yes, you read that right.
Thanks to grumbling among the fiscal nihilists of the House Freedom Caucus, there were fears that enough Republicans would join Democrats to vote down the so-called “clean CR” (short for continuing resolution, or just an extension of current spending levels). Earlier, House Speaker Mike Johnson appealed to these extremists by making the “clean” bill pretty dirty, adding major new spending for defense and mass deportations while cutting $13 billion in domestic spending. But that wasn’t enough, so Vance came to the rescue, as Politico reported:
Vance told House Republicans they need to vote for the GOP funding bill to clear the runway for the massive domestic policy bill Republicans are now in the process of assembling, the people added. By failing to pass the stopgap, Vance added, Republicans will lose momentum on securing the border and lose credibility with voters.
He also assured Republican members that Trump would continue cutting federal funding with his Department of Government Efficiency initiative and pursue impoundment — that is, holding back money appropriated by Congress.
In other words, the veep was telling Republicans they were approving a spending measure written in disappearing ink because Elon Musk at DOGE and Russ Vought at OMB would continue to cancel spending as they wished without any input from or concurrence by Congress. As Edith Olmstead of The New Republic rightly observed, it was an act of institutional suicide by the party controlling the legislative branch:
If it seems a little outrageous that even with control of the House, Senate, and White House, the Republicans must openly admit that they are working to pass laws they have no intention of actually enforcing, that’s because it is. Rather than forge actual party unity behind his agenda, Trump wants the power to act unilaterally — leaving Vance to bully party members into saying “yes” to Trump doing whatever he wants when it comes to federal funding.
The only catch is that pulling off this abandonment of the constitutionally assigned congressional “power of the purse” will require at least some complicity from the minority party. After House Democrats demanded (and Republicans quickly rejected) language ensuring that the appropriations were binding on the Trump administration, only one of their members voted for this shady CR, Maine’s egregiously Trump-friendly Jared Golden.
Now that the CR has passed, it goes to the Senate, where 40 of the 47 Democrats (along with Republican Rand Paul, who wants deeper spending cuts guaranteed) can stop it with a filibuster. Multiple Democrats, however, reportedly fear that if they actively fight this bill, they — rather than the Republicans who totally control the executive, the legislative, and much of the judicial branch of the federal government — will be blamed for a destructive government shutdown. To put added pressure on them, House Speaker Mike Johnson quickly adjourned the House after the passage of the CR so as to “jam” the Senate with a bill that cannot be amended. So Democrats have the terrible choice of enabling a Republican-engineered government shutdown or enacting a bill that preserves the DOGE-OMB option of gutting rather than shutting the government.
If Senate Democrats (or at least enough of them) do choose the easy way out by refusing to stand in the way of the CR locomotive, they must live with the realization that they’ve given up the one bit of leverage they had this year. From here on out, Republicans intend to enact Trump’s legislative agenda via a giant budget reconciliation bill that cannot be filibustered and which will exclude Democrats from having any say over the size, shape, and purpose of the federal government. As DOGE continues to abolish and slash programs and fire federal workers, and as OMB picks and chooses which appropriations it will actually make available, Democrats can only hope the federal courts intervene or Republicans somehow fall into disarray.
