Congress

Republicans Set Up the Next Government Shutdown Fight

Written by SK Ashby

Because congressional Republicans drafted and passed their tax cut bill in just a few days, it's full of holes and unintended consequences that would have been uncovered had it been passed through regular order.

To that end, Politico reports that congressional Republicans want to attach a package of fixes to the next continuing resolution to fund the federal government.

Republicans would like to address the problems as soon as next month, as part of legislation needed to fund the government. But to do that, they’ll need assistance from Democrats, and it’s unclear they are in any mood to help. They were shut out of the process of writing the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and may be looking for payback after Republicans steadfastly refused to allow them to fix hitches in the Affordable Care Act.

Some Democrats say they will want to widely reopen the law, as part of any effort to clean up the legislative miscues.

“We’re not going to say to Republicans, ‘Oh tell us what you want to do,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who sits on the tax-writing Finance Committee. “We want to make the bill better, not just correct whatever technical fix is needed.”

If we're going to have another possible government shutdown next month, this will probably be the reason why. And to be clear, to say that Republicans want to implement "technical" fixes may be putting it too kindly.

The biggest area of concern for congressional Republicans appears to be tax breaks that were unintentionally eliminated in the bill. That's unfortunate, but when Republicans say they want to "fix" the bill that means adding more tax cuts to it. And you can bet their "fix" will include other things that weren't actually intended to be part of the original bill.

There's virtually no good reason for Democrats to play along and they appear to understand that. Republicans will just have to sleep in the bed they made until the midterm elections.

With all of that said, I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the fact that temporarily funding the government on a month-to-month basis is now the status quo. It's a foregone conclusion that we'll see another continuing resolution next month.