Washington Merry-Go-Round

IMMEDIATE RELEASE 15 February 2025
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
Today’s Events in Historical Perspective
America’s Longest-Running Column Founded 1932
Trump’s Brumaire
By Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift         
 
WASHINGTON – A triple civil war is brewing, and a strongman is standing in the wings ready to take control.
         No, this is not Napoleon’s Coup of 18 Brumaire when he overthrew the French Directory in 1799. It just feels like it.
              Neither is the Republican takeover of the House, Senate, and Presidency comparable to the French Revolution. But it, too, is beginning to feel like it. As then, chaos rules the day.
              The casus belli (cause of war) is the mundane issue of budget negotiations, but there will be nothing mundane about the result.
              Constitutionally, all spending bills are required to be initiated by the House of Representatives, but under the reconciliation process, the Senate simultaneously gets in the act.
              Reconciliation allows one vote per year on three subjects: expenditures, taxes, and the federal debt. The process was created to exclude the Senate’s filibuster rule requiring a three-fifths majority on legislation, but just for those three once-a-year votes.
              That is the background. Here is the war.
The House Republican majority called a Senate Republican blueprint “dead on arrival.” Like most budget blueprints, it relies on magical thinking where an increase in military spending plus more money for border enforcement and detention beds would be paid for in part by revenues from domestic oil drilling.
“Drill baby drill” was one of Trump’s campaign slogans, but U.S. oil and gas production is already the highest it’s ever been, and Republican budget-cutters are eyeing domestic programs to find the needed cuts to offset the cost of extending the Trump tax cuts from 2017, which are set to expire.
But House Republicans are themselves divided with GOP hardliners of the House Freedom Caucus demanding $2.5 trillion in spending cuts that other lawmakers oppose as excessive.
The Freedom Caucus said in a statement, “We should not be negotiating with ourselves on how little to cut from Joe Biden’s insane spending levels.”
President Trump says he does not care if his priorities – money for tax cuts and border enforcement – are in “one big, beautiful bill,” which the House favors, or in two more bite-size pieces of legislation, which the Republican-controlled Senate wants. In fact, he undoubtedly does not care about the negotiations at all even though he gave a pro forma invitation to some battling Republican representatives to meet in a room to hash out their differences in what he knew would be a hopeless event.
The House Budget Committee then ignored the Republican dissidents and released a plan that would go after federal programs that benefit poorer Americans. Trump has ruled out cutting Medicare, but its sister program, Medicaid, has always been fair game for Republicans, who think there is minimal political cost for their party in trimming what they regard as hand-outs.
Extending Trump’s tax cuts is central to the GOP House plan, which calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts that would disproportionately flow to those earners in the top bracket.
              However, the Committee’s plan cannot pass the House without support from the Freedom Caucus.
              So, with the House Republicans at war with themselves as well as with the Senate Republicans, the stage is set for Donald Trump’s Coup of Brumaire. The budget will not be decided in the halls of Congress; it will be decided at one man’s desk in one man’s Oval Office.
Trump will threaten to primary anyone who opposes his budget the same way he coerced reticent senators to confirm his most controversial and blatantly unqualified nominees to Cabinet posts, having discovered that spineless legislators are willing to put reelection prospects above patriotism. He will have relegated the House and Senate into irrelevance. The budget civil wars and coup that followed will have resulted in an all-powerful president,
 
See Eleanor Clift’s book Selecting a President, and Douglas Cohn’s latest books The President’s First Year: The Only School for Presidents Is the Presidency and World War 4: Nine Scenarios (endorsed by seven flag officers).
          Twitter:  @douglas_cohn
          © 2024 U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
          Distributed by U.S. News Syndicate, Inc.
END WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND