WASHINGTON ― The Senate was on the verge of a bipartisan deal with the White House on confirming dozens of Trump administration nominees in exchange for unfreezing billions of dollars in spending until President Donald Trump blew it up ― twice.
The dramatic collapse in talks over the weekend doesn’t bode well for the tougher job lawmakers are facing of funding the government ahead of next month’s Sept. 30 deadline. The White House is pushing for massive spending cuts that Democrats have dismissed as a nonstarter, increasing the odds of a costly government shutdown.
In Saturday’s skirmish, Senate Democrats held firm and refused to quickly confirm Trump’s nominees without extracting concessions from the administration. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) blamed the president for ultimately walking away and telling Republicans to leave town for the August recess without agreeing to terms the GOP had seemed amenable to.
“Is this the ‘Art of the deal?’ Posture, cajole, stamp your feet, and then give up?” Schumer said in a press conference. “This says it all. Donald Trump tried to bully us, go around us, threaten us, call us names — but he got nothing, and he walked away with his tail between his legs.”
“When it looked like we were getting close a day before, he again called in and screwed it all up,” the senator continued, chiding Republicans for kowtowing to Trump. “They should stop listening to him. If they want to do what’s good for the American people, they shouldn’t be in blind obeisance to Donald Trump.”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
In exchange for agreeing to quickly confirm a batch of Trump nominees before the August break, Democrats asked the administration to release spending Congress had already passed ― including $5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and over $1 billion in foreign aid funding, $300 million for the World Food Program, $50 million to fight HIV in developing countries and $142 million for the United Nations Children’s Fund. Most of those programs have bipartisan support.
Democrats also offered to approve a second round of Trump nominees later this year if the Trump administration committed not to send more partisan rescissions to Congress, like the bill that Republicans unilaterally approved that claws back $9 billion in spending on PBS, NPR, and foreign aid. The White House objected to those terms, however, sources told HuffPost.
But senators still believed on Saturday that they had an agreement on the initial deal involving nominations for spending until an irate Trump blew up the deal and told Republicans to go home empty-handed.
“There were several different times when maybe both sides thought maybe there was a deal. But in the end, you gotta be able to close it out, and we never got there,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) told reporters afterward.
Trump was more blunt about the episode, however, urging Schumer to “GO TO HELL!” instead.
“Tell Schumer, who is under tremendous political pressure from within his own party, the Radical Left Lunatics, to GO TO HELL!” Trump posted on Truth Social. “Do not accept the offer, go home and explain to your constituents what bad people the Democrats are, and what a great job the Republicans are doing, and have done, for our Country.”
Unanimous consent is required to speed up confirmations of nominees in the Senate. Democrats have insisted that the Senate hold procedural votes to cut off debate on nearly every Trump nomination, forcing Republicans to burn valuable floor time, as a way to protest the Trump administration’s policies and its freezing of federal funding to many government programs.
Republicans complained repeatedly about the “unprecedented” obstruction and threatened to go “nuclear” by unilaterally changing the Senate’s rules on confirming nominees, but they left town without doing so on Saturday. They also blocked Trump from making recess appointments, as some GOP senators had demanded, by agreeing to hold pro forma sessions every three days until Sept. 2.
There was some talk of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) bringing the House back from its recess to formally adjourn Congress so Trump could make recess appointments, as required under the U.S. Constitution. But that would have likely complicated matters even more for Trump, since a number of House Republicans are demanding votes in that chamber on the release of more information regarding the death and activities of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Nevertheless, GOP senators are vowing to go forward with rules changes upon the Senate’s return next month. Doing so would only require a simple majority of votes, but would also benefit Democrats if and when they return to power.
“I look forward to changing Senate rules to expedite the confirmation of all of the pending nominations by POTUS on our return,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) wrote in a post online.
Changing the Senate’s rules would only add to lawmakers’ to-do list when they return in September, however. They have only four weeks to negotiate a bipartisan spending deal on keeping the government open, requiring approval from the White House, Senate Democrats and conservatives in the House ― a tall order. Already, some lawmakers are discussing the likelihood of short-term funding patch to give Congress more time to fund the government.
Schumer, meanwhile, is urging Johnson and Thune to meet this week to discuss the path forward for government funding.
“As Leaders of the House and Senate, you have the responsibility to govern for all Americans and work on a bipartisan basis to avert a painful, unnecessary shutdown at the end of September,” the senator wrote in a letter alongside House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) on Monday. “Yet it is clear that the Trump Administration and many within your party are preparing to ‘go it alone’ and continue to legislate on a solely Republican basis.”
“Therefore, we request you swiftly convene a so-called Four Corners meeting this week, for the four of us to discuss the government funding deadline and the health care crisis you have visited upon the American people,” they added.
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