America's Talking - House Rejects Trump-Influenced Stopgap Bill, Threatening Government Shutdown

Episode Date: December 20, 2024

(The Center Square) – The House has overwhelmingly voted against the stopgap bill presented to the House floor Thursday evening by Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., after a last-minute scramble. With 174 yeas and 235 nays, opposition from both Democrats and Republicans tanked the 116-page American Relief Act, 2025 which needed a two-thirds majority to pass. The measure would have funded the government through March, allocated roughly $100 billion in disaster relief, extended the farm bill for a year, and suspended the debt ceiling until January 2027.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxxFull story: https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_843595e6-be6a-11ef-a067-6b989e27c5a6.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, chief content officer of Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the Center Square Newswire Service. We are recording this on Friday morning, December 20th. A partial government shutdown could happen after midnight if Congress doesn't soon pass a stopgap funding measure known as a continuing resolution. U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is in the hot seat after the first attempt at a continuing resolution that he negotiated with Democrats was widely criticized by President-elect Donald Trump and other Republicans for its expansive new spending and pork projects included in it. A second scaled-back version of the continuing resolution was defeated in the House Thursday night when

38 Republicans joined all but two Democrats to vote against it. Joining me to discuss this is Casey Harper, Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Center Square. Casey, the U.S. is more than $36 trillion dollars in debt. Is a partial government shut down so bad if Congress can't commit to cut spending? You know, it's a great question, Dan, because if you think about the federal government as a human body or something, I mean, maybe we need something, you know, your heart is racing too fast. You have to get the shock paddles out and reset it or something. I mean, you know, shocks like this, just like in health, are often a sign of a deeper issue. And I think that for all the headlines and the media and the firestorm, you know, this week about how Trump's governing and how Biden is not governing

and is Johnson, you know, doing the right thing and all the stuff. You know, we've been through this song and dance many times, Dan. And what it all, what at all, the bigger thing, the trend that it points to is the debt is out of control. It's over 36 trillion. You know, this time next year we have this podcast, it'll be 37 or 38 trillion. Washington, D.C. is totally dysfunctional in how they pass these. They're supposed to pass, you know, 12 appropriations. bills that individually fund different parts of the government, and they can never do it. And so they just passed these kind of silly CRs. And even, you know, the third point, before I pass it back to you, is Congress is so dysfunctional

that whoever's the, they cede all of their power to the president and to the courts. I mean, the founders designed the constitution where Congress would have most of the power. The judiciary branch would kind of do their thing in the president. You know, he had very limited powers and really in time of war when it was when he was supposed to step up. but Congress created the administrative state because they couldn't govern, and they enabled and allowed judicial review to give much of their power to the Supreme Court. So Congress is just deeply dysfunctional. The debt is out of control. And of course, you know, there's a lot of implications we can talk about with Trump, with, you know, Mike Johnson and his speakership, whether it's in danger with, you know, what the spending levels should be. But overall, this is just a sign of how broken Washington has become. We'll come back to Johnson in a moment, Casey.

Joe Biden is still the president. He's been absent from this entire conversation. Or whatever collection of people are running the country with Biden. Yeah. Regardless, it's almost as if President-elect Donald Trump has already taken over. And of course, we've talked a lot about this new department he's created, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramos, Swami. You on and Vivek have been very vocal about this ongoing process too. Of course, they've been

charged with cutting spending, cutting government regulations. And here Mike Johnson negotiates this expansive spending bill with Democrats. It doesn't seem like Johnson's in tune with what's going on with President-elect Trump. It definitely comes across a little tone-deaf. So much of the messaging for Republicans right now has been that Trump has a mandate. I mean, he won a amazing. victory over Kamala Harris. He won all seven swing states. And that's got to be Trump's message, you know, from his perspective is mandate, mandate, mandate, anytime people challenge him, he says, I have the mandate. And so in a sense, he can't allow someone so early on to defy his will because it really pulls the rug out from under this idea that he has a mandate. And all presidents, you know,

kind of get these mandate windows and who knows how long Trumps will be, but at least 100 days, usually. First 100 days, the president has free reign to mostly just put his, agenda in action. Now, what's complicates this is the point you brought up is, hey, Trump's not in office yet. What is going on here? How is it that he's having more pull and influence than the current president, Joe Biden? You know, I joked about the people running the country, Dan, but I'm sure you saw the bombshell Wall Street Journal article earlier this week, which interviewed several, you know, White House aides and, and Democratic lawmakers and basically said that the White House has been run by AIDS and by committee for a long time now, and it's getting worse.

The Joe Biden has good days and bad days, and they try not to bother him too much on the bad days. And so this is really a president in decline. He's running out the clock. He's just taking a knee to run out the clock to end this game before January 20th. And so this really created a power vacuum in the U.S. And Trump has more power than anyone right now. He's got the mandate, as I said. And, yeah, I mean, Johnson, it seems tone-deaf because Trump has focused so much about cutting spending And just to give you a, you know, I know this bill has changed a lot, Dan, and this is not the current state, but the, you know, a continued resolution can be like, you know, 25 pages long or something, or 100, you know, 125 pages. I mean, not very long. But the one that Johnson first pulled out or laid out earlier this week was over 1,500 pages. So it's not like this was a normal CR that was just a little off. I mean, it was basically getting towards an omnibus spending bill that was called the CR. And I think that's what sparked a lot of the outrage. And of course, Elon Musk himself used the power of Twitter to spark a lot of outrage and get the bill killed. And Casey, we're hearing that a third version of the continuing resolution

could be voted on at some point in the House today. But regardless of that, regardless of whether there's a partial government shutdown or not, with Republicans in control of the House, Republicans in control of the Senate next year after Trump and of course Trump in the in the White House, after January 20th inauguration, they had the ability and the power and the opportunity to rein in government spending. I think it would be a failure if they can't figure out how to do that. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, they don't get these windows very often. I think with all the way that they've been talking so much about government efficiency, it seems like if it doesn't happen now, it's not going to happen for a long time, not be it 10 or 20 years

before another opportunity like this comes up. And, you know, if you look at the CBO projections for 20 years out, for instance, it's not pretty. I mean, we'll be spending more on our interest on the national debt than we spend on national defense or anything else. The interest payments on the national debt over the next 20, 30 years get really big. And it gets kind of scary. So something needs to be done.

They do have this window. I think the issue they're going to have to grapple with is some Democrats will say, sure, we'll cut spending only if you raise taxes significantly. And are Republicans going to be willing to raise taxes at all to meet Democrats in the middle and cover some of the spending? I doubt it. And the problem is with the slim majority they have in the House. And even really, they don't have 60 votes in the Senate. It's going to be pretty hard to do all this without Democratic help. Thank you for joining us today, Casey. Listeners can keep up with this story and more at thecenter square.com.