Now What?

Three huge negotiations were happening simultaneously in Congress. One was what is referred to as the omnibus spending bill. Congress routinely bundles spending authorizations for the myriad government departments, as well as foreign aid and grants to various non governmental agencies into a handful of giant bills. One of these was the Defense Spending Authorization Bill which passed last week but was vetoed by Trump because it did not contain a repeal of "Section 230", which immunizes social media platforms against actions taken by users of their sites and because it did contain an authorization to rename military bases that are named for Confederate generals and politicians. It remains to be seen whether Congress, which passed the bill by enough votes to override a veto, will actually override. 

The second of these (the so-called omnibus bill) was passed just a few days ago. It included a vast laundry list of spending authorizations from the routine to what could be considered "pork" pushed by special interest lobbyists. Most of these items were included in the budget that Trump submitted to Congress, including foreign aid and support for the arts. 

The third set of negotiations was the Covid Relief Bill. Among other things, this bill included a $600 one-time payment to individuals.  There was widespread criticism of this amount as too small. Democrats had initially wanted a larger amount, some factions of the Republican Party wanted no individual payment. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Trumps liaison with Congressional leadership suggested a compromise amount of $600. The Covid Relief Bill had broad support, as did the omnibus, so they were combined into one bill and were passed with bipartisan support. Trump immediately criticised it. His criticism was that the individual payment should be $2000, not $600 and that the bill should not have included foreign aid or support for the arts, even though his budget called for those expenditures. 

Trump could have weighed in with the $2000 figure at any time during the negotiations, but chose to focus on overturning the election. He only spoke up after the negotiations were over and conflated the items in the omnibus with the relief bill to make it look like foreign governments were being prioritized over working Americans. The Democrats immediately moved to increase the individual payment to $2000, but were blocked by Republicans in the House of Representatives. At the writing of this blog post there is no word on what Trump will do: whether he will sign, veto, or ignore. Whether Congress will vote on the increase (the previous attempt was what was called Unanimous Consent, where a proposal is considered to have passed if no one objects - someone objected). A further complication is that some Republicans want to bundle the foreign aid and support for the arts that Trump attacked with the $2000 relief checks. 

Congress is always going to do things that some (or all) people don't like. Compromises that somehow displease everyone will happen. That's never going to change. What we're seeing now is just chaos for the sake of chaos. A president who is actively trying to overturn the results of an election has abdicated any responsibility for governing, yet manages to gum up the works without any real solution. His idea of negotiation continues to be the bully's way.