Democrats seek budget summit, see possible shutdown

Senate Democrats demanded a new bipartisan budget summit, saying Tuesday that the blueprint the GOP crafted and passed through Congress little more than a month ago is a non-starter that could lead the government into another shutdown.

The demands came as Democrats lost their first bid to cut nearly $40 billion from defense spending this year, insisting that if domestic programs don’t get a boost than neither should the Pentagon, which is struggling to ramp up the war against the Islamic State.

“We need to have more money,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, Maryland Democrat and vice chairman of the Appropriations Committee, which is trying to figure out how to fund government at the GOP’s lower levels of spending.

At issue are the budget “sequesters,” which are still biting nearly four years after they were first adopted in a massive debt deal that gave President Obama the power to incur $2 trillion in debt, in exchange for strict limits on spending through the end of the decade.

Now that those limits are cutting both defense and domestic spending, though, all sides are looking for an out.

Defense hawk Republicans say the Pentagon can’t live within the sequester-level budget, and they forced GOP leaders to boost the allocation for 2016 by using a budget gimmick that uses one-time war spending on regular defense needs.

“Every military uniformed leader who has come before our committee has said that cutting this kind of money from our military would place the lives of the men and women serving in the military in greater danger,” said Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Fiscal conservatives reluctantly went along, for the sake of party unity, but Democrats attacked the use of the gimmick and said if defense gets more money, so should health care, education, homeland security and other basic needs here at home.

While lacking much power in the House, Democrats maintain more than enough senators to filibuster in the Senate — and on Tuesday they vowed to block any of the dozen annual spending bills from even reaching the floor until the GOP agrees to higher spending.

That would leave Congress poised for another shutdown showdown come Sept. 30, which is the end of the fiscal year. Democrats said in order to head that off, all sides should meet this month and set new budget levels higher than the GOP’s blueprint.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell flatly rejected that plan, saying he’ll test Democrats’ will to fight.

“There’s been a lot of big talk about stopping bills, we’ll see whether they really want to do that,” he said.

The complex budget and spending process gives Democrats a choice of where to fight it out, and on Tuesday they ceded one of those bills, signaling that they won’t insist on a filibuster to halt the annual defense policy bill. That legislation authorizes tapping war funds for the $38 billion spending boost, but doesn’t actually spend the money.

Instead, Democratic leaders said they’ll fight over the dozen annual spending bills, which actually control discretionary funding.

The first of those, the defense spending bill, will come to the floor as soon as the defense policy bill is completed, Mr. McConnell said.

In addition to Senate Democrats’ threats, Mr. Obama has vowed vetoes on the defense policy bill and on all of the spending bills, saying Congress must boost funding for his priorities.