Is deficit dogma back? - The Washington Post

Publish date: 2024-08-07

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In today’s edition … What we’re watching: Partial release of Georgia grand jury report on 2020 election interference … Why one-time Trump ally Rep. Norman endorsed Haley … Where are all the senators? … but first …

🚨: President Biden is expected to deliver public remarks as soon as today about the four aerial objects downed in recent weeks, people familiar with the plans told our colleague Yasmeen Abutaleb. “Biden is also expected to outline his decision to direct his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to lead an interagency team to develop parameters for how the United States will deal with unmanned, unidentified airborne objects moving forward. White House officials said the country has not had such guidelines before, and that they would likely be finalized by the end of this week.”

On the Hill

Is deficit dogma back?

The federal government is set to run budget deficits as far out as the Congressional Budget Office can forecast — but lack of concern about the deficit is suddenly no longer in style in Washington, in either party.

The CBO’s projection on Wednesday that the federal government will add $18.8 trillion to the debt — about $3 trillion more than the nonpartisan office projected last spring — caused even Democrats to express alarm. But they maintain that any effort to reduce the deficit should not be tied to lifting the debt limit, which Republicans are demanding.

“We can’t continue to incur this level of debt year after year without there being consequences,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) told The Early on Wednesday.
“We ought to work together in a bipartisan way to make inroads into it,” said Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.). “I don’t think the right way to do that is on the debt limit, though.”
“I’m deeply concerned about the deficit, but I’m equally concerned about any possible failure to raise the debt ceiling,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “We want to address both but do it separately.”

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a former Senate Budget Committee chairman who does not have a reputation as a fiscal hawk, on Wednesday called the deficit “a real issue that we’ve got to deal with.”

Republicans say the CBO report proves them right.

“It just reconfirms to me that the No. 1 issue facing this country is our national debt,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), a member of the Senate Budget Committee.

Back to the future

The bipartisan concern about debt recalls in some ways the Obama years, when Republicans and Democrats agreed the deficit was a pressing problem even as they battled over how to address it. Barack Obama warned of the prospect of “trillion-dollar deficits for years to come” in 2009 even before he took office.

There were commissions and tasks forces and committees: Simpson-Bowles, Domenici-Rivlin, the infamous “supercommittee.”

The supercommittee’s failure triggered cuts to defense and domestic spending that were unpopular in both parties. The deficit shrunk as the economy revived and some of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts expired, leading tax receipts to swell.

The battles abruptly ceased with the election of a president who didn’t care about deficits in 2016.

Donald Trump never mentioned the budget deficit — which climbed each year he was in office — in any of his State of the Union addresses. Biden, in contrast, boasted in his State of the Union last week about his efforts to cut the deficit, which soared to nearly $3.7 trillion during the pandemic as Congress passed a series of massive relief bills.

In a speech in Lanham, Md., on Wednesday, Biden pledged to release a budget that would cut the deficit by $2 trillion over 10 years.

“I’ve always felt that he had a concern about the deficit,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a staffer on the Senate Budget Committee while Biden was on the committee. “He’s not one of those that says that deficits don’t matter.”

But Biden’s promise to reduce the deficit by $2 trillion over 10 years isn’t nearly enough even to ensure that the debt stops growing faster than the economy as a whole, added Hoagland, who is now a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

What’s next?

The next stage of the deficit battles will kick off March 9 when Biden is set to release his fiscal 2024 budget. House Republicans plan to vote on their own budget by April 15, staking out a position that could allow the two sides to start negotiations.

Biden, who met with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier this month, has said he’s willing to have a conversation “about how to grow the economy, create jobs, lower costs and reduce the deficit” as long as it’s not tied to raising the debt limit.

But the road McCarthy envisions toward cutting the deficit is likely to be much different that Biden’s budget.

Our colleague Tony Romm reports this morning that Republicans are eyeing cuts to food stamps, which will be a hard sell for Democrats. Democrats. meanwhile, are already slamming Republicans for refusing to discuss tax increases or other ways to raise revenue.

“Revenue needs to be on the table, for sure,” Blumenthal said.

One crucial difference between the coming deficit battles and the ones of Obama years: This time around, neither Republicans nor Democrats are willing to negotiate over Social Security and Medicare, even though the trust funds that help fund them are expected to be exhausted within a decade, according to the CBO’s report.

“I’m always concerned about it,” said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) of the deficit. “But what’s the next step? The next step is not to cut Social Security and Medicare.” Instead, Brown proposed closing tax loopholes and allowing some of the 2017 tax cuts to expire.

What we're watching

The election interference investigations: Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney is expected to unseal portions of the grand jury’s final report today. Only three sections of the report will be released today: the introduction, the conclusion and a section detailing the panel’s concerns that witnesses may have lied under oath.

(Reminder: Several prominent Republicans have appeared before the panel, including Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.)

The full report is the culmination of a months-long criminal investigation into whether Trump and his allies broke Georgia law when they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

On the Hill: McCarthy will take advantage of the House’s recess this week by visiting a stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona today with four freshmen Republicans: Reps. Juan Ciscomani (Ariz.), Lori Chavez-DeRemer (Ore.), Jen A. Kiggans (Va.) and Derrick Van Orden (Wis.).

The campaign

Why one-time Trump ally Rep. Norman endorsed Haley

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) called Trump on Tuesday night to tell him that he was going to endorse Nikki Haley for president the next morning.

Typically, it would not be unusual for one politician to endorse another in the same state who worked closely together in the statehouse. But it is unusual in the Trump era. Trump has backed successful primary challenges against Republican lawmakers who have crossed him, ruining the political careers of some of them.

“If it hurts me politically, then so be it,” Norman said in an interview on Wednesday after he introduced Haley at her announcement rally in Charleston.

Norman has also been a big Trump booster in the past.

He voted to block the certification of the 2020 presidential election on the House floor on Jan. 6, 2021, based on the false claim Biden won due to voter fraud. He also privately suggested that Trump invoke martial law three days before Biden’s inauguration to remain in power.

In the interview, Norman praised Trump as a “great” president but said the party needs new leadership, suggesting Trump can’t win.

“We’ve got to attract every type of voter — the independents to the young people to the dyed-in-the-wool Republicans — to come out and vote,” Norman said. “I told him the same things I just told you.”

Where are all the senators?

The elephant in the room: As some members of the GOP try to nudge their party in a new direction, the Senate — a ripe source of presidential candidates — has been eerily quiet. It is a remarkable shift from the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, which saw four senators fighting for their party’s nomination. This time, only one lawmaker — Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) — is expected to throw his hat into the ring.

“It’s a historical anomaly to have such little presidential ambition in the world’s greatest deliberative body,” our colleague Paul Kane writes.

“Senators, independent analysts and political consultants point to a multitude of reasons for this unusual ceding of political territory, but ultimately one figure continues to loom so large that it makes it hard for lower-profile senators to find their lane and attract enough voters.”

His name? Trump.

“You have an ex-president who remains very popular with the base, and I think that you have a lot of senators — again, I don’t want to speak for anybody in particular, this is just my sense — a lot of senators who probably would be very interested in running,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told reporters Wednesday. “But they don’t want to be the first mover, so they’re happy for Ron DeSantis to be the first mover or Nikki Haley.”

“Trump, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), have taken up a ton of political oxygen at this early stage of the Republican race,” Kane writes. “And senators, despite their traditional ambition, regularly fail to win the nomination and are even less likely to win the general election.”

“So governors have been able to position themselves better as outsiders, avoiding all the complicated votes senators have to take and talking in everyday parlance that avoids parliamentary process that can make senators seem very out of touch.”

The Media

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