WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s disregard for Congress and its energy of the purse is placing senior Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a clumsy spot as she heads in the direction of an important reelection battle subsequent 12 months.
As chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Collins ought to have large affect over laws allocating federal funding to varied authorities packages and getting them to the Senate ground, an argument she made repeatedly throughout her 2020 Senate marketing campaign. Doing so requires bipartisan settlement within the Senate, the place 60 votes are obligatory to beat a filibuster.
But the White Home made clear it has little respect for the appropriations course of or bipartisan enter normally. The administration has frozen billions of {dollars} in funding Congress handed earlier this 12 months, shuttered federal companies with out congressional approval, and handed partisan rescissions clawing again spending beforehand accepted on a bipartisan foundation — primarily making Collins’ job lots much less influential.
Collins’ objections to that strategy have largely been ignored, nevertheless, and the Trump administration is making ready much more rescissions that might additional poison the appropriations course of. How the senator handles the state of affairs may decide whether or not the federal government plunges right into a shutdown and will probably have ramifications for her bid for a sixth time period subsequent 12 months in Maine, the place polls present her standing has suffered in latest months.
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When requested this week how she felt concerning the White Home undermining bipartisan efforts to go spending payments, Collins put a constructive spin on issues.
“We’re on track on the appropriations process. We’re actually ahead of where we were last year at this time,” Collins informed HuffPost.
That’s a fairly low bar. The Senate is on the verge of passing its first spending invoice this 12 months — a largely uncontroversial pot of cash coping with navy development initiatives and veterans’ affairs. It received’t take up the 11 further, tougher-to-pass payments till September, after the August recess, giving lawmakers only a few weeks to maintain the federal government open earlier than a Sept. 30 deadline.
Republicans within the Home, in the meantime, are pushing for much more draconian spending cuts that Democrats have already known as a nonstarter. That lawmakers might need to go one other persevering with decision, or “CR” — primarily kicking the can down the highway by funding the federal government finally 12 months’s ranges — is nearly a assured conclusion at this level.
Democratic senators — haunted by their choice to cave to the GOP on authorities funding earlier this 12 months — are nonetheless struggling to align on technique for the subsequent shutdown battle. This week, they voted to advance spending on navy development initiatives and veterans affairs. However they’re warning that may change if the White Home pushes for an additional rescissions package deal, which they used to chop funding for PBS, NPR and overseas assist packages by majority vote earlier this month.
All of which is complicating Collins’ function as chair of the appropriations committee. Final week, the Maine Republican opposed Trump’s rescissions invoice — however the measure handed anyway after a tiebreaking vote from Vice President JD Vance.
Collins managed to achieve eradicating $400 million in cuts to PEPFAR, the George W. Bush-era program targeted on preventing AIDS, from the invoice. However she determined in opposition to pursuing a separate effort to scale back cuts to funds for public broadcasting. Had she achieved so, the modification probably would have been adopted, threatening to scuttle the invoice’s passage since conservatives within the Home needed deeper cuts. Democrats later put up the identical modification for a vote, however Republicans rejected it.
An aide to the senator informed HuffPost that, had the modification succeeded, the invoice “could have ended up with the original rescissions package that included the PEPFAR cuts she had successfully advocated to be removed.”
The Trump administration, in the meantime, is threatening huge Collins priorities, additional undermining her gavel. The White Home froze and sought to get rid of federal funding for packages important for Mainers like Head Begin and LIHEAP. If enacted, the cuts would intestine early schooling for the nation’s neediest kids and little one care for his or her households, in addition to the flexibility of hundreds of thousands of low-income households to warmth and funky their properties. The White Home additionally tried to freeze Title IX funding in Maine in retaliation to the state’s insurance policies relating to transgender athletes in colleges however was rebuffed in court docket.
Republican senators defended Collins’ strategy, praising her for fostering bipartisan consensus amid White Home strikes they readily acknowledge have unfairly antagonized Democrats.
“It’s a very delicate balance,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) mentioned. “Right now, she’s got everybody playing ball and that is to everybody’s advantage to actually get the appropriations process working again. The challenge is that rescissions were tough because it’s something that Democrats looked at and said, you’re taking away things that we care about. She’s trying to regain their confidence.”
However Collins’ critics view the senator’s opposition to Trump’s agenda and her efforts to reverse a few of the White Home’s proposed cuts as fig leaves designed to additional her reasonable picture forward of what may very well be a tricky reelection 12 months.
They notice she voted to advance Trump’s unpopular tax cuts regulation on the Senate ground and that she supported the affirmation of White Home funds chief Russ Vought, who simply final week instructed he doesn’t want Congress or the Structure to power via large cuts to federal spending, a view that Collins known as “baffling.”
“We will make sure Mainers know it’s not an accident that Susan Collins is failing to stop the toxic GOP agenda; it’s a carefully orchestrated political ploy to keep her seat while cutting Medicaid and delivering tax giveaways to billionaires,” Tommy Garcia, a spokesman for the Maine Democratic Occasion, mentioned in an announcement. “At the end of the day, Donald Trump and Washington Republicans know Susan Collins will have their back.”
No main Democratic candidate has but emerged to problem Collins for her seat subsequent 12 months, despite the fact that polling is exhibiting her approval ranges at document lows. Democrats are hoping that Gov. Janet Mills (D) will nonetheless enter the race. The 77-year-old governor hasn’t formally dominated out a run, however hasn’t precisely expressed curiosity in a single both.
But regardless of an administration bent on thumbing its finger at a compliant Congress at each flip, Collins continues to be holding out hope that bipartisanship can win the day.
“The appropriations process is the key way that Congress carries out this significant constitutional responsibility. We must not abdicate our constitutional responsibility for the purse,” she mentioned in a speech on Tuesday.
Correction: A earlier model of this text misstated the heft of the PEPFAR cuts that Collins helped take away from Trump’s rescissions invoice. The cuts would have amounted to $400 million.
