Colorado Politics

Bennet: Trump’s spending plan, tax reform, Pentagon boost going nowhere

Gridlock in Congress could leave the Trump administration heading into its second year with his predecessor’s spending plan.

Colorado Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet said with the federal fiscal year winding down, there’s little time left for Congress to act on President Donald Trump’s spending plan. And with increasing tension between the White House and leaders in the House and Senate, major budget bills seem likely to bog down.

“It looks more and more like we’re headed for a continuing resolution,” Bennet said during a visit to Colorado Springs on Friday.

It’s a fate that could scuttle the Trump administration’s biggest plans, from health care and tax reform to a big boost in Pentagon spending. Continuing resolutions, temporary measures that fix federal spending at last year’s level, have been common in recent years as a Republican-led Congress battled the Democratic administration of former president Barack Obama.

But now, even with the GOP in charge in the two chambers and the Oval Office, there seems to be little momentum to push budget deals along.

That’s not helped by the string of controversies that have soured relations between Trump and lawmakers. In the past week, Trump sparked criticism from Capitol Hill with statements that blamed “both sides” after a reported neo-Nazi ran over counter-protesters at a Virginia rally that drew white supremacists and neo-Nazis. The rancor between lawmakers and Trump triggers budget worries in the Senate, which has already been slow to take up spending measures. And filibuster rules give minority Democrats power to stall budget bills they don’t like.

To get budget bills through, the GOP has to woo Democrats like Bennet who has been known to work with moderate Republicans.

Losing budget battles would add to a string of legislative difficulties tallied by the Trump team. Senators last month turned back Trump’s signature effort from the 2016 campaign when it voted down a measure to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

And increasing bombast from Trump on Twitter could make it even harder to get the White House budget agenda to a Senate vote.

Bennet expressed alarm over Trump’s Thursday tweets that alluded to a debunked story of Gen. John Pershing summarily executing Muslim prisoners during the Philippine insurgency after the Spanish-American War with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood.

Those kinds of tweets, Bennet said, sully the reputation of the president and are more suited to the campaign trail.

“The campaign is over,” he said.

Bennet, though, noted that the military seems to be ignoring the president’s tweets on Charlottesville and terror tactics.

He noted that military leaders in recent days have issued statements against racism and are unlikely to take the pigs’ blood tale seriously.

“The Joint Chiefs won’t be distracted by anything,” Bennet said.


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