The House Budget Committee advanced a $95 billion package Thursday for the Iran war, farm aid and President Donald Trump’s push for strict new voter ID requirements, moving the machinery of Congress forward on a party-line vote even as the full House and the Senate remain shaky ground. The committee approved the resolution 20-14. Ordinary people get the bill. The people with the gavels get the leverage.
Who Has the Power
Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington framed the proposal as one last push to deliver for voters ahead of the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress. “We are rallying to finish what we started when the American people sent us here,” said Arrington, R-Texas. That’s the language of the apparatus: speak for the people, then spend their money on war, policing, and election rules that tighten the same grip.
With Iran war funding making up the bulk of the package, some $60 billion, Arrington acknowledged that people can debate “why we’re there” in the overseas conflict. He said the money is needed for basic supplies — “just the bombs, bullets and battlefield readiness for our men and women in uniform to finish the fight successfully and return home safely — that’s it.” The phrase is doing a lot of work. So is the money.
The resolution, which sets out instructions for the various congressional committees to draw up proposals, also calls for $13 billion for Intelligence, $12 billion for Agriculture, and $10 billion for Administration, which handles voting and elections. War, surveillance, food, and the machinery that counts the votes. A neat little hierarchy, all under one roof.
Who Gets Crushed
The proposal is the third budget reconciliation package Republicans in control of Congress have put forward this session to steamroll Trump’s priorities past Democratic objections using a legislative procedure that allows for simple majority votes for passage. It is the same process House Speaker Mike Johnson used to pass Trump’s big tax cuts bill last year and to advance Homeland Security money after Democrats refused to fund the department following the deaths of Americans protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions earlier this year. The state keeps its tools polished. The people at the bottom keep paying.
Johnson is pushing the effort almost single-handedly, without full backing from his slim House Republican majority or the Senate. He held lengthy meetings with Trump this week at the White House and hosted a private session for Republicans at the president’s Camp David retreat to hash out details. Closed doors. Private sessions. Public consequences.
But the 47-page package remains a long-shot effort — too meager for some, too costly for others — ahead of voting in the full House expected next week. Key Republican Rep. Chip Roy, an influential member of the Freedom Caucus who has expressed reservations about the package, did not vote at the Budget Committee session, as his home state of Texas deals with flooding.
What They Call “Order”
Democrats are ready to vote against the proposal, as they did Thursday during committee action. Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the Budget Committee, said the document, some 6,500 words, never once mentions the issue that’s top of mind for many Americans: affordability. “People know this is a failed presidency, and a failed Republican majority,” Boyle said.
Democrats offered more than a dozen amendments to the package during the hourslong Budget Committee session and raised questions about how the new spending will ultimately be paid for — either via budget cuts to other programs or by piling onto the nation’s debt. Boyle offered an amendment to reverse healthcare cuts from the Republicans’ big tax breaks bill. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., sought to reinstate funding for food stamps under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., suggested funding for immigration enforcement at Department of Homeland Security could be used to offset costs elsewhere. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, blamed the high costs of living on the Iran war and said every time Americans open their refrigerators or go to the gas pump they are “paying for a war that should never have been started.”
That’s the hierarchy in plain sight. War spending climbs. Food stamps, healthcare, and basic affordability get shoved into the bargaining pit.
Next steps are highly volatile, as the House holds a rare Saturday pro forma session, which is a largely administrative meeting that will allow the resolution to be filed in time for consideration next week. Johnson can only lose a few detractors on his side of the aisle as he relies on Republicans only, without Democrats, for passage.
But the resolution would also have to be agreed on by the Senate, and Republican senators have largely panned the House effort, waiting to see if Johnson can heave it to passage. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said senators have “a lot of questions” about it — from defense hawks concerned about the military to deficit hawks who want to offset costs. “It’s a very uneven path,” he said. “We’ll see what the House can execute on,” he said, but “I can’t make any guarantees over here.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who is expected to take over the Senate Budget Committee after the sudden death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, has been a leading budget hawk concerned about the nation’s rising deficits. The House plans to have its committees work on bill text over the August recess and bring the whole package back to the floor for a final vote in the fall.
The votes, the retreats, the committee rooms, the procedural tricks — it’s all the same old theater of managed power. The package moves because the machinery is built to move it.