An infrastructure meeting imploded, budget talks stalled and a disaster aid deal only barely survived.
One day after President Donald Trump indicated he would not cut deals with Congress while he’s being investigated, he cut a deal with Congress.
With Trump’s support, the Senate passed a long-stalled disaster aid bill, in the perfect encapsulation of a whiplash-inducing week.
On Tuesday, hopes of a two-year budget deal rose and fell. On Wednesday, a bipartisan infrastructure meeting at the White House went off the rails, sparking open warfare between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the president. And with Washington at rock bottom, and Congress preparing to leave for a week-long recess on Thursday, it looked dire for disaster aid.
Yet through backchannel negotiations with senators, Trump dropped demands for emergency border spending and signed off on $19.1 billion in much-needed aid for hurricane, wildfire and flooding victims.
The Senate even took the first set of roll call votes on legislation in weeks — to ban robocalls — after a monomaniacal focus on nominations.
“I’m delighted,” deadpanned Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who complained on the Senate floor that the chamber had done “zilch” on Wednesday.
Yet the momentary peace was shattered almost instantly. At an impromptu press conference late Thursday afternoon during a photo-op with farmers, Trump lit into Pelosi, who earlier in the day said that the president had committed “impeachable offenses” and was in need of “an intervention” by family and friends. The president lashed out at the speaker, calling her a “mess.”
And when he was asked about progress on a deal to raise stiff budget caps or increase the debt limit, he had only this to say: “I am a very capable person. We’ll see what happens. I can tell you this: Let them get this angst out of their belt and when it is, we can do things so quick your head will spin.”
Disaster aid took months to pull off, an unusual delay for something that was once routine on Capitol Hill and would help popular constituencies like farmers and wildfire victims. And the battles ahead will only be more difficult.
“It’s shocking it takes this long,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). “The willingness of the Republican Party, led by Donald Trump, to be constructive and engaged, is absent. He’s led them into a blind alley.”
His counterpart across the Capitol saw things differently and cited a more familiar reason for the disaster aid deal. “This became the only option before the [Memorial Day] break,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S. D.), the majority whip. “It was the last train leaving the station.
