Congress is in for a long, painful September

[Portions of this appeared as a comment on a friend’s social media post elsewhere, but it felt articleworthy, and it’s been a little while since I wrote something new here].

There’s a lot of confusion swirling about what Congress is facing as they come into September. Some of this confusion is the sheer number of things being talked about, and the ways various people try to make them dependent upon each other in the name of leverage. Some of it is just that the “the news” just isn’t always really good about talking about this stuff and getting the details straight. And some of it is that government works in mysterious ways, always has, and really should, no matter how much people try to simplify it so that “anybody” can understand it.

Right now, there are four separate things that MUST PASS in the next four weeks, each for entirely different reasons. None of these are actually related to each other. They are, as we say in the software engineering business, orthogonal concerns. Which does not mean they won’t have any effect upon one another, but any effort by congresspeople to tie them together, or to tie them to other things like spending cuts, has more to do with political leverage than any inherent relationship.

In no particular order:

1. The Debt Ceiling must be raised. The debt ceiling is exactly what it says it is — a limit on how much debt the US government can be carrying at any given time. The thing is, we have lots of outstanding debt, in the form of bonds, where we routinely pay the interest by borrowing more money. This, by the way, is a practice that dates back to the UK government in the 1700 — Blackstone talks about it as a relatively new idea in his Commentaries. So, we have to borrow more to continue paying the interest on what we’ve already borrowed but have never bothered retiring, as well as meeting all of our other cash obligations. If we hit the ceiling and Congress refuses to raise it, we must stop borrowing, at which point, we start to default on our older debts. That will kick off a cascade of failing confidence in the US’ credit-worthiness, which will make it harder, or impossible, to borrow again in the future. Markets will crash hard and fast, with all the knock-on effects to our economy.
2. A spending measure — NOT a budget, but an actual appropriation to spend money, which is different — must be passed. All money bills in Congress come in one of three forms: a budget — which is nothing actually meaningful but a kind of vague plan for spending, much of which will later be ignored despite all the strum und drang; an authorisation, which takes individual budget items and actually makes them into statements that say, “Yes, we will spend this much money, through this agency. This agency exists and has these these powers, which we promise we’ll figure out how to pay for.” And finally, appropriation bills, which say, “Here’s how much money we’re going to spend on that thing we authorised.”
   If we had a not-dysfunctional government — which we haven’t had for decades — then the path from budget to authorisations to appropriations would be smooth and regular and there would never be any issue. But that’s not the government we currently have, because, in Parliamentary terms, we actually have a minority government. Nobody talks about it that way, because doesn’t the GOP have a majority in both houses and the Presidency? But the faction of the GOP that has control of Congress does not have a majority. They are actually in coalition (tho’ again, that’s now how we talk about it here) with whackjobs who think government is evil and shouldn’t ever spend money. Which makes it really damned hard to pass money bills.
   ANYway, the point is, all of the existing appropriations are running out and a new one must be passed or every single department of government ceases to be allowed to actually spend money. At that point, non-emergency services get furloughed, which is perfectly fine with the whackjob faction who thinks they shouldn’t exist anyway. This is what we mean by “government shutdown.”
3. An income tax reform package — not because taxes actually NEED reform that badly (I mean, they’re not great, but…), but because of political promises. The GOP hates taxes; the whackjob faction really hates taxes because if they could get rid of taxes they’d have an excuse to cut spending on just about everything which would be awesome (they think). Anyway, Trump promised one; the GOP leadership has been promising one of for years; they have to do this, or else admit that they don’t know how to do anything they actually want to do at all.
4. Hurricane Harvey relief — because FEMA is overcommitted on its current reserves (this is not a structural problem, it’s expected, and it’s expected that when needed FEMA will get its funding boosted). So this has to pass really on humanitarian grounds as well as the political ground that fucking over the fourth largest city in the United States is not the way to stay in office.

Of all of these, the only one I actually think will pass is Harvey relief, and even that will be a squeak. Yes, that means I genuinely expect us to default our debts and shut the government down. I don’t want either of those things to happen, mind you, but I really think our government has become that dysfunctional.