Patty Murray, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the Senate, threatened today to provoke a government shutdown this fall if the Republican-controlled Congress won’t agree to a budget more in line with President Obama’s priorities.
“Republicans have a choice,” Murray said in a Wednesday speech, per the Huffington Post. “They can either work with us early on a bipartisan budget deal that will set the topline budget levels and allow the Appropriations Committee to work on bills that can be signed into law. Or, they can wait until we reach a crisis, until we approach or hit another completely unnecessary government shutdown — and work with us then.”
Obama has promised to veto any spending bill that does not totally reverse the sequestration spending cuts mandated by the Budget Control Act, which he signed in 2011.
House Republicans have tried to get around the sequester legislation’s defense-spending caps by proposing to place money in a separate account that funds U.S. military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Obama supports an increase in defense spending relative to sequestration, but has promised to veto any such increases unless Congress also raises the law’s limits on domestic spending.
Murray’s speech is a far cry from her 2013 statement on the government shutdown, which came about after Republicans — then in the Senate minority — tried to withhold funding for the implementation of Obamacare. “The last thing anyone should want is a government shutdown, but the days of a small political faction holding the entire nation back from addressing the much larger challenges we face must come to an end,” she said at the time.
If Democrats stick by their current position, they may test the “iron law” laid out by GOP strategist Karl Rove: “Republicans get blamed for any government shutdown, no matter who controls the White House or Congress.”
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.