The latest twist in the current budget battle in Congress has Democrats in the Senate turning thumbs-down on the short-term spending package passed by House Republicans this week, including a lawmaker from Virginia.
Congress faces a deadline of Friday at midnight to pass a budget and avert a government shutdown. Democrats in the Senate appear largely united in plans to vote against legislation passed in the House.
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine joined WTOP’s John Aaron and Michelle Basch about his plan to vote against the House-approved measure.
Read and listen to the interview below.
The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
- Q:
How does the senator plan to vote?
- Tim Kaine:
I am a no, guys. We had an Armed Services Committee hearing yesterday, and the Pentagon brass, who are now Trump administration officials, looked us in the eye and said, ‘This House CR (Continuuing Resolution), will hurt our national defense.’ We’ve never been under a full year CR before, and they walk through issues like ship maintenance and others that will be severely compromised by the CR. My Republican colleagues on the committee said, ‘You’re right. We shouldn’t do this. The CR will hurt our defense.’ Well, guess what? We don’t have to do it. We should, instead of embracing this House proposal that is so damaging in so many ways, we should just extend existing funding for 30 days, very simple, and then work out an actual appropriations bill for the remainder of the year, like we always do that. That’s the right answer here, and that’s what we’re pushing for.
- Michelle Basch:
But what about the concerns that Democrats could be blamed if this doesn’t happen and the government indeed shuts down?
- Tim Kaine:
I don’t buy that. Democrats had nothing to do with this bill. The House Republicans put it together without a single Democratic involvement in drafting the bill, and now they sent it to the Senate, and guess what the House did? Guys, you know this, they voted Tuesday night, and then they skipped town. They left thinking, ‘Oh, we’ll force not just Senate Democrats, but Senate Republicans have to go along with this bill that hurts our national defense because we skipped town on a Tuesday night.’ It takes two houses to do a budget. I expect Senate Republicans should stand up and say, ‘Yes, Speaker Johnson, you’re the speaker of the House. You’re not the czar of the Senate.’ We got a role in this too, and the right thing to do is a simple 30-day extension and then get an actual budget deal. But Dems had had nothing to do with this bill, so folks are not going to blame us for a bill that hurts our national security, hurts the District of Columbia, hurts education and health programs because they wouldn’t even let us in the room.
- John Aaron:
Well, regardless of who might get blamed for a possible shutdown, some worry that a shutdown could play right into the president’s hands and accelerate his efforts to shrink the government. Is that a concern of yours?
- Tim Kaine:
It is a concern. But if you look at the CR, one of the reasons the CR is bad is it does that very thing. It it hands over a lot of discretion to Donald Trump and Elon Musk to do whatever the hell they want rather than follow a congressional budget. It’s one thing for the president to grab that power. It’s another thing for Congress to vote to give him that power. I don’t want to vote to give President Donald Trump the power to do whatever he wants because what he’s doing now with his mass firings is, it’s a war on veterans; 30% of the federal workforce is veterans. Virginia is very veteran-heavy in terms of our population, and the president’s firing spree is falling disproportionately on the shoulders of America’s veterans, and he knows it. He’s been president before, he knows who the federal workforce is. Russ Vought has been OMB Director before he knows who the federal workforce is. I don’t want to vote to give the president the power to continue to cudgel our veterans.
- Michelle Basch:
This 30-day spending bill that’s being put forth by your party, are you seeing your colleagues falling in line? Does it look like it’s going to go through in the Senate?
- Tim Kaine:
Democrats are united around it. We are in minority. Listen, the timing of voting in the Senate can be slow. A bill comes over from the House. It has to be pending for a certain number of days before you get a vote. We said to the Republicans, we won’t insist on the full timing. We’ll speed it up if you just give us this amendment vote, and we’re waiting for them to answer. But again, I had Republican colleagues just yesterday saying, ‘The House CR hurts our defense. We should do an actual budget.’ If they vote in accord with what they were saying publicly yesterday, we should be able to get the votes to do this, but we’re still waiting for them to respond.
- John Aaron:
Can you beat the clock on this, even if you do get to some sort of agreement?
- Tim Kaine:
Sure, yeah, we can do it. We’ve done it before, and again, our proposal is a simple one, which is just take the existing spending and without any adjustments, just do the same thing for the next 30 days while we work out a full year budget deal for the remainder of the year. And we are close on that deal. The lead negotiators, Patty Murray and Susan Collins, are very close. We can do that over the course of 30 days, but just to find the path to a vote for the simple 30 day extension. We definitely have time to do that.
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