NATION/WORLD
Saturday, July 1, 2017
East Oregonian
Page 9A
Summer looms with GOP stuck on health care, budget, taxes
WASHINGTON
(AP)
—
Republicans are stuck on health
care, can’t pass a budget, and hopes
for a big, bipartisan infrastructure
package are fizzling. Overhauling
the tax code looks more and more
like a distant dream.
The GOP-led Congress has yet
to salt away a single major legisla-
tive accomplishment for President
Donald Trump — and a summer
of drift may lead to a logistical
nightmare this fall.
Instead, Trump’s allies appear
both divided and indecisive, unable
to deliver on his agenda while
letting other must-do congressional
business — chiefly their core
responsibilities of passing a budget
and spending bills, and keeping the
government solvent — slide onto
an already daunting fall agenda that
is looking more and more like it’ll
be a train wreck.
Friday brought more bad news
for Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.,
and other House leaders as 20 GOP
moderates signaled a revolt on the
budget, penning a letter to Ryan
announcing their opposition to
an emerging plan to force cuts to
government agencies and benefit
programs such as food stamps. The
letter, authored by Rep. Charlie
Dent, R-Pa., warned that without
an agreement with Democrats
on increasing agency spending,
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
The Capitol in Washington is quiet after lawmakers departed for
the Independence Day recess on Friday.
moderates will be “reticent to
support any budget.”
“It’s looking like they’re very
disorganized. They got obviously
a lot of conflict over spending
preferences and it’s not just a
two-way conflict,” said top House
Budget Committee Democrat John
Yarmuth of Kentucky. “It’s just a
tough Rubik’s Cube they’re trying
to solve.”
So it’s not just the Senate effort
to repeal and replace Democrat
Barack Obama’s health care law
that’s foundering. The annual
congressional budget measure — a
prerequisite to this fall’s hoped-for
tax effort — is languishing as well,
as are the 12 annual spending bills
that typically consume weeks of
House floor time each summer.
But GOP leaders say all is going
well. Ryan told a Wisconsin radio
host on Thursday that “it’s the
most productive Congress since
the mid-’80s” and issued a news
release Friday titled “Despite What
You May Hear, We Are Getting
Things Done.” The release cites a
bipartisan Department of Veterans
Affairs accountability measure
and 14 bills repealing Obama-era
regulations as Congress’ top
achievements.
“It would be hard to fault the
average American for thinking
all that’s going on in Washington
these days is high-drama hearings
and partisan sniping,” Ryan said.
“But amid the countdown clocks
and cable news chatter, something
important is happening: Congress is
getting things done to help improve
people’s lives.”
In the first year of a presidency,
the annual August congressional
recess is a traditional point to take
stock. By that point, Obama had
signed an economic recovery bill
and President George W. Bush
had won his landmark tax cuts,
while President Bill Clinton was
celebrating a hard-fought budget
package. Trump has no comparable
successes to trumpet — but his
allies in Congress say they’re not
worried.
“We laid out an agenda in
November and December, and
we’re needing to get there,”
said House Rules Committee
Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas.
“And we can effectively get there.
The questions that confound us
are those that we can answer
ourselves. And we will.”
And as Republicans are stalled
on health care, the budget and infra-
structure, there are several other
problems that need to be taken care
of, including increasing the nation’s
borrowing authority, preventing a
government shutdown, and lifting
budget “caps” that are hobbling
efforts to beef up the military.
Unlike health care, the debt
limit and a deal to fix the spending
caps — a leftover from a failed
2011 budget deal — can only be
resolved with Democratic help.
However, they promise to consume
political capital and valuable time
and energy, and there’s no political
pay-off, other than forestalling
disaster.
First, Congress is off on vacation
to return in July for a three-week
session. Then comes the traditional
monthlong August recess.
After Labor Day comes a
four-week sprint to October and
the deadline to avert a govern-
ment shutdown with a temporary
spending bill — and to forestall a
disastrous default on U.S. obliga-
tions by lifting the debt limit, which
is a politically toxic vote for many
Republicans.
Sentiment is building among
some lawmakers to shorten the
recess to make progress on the
unfinished work that is piling up.
BRIEFLY
GOP bill would let churches
endorse political candidates
But if they want to get political, they don’t
have a constitutional right not to pay taxes.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Churches
should have the right to endorse political
candidates and still keep their tax-free status,
say House Republicans targeting a law that
prohibits outright politicking from the pulpit.
Republicans repeatedly have failed to
scrap the law preventing churches and other
nonprofits from backing candidates, so now
they are trying to starve it. With little fanfare,
a House Appropriations subcommittee added
a provision that would deny money to the
IRS to enforce the 63-year-old law to a bill
to fund the Treasury Department, Securities
and Exchange Commission and other
agencies. The subcommittee passed the bill
Thursday.
Republicans say the law is enforced
unevenly, leaving religious leaders uncertain
about what they are allowed to say and do.
Some Democrats say the measure comes
too close to mixing church and state.
They say religious leaders already have
First Amendment rights, just like anyone else.
Trump suggests just repeal
Obamacare, replace later
WASHINGTON (AP) — President
Donald Trump barged into Senate
Republicans’ delicate health care
negotiations Friday, declaring that if
lawmakers can’t reach a deal they should
simply repeal “Obamacare” right away and
then replace it later on.
Trump’s tweet revives an approach that
GOP leaders and the president himself
considered but dismissed months ago as
impractical and politically unwise. And it’s
likely to further complicate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell’s task as he struggles to
bridge the divide between GOP moderates
and conservatives as senators leave
Washington for the Fourth of July break
without having voted on a health care bill as
planned.
The president sent his early-morning
tweet shortly after Nebraska Republican
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Sen. Ben Sasse appeared on Fox News
Channel’s “Fox & Friends” to talk about
a letter he had sent to Trump making that
exact suggestion: a vote on repealing former
President Barack Obama’s health law
followed by a new effort at a working out a
replacement.
Trump is a known “Fox & Friends”
viewer, but Republican Sen. Rand Paul
of Kentucky also claimed credit for
recommending the tactic to the president in a
conversation earlier in the week.
Trump travel ban won’t keep
engaged couples apart
NEW YORK (AP) — Paul Gottinger,
who applied nearly a year ago to bring
his Iranian fiancée to the United States so
they could be married, went to bed feeling
hopeless.
The Trump administration’s travel ban,
as first outlined on Wednesday, required
people from six mostly Muslim countries to
have a business or close family relationship
with someone in the U.S. to get a visa.
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Siblings, parents or spouses made the list;
fiancés didn’t.
But then government officials abruptly
changed course, just hours before the new
rules went into effect Thursday evening. The
travel ban would not keep engaged couples
apart after all.
“This one more crazy twist on the roller
coaster,” Gottinger, a 34-year-old journalist
from Minnesota said by telephone Friday
from Istanbul, Turkey, where the couple
go to spend time with each other. “We’re
relieved, but we have a long way to go.”
Before the State Department relented,
immigration lawyers said it made no sense
to exclude fiancés because there is already
rigorous vetting aimed at rooting out
marriage fraud.
Foreigners engaged to marry a U.S.
citizen have long had to provide detailed
documentation of the relationship’s
authenticity and undergo background checks
to get a fiancé visa, known as a K-1.
Scrutiny of such visas increased after the
2015 San Bernardino, California, massacre
that left 14 people dead.
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