Trump Tries to Avert GOP Rebellion on National Emergency

Plus - Trump demands allies pay billions more for U.S. troops

Trump Tries to Head Off GOP Rebellion on National Emergency

Facing a potentially embarrassing political rebuke, the White House is scrambling to rein in nearly a dozen Republican senators who have indicated they may vote to reject President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border with Mexico.

The Senate will take up the issue next week, following the House’s passage last month of the measure to terminate Trump’s declaration. The White House expects to lose the Senate vote, leading to Trump’s first veto, but the administration is confident that Congress will be unable to override the veto.

Even so, in what Politico’s Burgess Everett and Eliana Johnson call a “slow-motion freakout,” the White House is reportedly pressuring Republican senators to toe the line and keep defections to a minimum. While the White House knows it will likely lose four GOP senators — Susan Collins (ME), Lisa Murkowski (AK), Thom Tillis (NC) and Rand Paul (KY) have all said they’ll vote for the resolution — it wants the rest to stick with the president.

Administration officials are calling senators to ask for their support, and Trump is “taking names” of those who oppose him, The Washington Post’s Erica Werner and Seung Min Kim report, with a special emphasis on those senators who will be running for reelection in 2020.

GOP senators on the fence: Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on February 15 enables the White House to redirect roughly $3.6 billion in military construction funds toward the border wall. Some senators are bothered by the constitutional issues raised by the move, which could constitute executive branch interference with the legislative power of the purse. In addition to the potential legal issues, some senators are worried about taking federal money currently appropriated for dozens of defense projects, some in their own states. The administration has claimed that all redirected funds would be “back-filled” in Trump’s upcoming federal budget request, but there are doubts about how effective that would be.

Need more details: There are still lots of unanswered questions about the details of the emergency financing and how the vote will proceed. Senators are hoping the White House will spell out exactly how it plans to redirect funding, with a list of every military construction project that would be affected, but the administration had so far failed to provide a promised list. Some lawmakers are pushing the administration to find the money elsewhere, citing the roughly $4 billion available from forfeiture and anti-drug funds that do not require an emergency declaration to access. And senators are still unsure about their legislative strategy, with open questions about whether they will amend the House resolution or create companion legislation.

The bottom line: Trump is expected to lose the vote in the Senate next week, the only question is by how much. A presidential veto will likely keep Trump’s national emergency declaration in place even as court challenges continue. While there’s still uncertainty about which projects would be affected by Trump’s declaration, the current battle between the White House and GOP senators is also over power, appearances and pride.

Trump Pushes Allies to Pay a Lot More for US Troops

President Trump has long complained about the cost of keeping U.S. troops in foreign countries and expressed a desire for allies to more fully share the financial burden. In a speech at the Pentagon in January, Trump warned, “Wealthy, wealthy countries that we’re protecting are all under notice. We cannot be the fools for others.”

Although foreign policy experts have questioned his emphasis on payments for protection, arguing that overseas deployments provide considerable military, political and economic benefits for the U.S., Trump’s efforts are having a real effect. On Friday, South Korea agreed to pay 8 percent more to cover the cost of U.S. troop deployments in the country, bumping this year’s total to $925 million. And Bloomberg’s Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs report that the Trump administration is also pushing other allies, including Germany and Japan, to increase their payments for hosting U.S. troops.

Trump is reportedly looking for more than just a bump in payments from U.S. allies. Wadhams and Jacobs say the White House is asking host nations to pay the full price of deploying U.S. troops in their countries — plus another 50 percent for the privilege. “In some cases,” the reporters say, “nations hosting American forces could be asked to pay five to six times as much as they do now under the ‘Cost Plus 50’ formula.”

The U.S. could encounter challenges from allies who provide valuable bases that extend U.S. military reach, Wadhams and Jacobs say, and the White House may ease up on its demands if allies begin to question the need for U.S. troops on their soil. But it’s clear that the Trump administration has changed the conversation on foreign troop deployments, and that allies will now be expected to pay more than they have in the past.

Senate Budget Committee Chair Wants ‘Realistic’ Five-Year Plan

Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) says he wants to get real about the federal budget. Enzi, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, plans to break from past practice and put forth a “realistic” spending and revenue plan that covers five years instead of 10, Roll Call’s Paul M. Krawzak reports.

His budget reportedly would not envision wiping out deficits or achieving balance, in part as the result of the shorter timeframe but also because Enzi says he doesn’t want to rely on gimmicks — and because there’s little appetite among lawmakers for larger spending cuts or tax hikes.

“I’m planning on doing a realistic budget, not a gimmick budget, and I’m hoping that that will lead then to some budget process reform that will get us back on track, reduce spending,” the senator said, according to Roll Call.

Krawzak explains why reaching balance over the shorter timeframe would be daunting: “It would take $5.2 trillion in deficit savings to balance the budget in five years,” he says, “according to Congressional Budget Office baseline estimates. That’s equal to 4.4 percent of U.S. gross domestic product during that period; by contrast the unsuccessful Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan in late 2010, considered too dramatic at the time, would have trimmed deficits by about 1.1 percent of GDP over its first five years, and 2.2 percent over a decade.”

The Senate Budget Committee plans to mark up its fiscal 2020 budget resolution the last week of March, and the House Budget Committee is targeting the first week of April. The Republican-led Senate and Democratic-led House will have to come together to agree on spending levels that are otherwise set to fall sharply under caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Chart of the Week: How Americans Feel About the Health Care System

As Democrats debate “Medicare for All,” a new roundup of public opinion on health reform published this week by the American Enterprise Institute provides some useful background. For decades now, an overwhelming majority of Americans has felt that the U.S. system needs either fundamental changes or a complete overhaul.

In a new piece titled “The unique problem with U.S. health care,” Axios’ Sam Baker points out how unusual the mostly employer-based American system is. “If you look at other rich countries comparable to the U.S., you’ll find plenty of roles for private insurance,” he writes. “But you won’t find such a close tie between work and health care very often.”

In addition to that employer-based system, the United States also has a number of public health care programs. “It’s not unique to have a public and private system, but to have so many public and private programs co-existing — I can’t think of any other county that has that,” Irene Papanicolas, a health economist at the London School of Economics, tells Baker.

The result is costly bureaucratic bloat. “That fragmentation — one system for workers, another for the unemployed or self-employed, plus Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for low-income families, one for the military, another for Native Americans — contributes to our wasteful spending by driving up administrative costs,” Baker writes. “Almost nowhere in that convoluted process does the U.S. do much to control health care prices — another big difference from similar countries, and obviously a big reason our system is so expensive.”

Your Prize for Making It Through the Week

It's time to spring forward! Daylight Saving Time begins at 2 a.m. on Sunday. Yes, you'll lose an hour of sleep, but the benefits could be well worth it, at least according to some. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) filed a bill this week to make Daylight Saving Time permanent year-round.



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