WASHINGTON — Impeachment may have leapfrogged to the top of the national agenda, but members of Congress still have their day jobs as legislators, and they’re returning to Washington this coming week with mixed hopes of success.
It’s a volatile, difficult-to-predict time in Washington as lawmakers end a two-week break. The notion that President Donald Trump could do much significant dealmaking with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, his impeachment antagonist, could be fanciful, given Trump’s impulsiveness and demands for border wall money.
An important trade agreement pact has a pulse. An effort to deal with high prescription drug prices seems stuck.
Pelosi, D-Calif., is aware of the political imperative to avoid looking tied up in impeachment while leaving the rest of the nation’s business hanging.
Divided government has produced scant results thus far, except for a small-scale budget deal that lawmakers are struggling to put in place. The next few months could prove make or break for high-profile agenda items such as an updated trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, a full slate of spending bills and prescription drug legislation. Pelosi insists impeachment doesn’t have to harm the legislative agenda in Washington.
“They have nothing to do with each other,” Pelosi said earlier this month. “We have a responsibility to uphold our oath of office, to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. We also have a responsibility to get the job done for the American people.”
Hopes for a near-term breakthrough on trade, one of the few items on which Pelosi and Republicans are in general alignment, faded after AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka issued a combative warning against a speedy vote on the new North American pact.
On spending, negotiators are trying push through a $1.4 trillion package of agency spending bills to fill in the details of this summer’s budget-and-debt accord.
Experienced bargainers such as GOP Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, are taking the lead on that but lingering bitterness over the U.S.-Mexico wall fight threatens to again delay a resolution. That’s particularly so after Trump’s attacked lawmakers’ traditional power of the purse by raiding military construction projects to finance wall construction.
Given the uncertainty, lawmakers may end up doing what they do best: Kicking the can down the road.
Months-late enactment of the annual agency appropriations bills is increasingly common in Washington, and it’s clear that another temporary government-wide funding bill will be needed when the current one expires in six weeks. Likewise, there’s no hard and fast deadline for ratifying an important trade pact with Mexico and Canada that an administration priority.
Pelosi supported the original North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, as did the current House Ways and Means Committee chairman, Rep. Richard Neal, who has forged a good relationship with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.
Pelosi and Neal, D-Mass., had been making cautious but optimistic assurances about the long-delayed trade pact, which is being held up in large part over Mexico’s efforts to toughen labor standards and limit U.S. job losses.