Senate Democrats want to ensure they have a place at the table for any high-level budget talks this year.
For the first time since President Obama won election in 2008, Democrats are stuck in the minority in both chambers of Congress.
They don’t want to get sidelined in the same way they did at the end of the Clinton administration, when Republicans last controlled the Senate and House under a Democratic president.
Then, President Clinton took the lead in negotiating the year-end spending bills, wielding the bully pulpit to get the best deal he could to increase funding for domestic programs.
“That was then. We’re now,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (Md.), the senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “It is the Senate Democrats that are doing everything to force this issue.”
Senate Democratic leaders don’t want to rely on Obama’s veto to compel Republicans into convening a budget summit later this year, as that could lead to negotiations limited to the White House and GOP leaders.
Instead, Senate Democrats want to convene high-level talks now. They’re demanding a prominent role by threatening to block every single appropriations bill Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) brings to the floor, well before any of them reaches Obama’s desk.
“We hope to demonstrate as quickly as possible to the Republicans that if we’re going to resolve this budget crisis, we shouldn’t wait until November or December. Let’s do it now,” said Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), who also serves as the ranking member on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.
“If it’s going to work, it will require congressional leadership on both sides to meet with the president,” he added. “As long as the Republicans need 60 votes in the Senate and don’t have them, they’ll need Democratic cooperation.”
Clinton clinched his role as his party’s lead negotiator after he bested former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) in the spending standoff that resulted in the 1995 to 1996 government shutdown.
“The 1997 budget deal we were totally cut out of,” said Steve Elmendorf, who served as a senior adviser to House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.).
