By: The Editorial Board – wsj.com – December 18, 2024

The end-of-year CR is ugly as usual, but please leave town quickly.

In lieu of passing a real budget, the House and Senate have agreed on another continuing resolution, or CR, that will extend through March 14 in the new year. The only virtue here is that the government won’t shut down if the CR passes, and it will give the new GOP Congress a chance to use budget rules to pass a “reconciliation” bill next year with 51 Senate votes.

This means Chuck Schumer won’t be able to extort more spending if Republicans want at least some of their priorities to pass. But Mr. Schumer is going out with a CR bang, and the GOP is once again forced to take it. Some Republicans want to blame Speaker Mike Johnson for getting too little in exchange. But as long as they refuse to vote for a CR, the Speaker has no choice other than to count on Democratic votes to pass it. And that means bowing to their policy priorities, which is spend and spend.

This is how Mr. Schumer wants it. The GOP House actually passed nearly half of appropriations bills this year, and Susan Collins and Patty Murray passed almost all the Senate bills through the Appropriations Committee. But Mr. Schumer refused to bring them to the floor. He wants the end-of-year jam session when everyone wants to leave for Christmas, and he prevailed again.

The CR has $100 billion for emergencies, such as hurricanes, that President Biden requested. But that’s far more than is necessary to offer relief, as the members lined up to define everything as an emergency. There’s $10 billion more for farmers, plus an extension of the current farm bill for another year because the members couldn’t even agree on that pork-fest.

Congress didn’t offset all this with spending cuts, so it will add to the deficit, which is now running at a rate close to $2 trillion a year. Deficits have never run this high except in the crisis of a war or pandemic.

Meanwhile, as we write this the Senate is poised to pass a bill that would hand Social Security benefits to public workers well above what they have paid in payroll taxes. That will add another $196 billion to the debt over 10 years.

All of this speaks to the lack of any spending discipline on Capitol Hill even as annual payments on the national debt now exceed the entire Pentagon budget. If the U.S. dollar weren’t the world’s reserve currency, we’d be a banana republic. The spending will also complicate the GOP Congress’s job next year as it tries to avoid a huge looming tax increase when many provisions of the 2017 tax reform expire.

Also egregious, Republicans Don Bacon of Nebraska and Zach Nunn of Iowa held out for the full-year sale of E15 ethanol. This payoff to the ethanol lobby will lift demand for corn, though it could increase smog in hot weather, which is why E15’s sale has been blocked from June to September. With his narrow majority, Mr. Johnson had little choice but to accept this special-interest bonanza.

The CR also includes provisions to prevent pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) from favoring their own pharmacies over rivals and giving preference to higher-priced drugs on plan formularies so they can pocket higher fees and rebates. But the rules could reduce the incentive for PBMs to negotiate lower drug prices with manufacturers and thereby result in higher patient insurance premiums.

In a better Congress, if one is still possible, the CR would fail, and late in the day on Wednesday Donald Trump said he opposes it. But the question, as ever, is to what end if it loses? The bill will merely be revised to avoid a holiday government shutdown, perhaps on even better terms for Mr. Schumer.

All of which is a message to Republicans who will take control of the House, Senate and White House next year. To avoid another end-of-year fiasco, they need to stick together to pass spending bills on time. If they don’t, they’ll hand leverage to Democrats and show voters they’re no different.

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Source: Good Riddance to the 118th Congress – WSJ