The Senate Republicans have announced they will get on the same page as President Trump, which is an admirable goal, assuming they can first agree on which book they are in. Currently they appear to be in three separate volumes, a bonus pamphlet, and what one House member keeps describing as a “third package,” which sounds less like legislation and more like something the postal service left on your porch that nobody ordered.
The centerpiece of this unified front is a budget reconciliation package — and I want to be careful here, because “reconciliation” is doing an enormous amount of work for a word that means, at its root, getting two parties to stop being angry at each other. The Senate cannot reconcile the package. The House cannot reconcile the package. The package, to its credit, appears perfectly at peace with itself. It is everyone holding the package who has the disagreement.
Then there is the $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund. The number is a nice touch — patriotic, even — though I notice that 1776 is also the year a group of men decided that a distant authority controlling their money without their meaningful consent was a problem worth addressing. I assume the irony is intentional. These things usually are, in retrospect.
And the ballroom. A White House ballroom has entered the budget negotiations, which I think we can all agree is where ballrooms belong. When deliberations over federal spending become sufficiently abstract, the correct move is to hold them somewhere with a parquet floor and decent acoustics. The ballroom does not change the math. But it does improve the choreography.
What we have, then, is a majority caucus that controls the Senate, controls the House, and controls the White House, standing in a ballroom, disagreeing with itself over how to spend money it has already decided to spend, on a timeline it has already missed, under pressure from an executive whose preferences shift faster than a cloture vote. The phrase for this, in parliamentary procedure, is “internal deliberation.” The phrase for it everywhere else is a majority that has confused having power with knowing what to do with it — which, to be fair, is a confusion so bipartisan it practically qualifies for its own line item.
The reconciliation package remains unreconciled. The anti-weaponization fund is, for now, weaponizing the caucus against itself. And somewhere in the White House, a ballroom waits patiently for someone to call the dance.