As Congress returns to work this week, the threat of another government shutdown on January 19th will be the primary focus of both Republicans and Democrats. Extending the budget through October was tabled last year as Republicans focused on tax reform but the issue will take center stage in the January session.
Moreover, with just 17 days to strike a deal, the bid/ask spread seems fairly wide. The White House has made clear that funding for a border wall, a key promise of the Trump campaign, is imperative while Democrats want DACA, a program which shields some 1 million “Dreamers” from deportation but was ended by Trump back in September, signed into law.
Of course, while a “deal” would seem feasible, the looming midterm elections in November, in which Democrats hope to take one or both chambers of Congress, complicate the issue as neither side of the aisle will jump at the opportunity to offer up a ‘win’ to the other.
As Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told Bloomberg, “January is going to be contentious…people are not going to come back singing the Sound of Music together.”
If an urgent attempt to strike a deal on spending and immigration fails this week, the federal government may again be on the brink of a shutdown.
Congress last year repeatedly delayed passing legislation to fund the government through October. Some Democrats want to use the next deadline, Jan. 19, as leverage to force Trump to sign legislation to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as “Dreamers.” Trump said on Friday that he won’t agree unless Democrats consent to fund a border wall and to a broader and more controversial overhaul of the immigration system.
“The Democrats have been told, and fully understand, that there can be no DACA without the desperately needed WALL at the Southern Border and an END to the horrible Chain Migration & ridiculous Lottery System of Immigration etc.,” Trump said in a tweet from his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, referring to the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.
As always, the conservative Freedom Caucus in the House will also be a key obstacle for Paul Ryan and Republicans.
Meadows says his caucus is ready to stand its own ground on immigration issues, including seeking an end to family preferences and the diversity visa lottery, a program that provides visas to people in countries with low rates of migration to the U.S.
During an appearance Sunday on “Face the Nation,” he also indicated the conservatives he leads are skeptical of a spending deal. And earlier in the week he said the Freedom Caucus was prepared to fight over reauthorization of a controversial government surveillance program that they reluctantly agreed to extend only until Jan. 19.
“It looks like we’re going to spend more money on growing the government in January than perhaps the biggest amount of money that we spent since the Obama stimulus plan. And that’s a concern for conservatives,” he told CBS News.
Meanwhile, the ever controversial electronic surveillance program known as FISA section 702 – which allows spying on U.S. citizens without court warrants – will also be up for renewal after it was extended through January 19th under the last stopgap spending bill. Some Republican libertarians and privacy advocates in the Democratic Party want the program reduced or eliminated, while security hawks want a long-term extension.
Of course, as we pointed out last summer (see: FISA Court Finds “Serious Fourth Amendment Issue” In Obama’s “Widespread” Illegal Searches Of American Citizens), a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) found that the National Security Agency, under former President Obama, routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall.
“The October 26, 2016 Notice disclosed that an NSA Inspector General (IG) review…indicated that, with greater frequency than previously disclosed to the Court, NSA analysts had used U.S.-person identifiers to query the result of Internet “upstream” collection, even though NSA’s section 702 minimization procedures prohibited such queries…this disclosure gave the Court substantial concern.”
The court order goes on to reveal that NSA analysts had been conducting illegal queries targeting American citizens “with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court”…an issue which the court described as a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue.”
“Since 2011, NSA’s minimization procedures have prohibited use of U.S.-person identifiers to query the results of upstream Internet collection under Section 702. The October 26, 2016 Notice informed the Court that NSA analysts had been conducting such queries in violation of that prohibition, with much greater frequency than had previously been disclosed to the Court.”
“At the October 26, 2016 hearing, the Court ascribed the government’s failure to disclose those IG and OCO reviews at the October 4, 2016 hearing to an institutional ‘lack of candor’ on NSA’s part and emphasized that ‘this is a very serious Fourth Amendment issue.'”
But it’s probably no big deal, the FBI is a fairly trustworthy group of folks…
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