The Senate must act: budget delay is fiscal negligence

The Hill reports that President Trump has called on Senate Republicans to adopt a House-passed budget resolution before the upcoming recess — one that would clear the procedural path for a $95 billion emergency funding package to pass with a simple majority. I have no quarrel with the urgency of that call. My quarrel, if I have one, is with the Senate's apparent reluctance to answer it.

Let us be plain about what a budget resolution is. It is not a luxury. It is the foundational document by which a legislature announces to the markets, to foreign creditors, and to its own citizens that it intends to govern. When the House passes such a measure and the Senate sits on its hands ahead of a recess, the message transmitted is not neutrality — it is incapacity. And incapacity, in matters of public finance, is never free. A nation seen to squabble before ordering its own affairs pays a premium on every dollar it borrows, now and for years afterward.

The mechanism at stake — the reconciliation process that permits a simple-majority vote — is precisely the kind of energetic procedural instrument that a well-ordered republic should be willing to use. I will not pretend to know every modern parliamentary detail, but the principle is familiar to me: when extraordinary circumstances demand action, a legislature must possess, and must use, the tools available to it. Refusing to employ a lawful majority because the minority objects is not principle; it is paralysis dressed in the costume of virtue.

Ninety-five billion dollars is a large sum. Whether its specific allocations are wise I cannot judge from a headline alone — I mark that as inference, not recollection. But I can say this: emergency funding that sits unlocked because procedural steps were not taken before a recess is funding that does not reach its destination. Delay has costs. In war, delay costs lives. In finance, delay costs credit. The two are more alike than gentlemen in comfortable chambers are willing to admit.

I address myself not to the President's motives, which are his own, but to the Senate's obligation, which belongs to the Republic. The upper chamber was designed for deliberation, not for indefinite postponement. Deliberate swiftly; vote; and if you oppose the measure, vote against it openly rather than strangling it in the anteroom of a recess. The public credit demands no less. Go back to your states if you must — but pass the resolution first.