Late Friday President Biden vetoed H. J. Res 109 which overturned the SEC’s Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 (SAB 121) and returned the legislation to the House unsigned. In the veto message President Biden stated: “My Administration will not support measures that jeopardize the well-being of consumers and investors.”
While H.J. Res 109 passed the Senate on a vote of 60 Yes to 38 No, after the House had previously approved the House Resolution on a vote of 228 Yes to 182 No, both Chambers margins fell well short of the 2/3rds majority that would be needed to over-ride a Presidential veto.
While the White House had issued a veto threat prior to the House vote on the legislation the bill still got leading Democrats to support the resolution; indeed, the vote in the Senate was led by Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. In recent days as the White House considered what action to take, several Democrats urged the President not to veto the bill as part of a broad effort to reengage younger voters who were a core part of the President’s 2020 coalition and recent polls indicate are slipping away. However, the President didn’t take this advice and vetoed the bill.
Here’s a link to the White House veto message:
Budget
The Congress has started the process of considering the Administration’s budget requests for each department of government. With both the House and Senate closely divided, and the added challenges of an election year the consensus view is that the Congress will eventually pass a Continuing Resolution (CR) prior to the beginning of the new fiscal year on October 1.
One of the main problems with a CR is that the various Departments continue to operate with their old budgets. There is a view that this is especially problematic for the Department of Defense which needs to continue advanced work on new military systems, and with wars raging in Ukraine and Gaza there is an evolving need to replace equipment that has been shipped to Ukraine and Israel. While a CR can make changes to current spending it can be difficult for suppliers to meet DoD needs with a stopgap spending scheme. Therefore, there is some discussion of acting on a DoD budget that would be outside of the CR process.
Republicans are considering what the right timeframe for a CR should be. In an election year a CR can run past the election and set the new date in December and have the issues resolved in a post-election lame duck session. But some Republicans foreseeing a Trump win are discussing a CR that runs into the first quarter of 2025 to allow the priorities of the new President to be included in the FY 2025 budget.
The other question that House Republicans must decide is how much to cooperate with the Democratic Senate to avoid a government shutdown. Government shutdowns are always fraught with political danger. House Republicans will need to decide if a shutdown weeks prior to the election would help or hurt the Trump campaign and what impact it might have on their efforts to gain control of the Senate and maintain their narrow House majority.
Trump trial
Over the weekend political analysis were focused on the potential impact of the guilty verdicts against former President Trump at his NYC trial.
The most obvious point is that this is uncharted territory and in fact no one has any idea on what impact the conviction may have. Republicans were quick to point out that the base seems ok with the verdict and sent in over $34M overnight after the verdict was announced.
From my days in politics, it is my view that pre-Labor Day polling is not reliable. Too many voters are focused on their summer holidays and not the fall political races. Plus, it is hard to figure a way to frame polling questions for an unprecedented event. As Americans are notorious for their short attention span, the landscape the first week of June may look very different in five months.
