Congressional Democrats' failure to seriously try to delay or block President Donald Trump's budget cuts could backfire on them with their base, according to a new report.
Although the party's leadership recognized that there was no realistic chance of winning the fight, Axios predicted that explanation will not prevent a "fierce backlash from the Democrats' grassroots base, which has been demanding lawmakers use every tool at their disposal to fight the Trump administration."
Democrats have remained in lockstep in voting to obstruct Trump's agenda this term to date and for most of his first term. But their filibuster effort fell short on the $9 billion rescissions package that won final approval early Friday.
For exampke, Axios noted, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke just 15 minutes in his filibuster to delay the rescissions vote, while he held the House floor for a record near nine-hour speech to delay the One Big Beautiful Bill's final passage.
A Democrat filibuster would not have stopped the $9 billion rescission anyway, congressional experts told Axios.
While there was a Friday deadline in the Impoundment Control Act procedure that would have forced the massive Biden-era spending to lock in, it only applied to the Senate passage of it, not the House vote on the Senate changes to it, Axios reported.
Democrats could have continued their bogging down of the process with amendments and incessant House floor filibuster debate, but the House stoppage was merely limited to as long as they could keep the act going until the rescissions would have ultimately kicked in.
Perhaps the Democrats' most costly effect of not stopping the $9 billion rescission is there now will be more to come in the way of clawing back their Biden-era massive spending agenda.
"Our enthusiasm, the president's enthusiasm, is to send additional packages," Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought told reporters Thursday morning.
"We were watching closely about that first vote, and I think it's likely you'll see an additional package. We're not there. We're not here to announce anything on this front, but in terms of seeing whether this was a useful effort that was not a waste of time, it certainly has satisfied that threshold, and we'll see where we go from here."
Vought hailed restoring the congressional "muscle memory" of the dormant rescissions process, which was attempted in the first Trump administration only to fall short, but passed now for the first time since 2000.
It is a "very historic moment, the return of using rescissions, getting the muscle memory for that back into the system," Vought said.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.