Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.) told the Washington Reporter this summer that “the bottom line … is we’re not going to finish [appropriation negotiations] by September 30.” Now, days before a potential government shutdown, Cole’s prediction stands. Cole, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, spoke at length with the Reporter about where the GOP should go next in the showdown over government spending.

Following “Democratic obstructionism,” the GOP’s plans to attach the SAVE Act, a bipartisan measure that prevents non-citizens from voting in federal elections, look uncertain — as do plans to fund the government before the fiscal year ends at the end of the month.

President Donald Trump recently said that “if Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET.” However, Cole said, shutting down the government over Democrats’ refusal to back the SAVE Act, is “exactly what the Democrats want us to do.”

Options for funding the government include a three-month continuing resolution, backed by the White House and many House Democrats, which would allow the next president to enter office with a clean slate; a six-month continuing resolution, which is “pretty unprecedented,” and which most Appropriations Committee members “do not favor”; or a one-year-long continuing resolution, which Cole said “is a terrible thing, or you’ll end up shutting down the government, which is even worse thing.”

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) is the “central problem” on the Senate side, Cole said, and a handful of Republican members are “playing into the hands of the Democrats [and] weakening the position of our leadership.”

“Chuck Schumer won’t let any come before the floor, and he likes omnibuses, which are a bad way to govern, because it maximizes his power, and he can sort of negotiate in every bill on one thing,” Cole said. 

Cole noted that “we[‘ve] got a right-wing that’s been given everything it asked for, but it’s just not enough, or they can’t get their act together.” His committee has passed “exceptionally conservative bills…[that] prioritized the things that we know are important our conference, including defense, border security and taking care of veterans. Those things were [also] funded at levels I think the Democrats would find acceptable.”

Nevertheless, “the Speaker is in a tough spot,” he said. “What I think will happen is that I don’t think anybody is silly enough to shut down the government five weeks before an election, let alone an election as consequential as this. It will not be helpful to President Donald Trump, although I understand there are some people in his camp that think we should shut it down over the SAVE Act. It will not work.”

“CRs require bipartisanship, and we have people insisting on a partisan solution to the problem that we don’t have the votes to solve,” he said. “It’s still a Democratic Senate, and it’s still a Democratic president, and these are things they will not agree to, and you’re not going to be able to fund the government that way. So do you really want a government shutdown on the eve of an election? I don’t think so.”

Republicans, he noted, “haven’t done all our work, but we’ve done a whole lot more of it than [Senate Democrats] have, and they actually didn’t get to move until after it was apparent that we were moving. Our bills were coming out of committee, we’re starting to move across the floor and then all sudden we see movement.”

The upcoming negotiations won’t leave everyone happy — Cole, a longtime defense hawk, told the Reporter that he agrees that there is insufficient funding for defense, but added that “once we get to the bargaining table, it’s going to go up.”

“Sooner or later, we’ll strike a deal, and you’ll like some parts of it, and you won’t like others,” Cole said. “But welcome to democracy. That’s the way the system was designed to work, and if you want to change it, go win some seats, retake control the Senate, pad that margin up.”

Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Tom Cole (R., Okla.), lightly edited for clarity.

Washington Reporter:
During our interview in July, you said there was no way that Republicans were going to get everything done by September 30. It’s September 12. How did you know that this was going to happen? And how do you think we got to today’s events? 

Rep. Tom Cole:
Well, from a committee standpoint, things have actually gone fairly well, since we have achieved all the goals that we can achieve inside the committee; we got all 12 bills out of the committee. They all are exceptionally conservative bills; the total size of the package is the Fiscal Responsibility Act, minus the side deals. We agree with our leadership very much on that and our membership. We should only be going by what’s written in law. There were deals made by my friends, but they weren’t in the law, and a lot of our members, myself included, didn’t know anything about them, so we marked up to that number, which made it more difficult, and we prioritized the things that we know are important our conference, including defense, border security and taking care of veterans. Those things were funded at levels I think the Democrats would find acceptable. I would actually tell you they’re probably too low on defense, but that’s the law the land, the Fiscal Responsibility Act. We did those, and then we trimmed in other areas. And of course, the Democrats are not happy about that, but that’s above my pay grade to work out. 

So we got them done, and I’m pleased. I don’t look at this as much in terms of the number of bills. The point is that over 70 percent of federal spending, discretionary spending, has gone through the floor of the House, and we’re ready to go sit down and negotiate with our Democratic counterparts. It’s worth noting, the Senate hasn’t passed a single appropriations bill and has not been able to get Homeland Security out of their own committee because it’s a tough bill, a tough vote, and a divisive issue, so we’re in about as good a position as we can be. Where we are now is our leadership requested that we produce a bill that would be a six-month CR and that’s pretty unprecedented. Most CRs don’t last that long. It was much more likely that the Democrats would accept something to the end of December, and they want to attach the SAVE Act to that in an effort to try and force the Democrats to enact it. That’s the legislation that would prevent non-citizens from voting. We agree with that. Look, I’ve already voted for the SAVE Act. I don’t have any problem with that. I don’t have any problem with it passing, but it’s clearly not going to work with the Senate. So I think the frustrating part for us is that some of the people demanding this still aren’t willing to vote for a CR. This is a effort to deal with the most conservative elements in what’s a very conservative caucus. There’s nothing in here I object to. I can just tell you, though, at the end of the day, if we get it across the House floor, and I hope we do, Speaker Mike Johnson is trying heroically to do that now, but the problem is not our committee. We’ve got some people who say ‘I’ve never voted for CR’ or ‘the spending levels,’ even though they’re below the levels that were negotiated, even though they comport with what’s in law are too high. So we got a right-wing that’s been given everything it asked for, but it’s just not enough, or they can’t get their act together. So the Speaker is in a tough spot. But what I think will happen is that I don’t think anybody is silly enough to shut down the government five weeks before an election, let alone an election as consequential as this. It will not be helpful to President Donald Trump, although I understand there are some people in his camp that think we should shut it down over the SAVE Act. It will not work. That’s exactly what the Democrats want us to do. 

At the end of the day, sooner or later, there’s going to be a CR that lasts probably to the end of the year, probably not beyond that, and we’ll have an election on November 5, and the next President of the United States, which I certainly hope and expect to be Donald Trump, will then decide, ‘do we want to get this work done now–that is before the end of the year? Or do I want to deal with it myself as the new president?’ My recommendation to President Trump, and frankly, I’d make the same recommendation to Vice President Harris, get the work done. Tell your party to get it done. When the new President walks in, they will not have their people in place. They will not have gone through the confirmation process. They’re required by law to have a budget by February 15. None of them ever make that date, and frankly, I give them a little leeway in the first year, but they’re required to do that. They’re going to have to deal with the tax situation, because all the Trump tax cuts are essentially expiring. That’d be about a $5 trillion to $6 trillion tax increase, and it’s a pretty dangerous world you’re going to be dealing with that. Why in the world would you want a potential government shutdown to deal with as well? I don’t think that’s in the interest of the president. And I can tell you the deal that we get in March, if we do it, it’s going to be about the same as the deal we can get in December. People seem to think, just because you’ve got the majority in both houses and the presidency, that you can do whatever you want; that’s not true as long as the filibuster exists. Appropriations bills are not like reconciliation. You have to get to 60 in the Senate. Because of that, the minority, unless we happen to have 60, which we don’t, and won’t, is gonna always have a lot to say about what happens. So we’re going through that kind of exercise right now. Will our members vote with a leadership decision, and what will people in the Freedom Caucus, and I don’t want to be critical the Freedom Caucus, because a lot of them are voting for this, do? We’re not talking about very many members, but that’s the problem. We live in a world where, you know, we saw eight people throw a speaker out. That wasn’t the Freedom Caucus. That was eight people, and not all of those people were in the Freedom Caucus. We just have people that won’t play. This is a team sport, everybody that’s in leadership making those decisions, all whom I like and respect, were elected by the conference. Those elections, frankly, weren’t particularly close. Obviously, Speaker Johnson was elected by every single Republican; it’s time to play a little team ball. We’ve got some people here who clearly never played high school athletics, because, particularly in this case, you’ve been heard, the speaker’s actually giving you what you want, which is a six-month CR, which, by the way, most of my members on my committee do not favor–they want to get their work done, and they want to get it done on time, and they’ve produced their product, and they moved it out of their committee, but they’re willing to support our leadership. ‘Okay, that’s what you need us to do. We’ll do it.’ I can’t understand why a handful of members, for whatever reason, are playing into the hands of the Democrats. They’re weakening the position of our leadership. I will tell you in the end, by offering them what they want, which is fine, I don’t have a problem with that, I am for the SAVE Act, I can swallow a CR that goes to March. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s good government. It’s very bad for the military. It’s going to cost the American people billions of dollars, but we can do all that, but then those people can’t vote for the bill for some obscure reason?

Washington Reporter:
When we spoke in July, you noted that Sen. Patty Murray has been almost completely MIA. Where’s the Senator at right now? 

Rep. Tom Cole:
I think that the central problem is probably Sen. Chuck Schumer more than Patty Murray. Patty Murray wants to get her bills done. Chuck Schumer won’t let any come before the floor, and he likes omnibuses, which are a bad way to govern, because it maximizes his power, and he can sort of negotiate in every bill on one thing. The Senate is just not doing its work. We haven’t done all our work, but we’ve done a whole lot more of it than they have, and they actually didn’t get to move until after it was apparent that we were moving. Our bills were coming out of committee, we’re starting to move across the floor and then all sudden we see movement–and again, I don’t hold Patty Murray or Susan Collins responsible for that. The other thing I would say is the way in which they’ve proceeded in the Senate, we have something called the Fiscal Responsibility Act with side deals. They want all the side deals. They also have added tens of billions of dollars of extra spending on top of that, on top of what’s allowed by the law and the side deals. 

What they’ve basically done is tell everybody on both sides of the aisle that ‘whatever you want you can get, we’ll call it emergency money. So we’re going to spend a lot more money on defense than the House;’ I like that, but that’s not what the law says we can do. And then, ‘in exchange for that, you guys that are going to get for defense money have to be willing to vote for a lot more money on non-defense.’ At some point we do have a problem. 

Now, again, we’re not the central problem. This goes back to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. I’ve got some interesting numbers. When Rep. Hal Rogers first came to Congress, the Appropriations Committee appropriated 9.8 percent of the gross national product, and then around 11 percent was on non-discretionary spending, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest on the debt. Today, 44 years later, we appropriate 6.4 percent of the GDP. In other words, the Appropriations Committee has lowered the percentage of the GDP that it spent, whereas committees in charge of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, that’s gone up to about 16.4 percent– so you know where the problem is. We cannot balance the budget, and we’re fighting over nickels and dimes and making our government dysfunctional, hurting our defense. We can’t get anybody, and that includes both presidential candidates, that includes the committees of jurisdiction, that includes both parties, to act. The last guy to try to do anything on this was actually President George W. Bush. If you want to balance the budget, I’m all for it, but you’ve got to talk Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because that’s where that’s where the money’s at. We don’t have it anymore. I could eliminate the entire discretionary budget of the United States, and we’d still be running a deficit, and that would mean not a dime to defense. It’s insane. Nobody’s talking about it, but that’s the central budgetary problem. Right now, we’re just trying to get through the year, keep the government open. Obviously I would like to pass the SAVE Act. Do I think it’s likely to pass? No, I don’t, but I’m willing to give it a try. But, at the end of the day, CRs require bipartisanship, and we have people insisting on a partisan solution to the problem that we don’t have the votes to solve. It’s still a Democratic Senate, and it’s still a Democratic president, and these are things they will not agree to, and you’re not going to be able to fund the government that way. So do you really want a government shutdown on the eve of an election? I don’t think so.

Washington Reporter:
What do you think the Democrats’ actual objection to the SAVE Act is? 

Rep. Tom Cole:
I think it’s just because we would win on it. And to be fair, not every Democrat opposes it. Five of them voted for it in the House. And two of them were willing to stay with us and continue to vote for a long term CR and the SAVE Act. The problem there is our own people got what they asked for, and it’s still not good enough. 

Washington Reporter:
You were just mentioning the defense spending levels. Some defense hawks had concerns over the defense spending being too low. What is your message to them?

Rep. Tom Cole:
My message would be number one, I agree with you, I think it is too low. Number two, once we get to the bargaining table, it’s going to go up. The reality is, the Senate is well above us. And if you look at the basic negotiating paradigm, what’ll happen is we’ll go into negotiation really below the Fiscal Responsibility Act plus side deals level. The Senate will come into it considerably above that. So the number is going to be somewhere in between. We’re not going to go automatically up to the Senate number, so I still think defense spending will go up. Now it will go up at the price of some domestic spending I don’t agree with also going up, but that’s just the distribution of power. That’s the way it’s going to end up, or you’ll end up in a year long CR, which is a terrible thing, or you’ll end up shutting down the government, which is even worse thing. So sooner or later, we’ll strike a deal, and you’ll like some parts of it, and you won’t like others. But welcome to democracy. That’s the way the system was designed to work, and if you want to change it, go win some seats, retake control the Senate, pad that margin up, decide whether or not you really want to keep the filibuster. I never get in that debate, it’s not my debate. I’m not in the Senate. There’s only 100 people who have anything to say about it, and they never get rid of the filibuster, and certainly the people in the minority don’t vote to get rid of it.

Washington Reporter:
You talked extensively over the summer about your priorities on disaster relief funding. Is that something that you’ll see progress on in this budget battle?

Rep. Tom Cole:
We made some progress but we won’t settle it out. We will refill the disaster funds, where we’re starting to run out of money to do things like cleaning up the harbor and Baltimore, and we’ve made extraordinary progress on that. We’re getting dangerously low on stuff for the immediate reaction to things like tornadoes or hurricanes. So we’ll do that, and I’m willing to do more in terms of a larger package that would take care of it. Baltimore is probably the big single example, but we’ve had an unusual tornado season, and the Democrats have to decide, under the law, Baltimore’s entitled to about 90 percent of the cost of replacement, and they would have to find the rest out of their budgets. But we quite often suspend things like that. We had a situation where we lost a bridge, I think, in Minnesota, an important bridge during the Bush administration. Decision was made to move all of this. It’s a federal deal, we’re going to do it. If we do that for Baltimore, the only thing I’ve said is we also need to look at these other states. I can’t do for one set of states, blue or red, what I’m not willing to do for all the states. And all of these things have some cost share element to them. Of course, the localities sometimes are not in a very good position to deal with it. 

If you’re small town in Oklahoma and you got wiped out by a tornado, you just lost your sales tax revenue in a small town. How much money do you have that’ll pay for the cleanup? Not much. We haven’t gotten to that point, because we haven’t been given the authority to do that yet. There’s been some preliminary discussions at the staff level, but right now, let’s keep the government open. So we submitted a bill that ran through March and has what are called anomalies and adjustments; that is, things that you want to make sure continue to get done, or things that obviously don’t make any sense, and those are agreed to by both sides. They’re things that you ask, like ‘why would we spend money on that? Just because we were spending on it? We know that expense is done,’ things like that, so we’ve done that. Obviously, we’ve attached the SAVE Act to the bill. We’re all in favor of it. Nobody on the Appropriations Committee, on our side of the aisle, is opposed to it. This is just Democratic obstructionism. I think most Americans would say, ‘only American citizens ought to be voting in federal elections.’ It’s like the ultimate no brainer. But again, Democrats don’t want to do it. Some people on our side say, that’s because they’re planning to to manipulate the elections with millions of illegals. I think that’s hard to do, personally. I think most illegals don’t want to do it because it draws attention to them. It might expedite your expulsion from the country, but some undoubtedly do. Some probably innocently, others, maybe maliciously. I get my my colleagues’ concern about and I have no problem. That’s why I voted for it when it was on the floor. But unless you can convince the Democratic Senate and the Democratic president, who also issued a veto threat on this, tell me how you’re going to actually pass that through the House, the Senate, and get the President of the United States to sign it.

Washington Reporter:
A few days after our last interview, the movie Twisters came out. Have you seen it? Your town of Moore, Oklahoma saw one of its highest-grossing opening weekends. Did this movie spur any extra desire on disaster relief funding in Congress?

Rep. Tom Cole:
I have not seen it. I don’t know that it had any impact on Congress. Believe me, I live in the only town in the world that’s seen two F5s hit it, so I’ve spent a lot of my career dealing with this stuff, and I’ve had a lot of my friends lose homes, lose businesses, everything they had. That’s why I’ve never used disaster relief as a political weapon. If you recall number of years ago, we had people who did not want to do Hurricane Sandy relief in New York; that was over $80 billion worth of damage, and we had a lot of Republicans, quite frankly, who wanted to cut government spending to offset it. I’m sorry, disaster is a disaster. You don’t cut the Department of Defense because you had a hurricane hit someplace. I fought really hard and was part of the minority of my party to get disaster relief done. If we want to make adjustments to the budget, I’m all for it, but not at the expense of people who are already suffering and who have every right to expect their government, which they pay taxes to, to be there to help them in a time of crisis. I don’t want to use disaster relief now as a political weapon. I do not see it that way. 

Let’s just look at Baltimore. Nobody in Baltimore is remotely responsible for what happened. We had a foreign ship, for God’s sake, hit an American bridge, kill six people and do enormous damage. That company ought to be sued to the hilt. It’s got to be fined. That’s not something we do directly in Congress, but I get all that, and I’m for it. But in the meantime, I want to help people in Baltimore get their city and their harbor operating again, and help them with their problem. They did nothing wrong, and they have every reason to expect our help. I feel the same way about people in Oklahoma who get hit by tornadoes. They didn’t do anything wrong. To the extent it’s practical, you need to have insurance. I insure my house. You need to do things like that, you have some obligations to be responsible. But when you’re overtaken by a great natural disaster, and I think of Hurricane Katrina, I’ll never forget flying over the coastline, over from New Orleans to Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi, and looking down the damage. It was just breathtaking. 90,000 square miles and a loss of life. About the only thing close to it would have been a nuclear bomb. Every bridge was down, there’s no functioning fire or police on the ground because everything’s knocked out. That’s a pretty awful situation. I think the federal government ought to be there helping those folks.

Washington Reporter:
You talked very movingly during our last interview about how you were watching the events of 9/11 unfold outside your office at the Chamber of Commerce. Now, we’re back to where we were before in some regards, with the Taliban running Afghanistan. What are your reflections on this day?

Rep. Tom Cole:
It’s a very reflective day for me. There can’t be many people on the planet who were in Oklahoma City, the day of the largest domestic terrorist incident in American history, because I was intimately caught up in that as Secretary of State of Oklahoma, and in Washington, D.C. on 9/11 looking at the White House. I’ve been close to two of the biggest terrorist incidents, the two biggest terrorist incidents in American history, both foreign and domestic. I think about it every day. When I think about 9/11, yeah, we got we got Osama bin Laden, but we turned tens of millions of people, and I hold the Biden administration responsible for this more than anybody else, right back over to the same people who hosted Osama bin Laden. And the people in Afghanistan are paying a horrific price. The whole operation was a debacle in terms of how we left, when we left. And obviously we lost our own people in that, we left people behind, both our own and Afghan allies and supporters of ours. It’s one of the more shameful incidents in American history. But the mere fact that the successors to the people who hosted Osama bin Laden are back in charge Afghanistan, and the Biden administration is proud of this is a shame. They ended this war. Well, yeah, you can end any war if you’re willing to run up a white flag. That’s exactly what they did. And we had that in a manageable state. And to be fair, there was a lot of pressure in the Trump administration too. But Biden even undercut our NATO allies. There was a larger NATO contingent in Afghanistan than there was American which is something I think most Americans do not realize. The only time NATO’s Article 5 has ever been invoked was when the United States was directly attacked by a terrorist group, and every member of NATO came to our aid in Afghanistan, they obviously didn’t go into Iraq because that was an American decision, and we can question the wisdom of that, but Afghanistan was a retaliatory strike against a regime and then an effort to try and make sure that it didn’t revert to being a sanctuary for terrorists. It was a noble effort. So I think about it a lot. It’s not like the Taliban didn’t pay a terrible price, they did. They were expelled from power for 20 years, Osama Bin Laden was tracked down and killed, the planner of 9/11 is sitting in Cuba, so there are some measures of success. And, we haven’t had another 9/11 since, which tells me that a lot of the efforts associated with it have worked. I’ll tell you that on 9/12, nobody in American thought we’d seen the last of this. Everybody thought it could happen again, and happen soon, but it didn’t. And that says a lot about the quality of the response by our military, our intelligence people, our border security people, and the vigilance of our own citizens. So it’s certainly not a complete success but it’s far, far, from being an unmitigated failure.

Washington Reporter:
Congressman Cole, thanks so much for your time.