Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

The Policy Racket

Lawmakers work toward budget resolution as government shutdown threat looms

WASHINGTON - This is the week in Washington when the budget fits and starts that have been percolating for the better part of fiscal 2011 (we are, at this point, more than halfway through), must come to some sort of conclusion.

I know you’ve heard that before. But this time, it’s really more real.

For starters, Democrats and Republicans are actually much closer to an agreement than they have been in past weeks when the threat of a government shutdown has been looming on the horizon -- they have actually reached a number for cuts they can agree on.

The magic number, $33 billion from current spending levels, which was announced last week, represents a figure in keeping with the reductions House Speaker John Boehner initially called for this winter, before amending his asking price to fit in with the Tea Party’s demand to cut $100 billion of the fiscal 2011 request -- or put in same terms, about $61 billion from current spending levels.

But that doesn’t mean they agree about where they can slash to meet that figure.

“There’s no agreement,” Boehner said last week. “Nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

And they’re still a long way off from such an agreement.

The Republicans’ bargaining position is pretty well laid out by the parameters of H.R. 1, the budget bill that the House already passed and the Senate rejected.

Democrats, who still haven’t publicly scribbled out the details of their preferred position, have drawn a line in the sand on certain Republican demands.

“We are not going to bend on some of these ridiculous riders that they have,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Friday. “Neither the White House nor Senate leaders are going to accept any of the EPA riders ...We’re not going to deal with Planned Parenthood, National Public Radio and a few other things like that. We’re not going to cooperate on those.”

Reid also wants to see a bigger cut come from defense spending, which didn’t fully escape the House’s budget cuts, but was not dealt so large a financial blow as other institutions.

“Not all the cuts can come from domestic discretionary spending,” said Senate Democrats’ messaging chief Sen. Charles Schumer. “These negotiations are not about how much to cut, but about where the cuts should come from.”

The persistence of negotiations isn’t stopping Senate leaders from taking to the stump to trash certain Republican cuts -- like those to Head Start, another area that appears to be a non-starter for Democratic negotiators.

It’s also not stopping Republicans from using the House floor to step up the pressure to add to the cache of riders that they hope to add to an eventual budget compromise. This week, House lawmakers will be taking votes on measures to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate rules and stop the Federal Communications Commission’s adopted rule on Internet neutrality from taking effect.

To avoid a shutdown, all these strings are going to have to be woven into a satisfactory package by midweek, to give both the House and Senate a chance to cast a vote before Friday -- when the lights go out at midnight, otherwise. Neither side seems willing to drag this process out through yet another short-term funding patch -- which Reid said would be on the table only if there were some sort of delay for the processing of paperwork.

But that doesn’t mean that a compromise will cool the budget fervor in the Beltway. On the contrary -- we’re just prepping for a much more intense Round Two, that also starts this week.

House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan is expected to drop his answer to President Obama’s fiscal 2012 projections Tuesday -- which will start the clock on all the subject lawmakers managed to push off for the current fiscal debate, but which will doubtless dredge up a whole lot more consternation in Nevada.

We’re talking about making deeper cuts to broader programs like Medicare. And Social Security. The privatization Democrats like Reid and Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley have been sounding alarm over -- even though there was no proposal yet in sight -- through the entire fiscal 2011 negotiation process, for what seemed to be obviously coming over the horizon.

But the President has said it’s time to talk about the future of these entitlement programs, and last week, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said that Social Security “cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be.”

“To say that Social Security cannot exist in the future is to say that Nevadans don't deserve the peace of mind that comes from knowing that if they're permanently disabled, lose a spouse, or just reach their golden years, this program will provide them with vital financial support that cannot be exhausted,” Berkley said. “Americans who contribute to Social Security have earned their benefits and I will defend against any effort to dismantle this program now or in the future."

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