Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

The Policy Racket

Senate budget negotiations to start Wednesday

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Harry Reid

Nothing in this budget battle seems to keep clear of the political brink, but Senate Republicans and Democrats appear to have worked out their near-term differences, if not their greater ideological divisions, over how to begin the negotiations on the budget bill.

The Senate will take up both the House’s budget resolution (H.R. 1), which makes $100 billion worth of cuts below the administration’s fiscal 2011 request, and the President’s preferred proposal, which cuts about $50 billion off that level, on Wednesday, beginning at noon.

Under the agreement, the Senate will debate H.R. 1 for three hours, vote on it, and then vote on the Obama-preferred proposal. Both will have to clear a filibuster-proof majority to clear.

All told, that puts lawmakers only about 24 hours behind the schedule Congressional leaders had agreed upon last week, when they met with the Vice President to work out a way forward on budget negotiations.

"Even though there's been a few turns in the road, we're at the place where we need to be," Reid said.

But it doesn’t really do much to bring the country any closer to a long-term funding plan.

Both Senate votes are expected to fail. But even though everyone in Washington knows that, the votes seem to be a necessary round of political posturing in order for real negotiations to move forward.

Reid had been accusing Senate Republicans Tuesday of running from the cuts their counterparts in the House have been pushing for weeks.

“It seems Republicans themselves must have finally read their own budget, because now even they’re running away from it,” Reid said, who called H.R. 1 an “extreme” and “desperate” measure to satisfy this really narrow base that they have, that they’re willing to sacrifice American jobs for.”

He’s referring to the Tea Party, which has been promising to make $100 billion of cuts to the federal budget since the election, and have apparently convinced more establishment Republicans in the House and Senate to fall in line.

“We’re going to express out support for that number,” said Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, saying he expects Senate Republicans to back H.R. 1. “But we’re going to reserve our right to set our own priorities within that.”

Reid has said that Congress had “to get off the numbers game,” professing that he too considers the $51 billion threshold a “step forward, and we need to do more.”

Reid suggested Congress could look at offshore oil subsidies, domestic discretionary defense spending, and farm subsidies as places to bring down government costs.

But slashing the budget is in the end about numbers — whether that’s the potential number of Nevada jobs lost if the House’s bill becomes law, as Reid took pains to list on the Senate floor Tuesday morning, or the big money number that’s defining this whole debate: $50 billion, that being the difference between the Republicans’ and Democrats’ bills.

It’s also about perspective. If the starting point for these cuts is the President’s fiscal 2011 request, the debate is between making about $100 billion of cuts vs. $50 billion of cuts. But Congress never actually approved those spending levels; so if the point of reference is current levels of spending, the Republicans’ proposal becomes $57 billion, while Obama’s proposal is worth only about $5 billion. Even some Democrats in the Senate have called such proposed cuts “light.”

But while Reid seems willing to parley, it doesn’t look like he’ll be ready to do so until the House’s bill is firmly out of the way.

“We want the American people to know that H.R. 1 is dead,” Reid said.

That then gives lawmakers nine days to work out a budget compromise before federal funding — currently under a two-week budget resolution — expires on March 18. Reid said today he didn’t want to see any more short-term funding measures.

“Long-term is becoming short-term,” he said. “We’re down to about six months here” before fiscal 2011 is over, on Sept. 30.

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