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March 21, 2005 Wielding the axe It could have been worse. Both the House and Senate, as expected, passed budget reconciliation bills last week, and both, as expected, slashed domestic spending (that's Beltway talk for "stuff that doesn't explode") while piling on heaping slabs of new tax cuts, predominantly for the wealthy. Where the House largely stuck to its game plan, though - slash programs for low-income families, boost military spending and tax cuts, and let the resulting deficits be damned - the Senate had some surprises up its sleeve. After rejecting a "pay as you go" amendment that would have required that any tax cuts be accompanied by a plan to patch the resulting budget hole (on a tie vote - according to the Constitution, remember, Robotron is the tiebreaker), the Senate voted 52-48 to restore the $15 billion in Medicaid cuts that had been proposed over the next five years. House Republicans blew several gaskets over that development, and the media, probably excited to have something budget-related to report that could be explained in one-syllable words, jumped on it with both feet: "Senate's Spending Plan Goes Billions Over Budget" was one typical headline (from Saturday's L.A. Times), with the accompanying article serving up quotes from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Concord Coalition on how the Senate had just doomed the U.S. to crippling budget deficits. (As discussed last week, the Bush plan would boost deficits, too, but hardly anyone seems to be eager to say this in print.) From the reaction, you'd think that the Senate Republicans had gone all mushy overnight, casting off their Bushian shackles and settling in to provide government-sponsored chickens in every pot and nationalize Wal-Mart. Even the Senate budget, though, still includes plenty of whopping cuts to federal programs: The $2.8 billion cut to the Agriculture Committee that I discussed last week, for example - likely to come largely out of food stamps - is still intact, and will only get deeper once it meets the $5.2 billion cut pitched by the House. The Senate also - in an unexpected and bizarre twist - added an extra $60 billion in tax cuts, likely to come from repealing a Clinton-era tax on Social Security benefits for wealthy retirees. (Some reports explained adding more tax cuts than the president wanted by implying that Senators weren't aware what they were voting for, which isn't really all that reassuring.) This led to still more "budget buster" headlines, though it's extremely unlikely that the tax cuts will survive the conference committee to resolve differences between the House and Senate bills. And, once Congress is finished with its two-week Easter break - that's right, your elected representatives love Jesus so much that they need 14 days off for Easter Week, not counting time to raise the dead - conference committee is where the bills are now headed. Even with Republicans on both sides of the table, that's likely to be quite the squabblefest - House budget chair Jim Nussel was already moaning last Tuesday that it was going to be "very difficult" this year to reach a joint budget agreement, and that was before the Senate dared to exempt sickly poor people from the budget axe. For those concerned about the human effects of the budget - which should be anyone not drawing a paycheck from Bechtel - this is what hope has come down to: That the differences between the House and Senate bills will prove irreconcilable, and the resulting gridlock will force Congress to abandon any plans to overhaul the budget in one fell swoop. If that happens, there will still be cuts, no doubt. But they won't be subject to the fast-track budget reconciliation process, which means filibusters, committee hearings, and all the other fun stuff that makes our system of government so much fun. (Though, admittedly, not quite as much fun as some others.) If the House and Senate can settle their differences, both the spending cuts and tax cuts would be set in concrete for the next five years, with the only thing left to decide being what programs get cut by how much. Debbie Weinstein of the Coalition on Human Needs, who's been sending out invaluable e-mail updates on the budget process, points out that reconcilation got this far last year, too, only to have it fall apart in conference when Senators balked at the degree of cuts desired by the more arch-conservative House. On the other hand, she also noted the comments of Sen. Gordon Smith, co-sponsor of the Medicaid restoration amendment, that if the conference committee puts the Medicaid cuts back in, he might vote for the resulting budget anyway. "This time," she says, "it will be an uphill battle."
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