To the Council, Directors Circle and State ARP Heads: After the House THUD bill went “thud” on Tuesday and the Senate effort collapsed yesterday, the expectation is that work will begin on a continuing resolution good for maybe two months (October+November), which almost by definition will be a compromise between the Senate and House bills, which are $10 billion apart in total spending. In the Senate, Collins (R-ME), the top Republican on the subcommittee, was the only Republican to vote for cloture (to cut off debate) and the 54-43 vote fell six votes short. This is all part of a larger picture of dysfunction, given the level of disagreement between R’s and D’s. THUD was supposed to be a relatively easy bill, contrasted with Labor/HHS where the Ryan budget would cut spending 19% below current levels. Every function of government is affected. To some extent we are in uncharted territory, but it is good that Latham cited opposition to Amtrak cuts as one reason the R’s did not have the votes to pass their bill Tuesday. So we just keep up the pressure, and maybe some day the nation can move forward, and trains with it. I have put some choice quotes in the following stories in red. The subject line for this e-mail is the headline from yesterday’s The Hill print edition. There is a link in the Politico story on the senate to Politico’s story on the House collapse. --Ross Capon thehill/templates/thehill/images/space.gif thehill/blogs/on-the-money/appropriations/314733-house-gop-pulls-transport-housing-bill-from-floor Republican fiscal splits erupt; Rogers rips party leadership on spending cuts By Russell Berman and Erik Wasson - 07/31/13 08:38 PM ET Long-running Republican tensions over the Ryan budget’s deep spending cuts boiled over Wednesday as the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee accused his party of being unable to support them. In a blistering statement, Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said he was “extremely disappointed” with his leadership’s decision to pull the Transportation and Housing and Urban Development (THUD) spending bill from the floor. Leadership said they simply ran out of time — but Rogers charged that wasn’t the real reason. He hinted that a vote on the measure was scrapped because leaders didn’t have the votes to support the deep cuts he was directed to write, and accused Republicans of effectively abandoning House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget. Rogers called for a bipartisan deal that would replace the unpopular sequester with something bridging the gap between the House budget and Senate spending measures he said were too costly to pass the lower chamber. “With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted just three months ago,” Rogers said. “Thus, I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end. And, it is also clear that the higher funding levels advocated by the Senate are also simply not achievable in this Congress.” The office of Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) cited the House’s busy schedule this week for pulling the bill, but with the chamber scheduled to leave for its five-week August recess on Friday, it likely won’t come up again until the fall, if at all. House members returned to Washington late Tuesday. “The prospects for passing this bill in September are bleak at best, given the vote count on passage that was apparent this afternoon,” Rogers said. Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) denied Republicans lacked the votes for the bill. “We just don’t have enough time,” he told The Hill. Asked to respond to Rogers’s statement, Cantor said the “larger problem” for rank-and-file Republicans is the lack of action to reform entitlement programs, an issue that is not part of appropriations bills but was at the heart of the Ryan budget. “I can’t speak to his statement, but look, we have a larger problem here,” the majority leader told reporters. “The larger problem is we haven’t addressed what’s truly driving our deficit. That is the context within which I think members are looking at appropriations bills and the impact of the sequester.” Cantor called on the president to work with Republicans on entitlement reform, and said he held out hope that the House would still be able to pass appropriation bills after the August recess. The decision to pull the bill and Rogers’s criticism of it put sunlight on long-suppressed divisions within the GOP over how to handle the automatic spending cuts ahead of fights this fall over funding the government and raising the federal borrowing limit. President Obama visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday for closed-door meetings with House and Senate Democrats in which he sought to unify his side for those battles. He insisted he would not negotiate with Republicans on raising the debt ceiling, and that he would not reduce planned cuts to defense spending at the expense of domestic programs. The sequester imposed equal cuts to defense and domestic discretionary spending, but Ryan’s budget restores some defense spending while making deeper cuts on the domestic side. For Rogers and other senior Republican appropriators, the pulling of the THUD bill amounted to an “I told you so” moment. When the leadership agreed to back a 10-year balanced-budget plan, they warned that rank-and-file members would not like the stark reductions once they were put to specific programs, especially to infrastructure and the social safety net. With the Republicans unable to pass their own bill, those warnings became reality. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not comment on the move. Like Rogers and other Republicans, he has called for an agreement to replace sequestration with more targeted spending cuts and entitlement reforms. But Republicans are rejecting Democratic demands for higher taxes, and in the Senate, conservatives have blocked attempts to move to a formal House-Senate budget conference committee. Democrats seized on the THUD failure to argue anew that the GOP budget was impractical and that the House should negotiate an end to sequestration. “The collapse of the partisan Transportation and Housing bill in the House proves that their sequestration-on-steroids bills are unworkable, and that we are going to need a bipartisan deal to replace sequestration,” Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said. Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, portrayed the move as the latest example of “chaos” in the GOP-led House. And Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Obama on strategy and communications, said it showed Republicans must work with Democrats to govern. The THUD bill has $10 billion less in spending than a companion version being considered in the Senate that has divided upper chamber Republicans. Six Republicans voted for the higher spending in the bill in committee and 19 voted to start debate despite objections from Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). The House bill cuts $7 billion from 2013. Hardest hit in the GOP bill is the Community Development Block Grant program, which is cut nearly in half to $1.6 billion, a cut of $1.3 billion that makes its budget lower than it was in 1975. There is no funding for high-speed rail, and Amtrak gets a 21 percent cut to its operating budget. Democrats had suggested that Republicans were not comfortable with the cuts. “I always expected they would have vote problems on this. I don’t get the scheduling issue. We finished reading through the bill last night and were just down to end-of-bill funding limitation amendments,” a Democratic aide said. The House has passed bills funding Defense and Veterans Affairs at higher levels and Homeland Security and Energy and Water with relatively minor cuts. The rest of the bills contain far more controversial cuts. The most contentious, the Labor and Health and Human Services bill, would be cut 19 percent below the sequester. It was slated for release last week, but that release was canceled. Rogers had shown his frustration earlier in the day with the top-line spending level of $967 billion outlined in the Ryan budget, a figure $91 billion below the Senate’s. He called some cuts in an Interior and Environment appropriations bill “extremely tough, bloody decisions,” though he praised a 34 percent cut to the Environmental Protection Agency. Subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) railed against many of the cuts in the environmental bill he authored, and lambasted members of both parties for failing to back the Simpson-Bowles budget plan when they had a chance. Only 38 members voted for the proposal, he noted, which was based on the plan authored by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles (D). This story was published at 3:50 p.m. and last updated at 8:38 p.m. Read more: thehill/blogs/on-the-money/appropriations/314733-house-gop-pulls-transport-housing-bill-from-floor#ixzz2apoVcX9z Follow us: @thehill on Twitter | TheHill on Facebook Senate GOP stymies transportation-housing bill [From today’s print edition] Republicans seem to have a virtual lock over even incremental progress on the budget front. | AP Photo By DAVID ROGERS | 8/1/13 1:07 PM EDT Updated: 8/2/13 1:13 PM EDT A bipartisan transportation and housing bill stalled in the Senate on Thursday after the GOP leadership peeled back the votes of Republicans who had previously supported the $54 billion package when reported by the Appropriations Committee in June. The 54-43 roll call — six short of the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture — comes on the heels of Wednesday’s decision by the House GOP leadership to pull its own $44.1 billion version of the same bill. In the case of the House, the Republican transportation and housing bill cut so deeply that it was judged to lack even a simple majority. In the case of the Senate, the bill added back almost $10 billion and had been reported with six Republican votes. But it was blocked for not having a supermajority. The outcome was at least a short-term victory for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) who has reasserted himself on the issue in recent days. His tactics were strongly opposed by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has helped manage the bill and become something of a heroine for Democrats frustrated with the stalemate. “Sit down and shut up,” Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) barked, trying to restore some order for the benefit of Collins when she rose to deliver an emotional appeal before the vote for her party to let it move forward. “No one has been shut out of this process,” Collins said. “We tried so hard to advance this important legislation. … Think very carefully about this vote. It will be so unfortunate if we go home to our constituents in August and are forced to tell them that we’re unable to do our job.” When the bill was reported from Appropriations in late June, five Republicans had supported the package with Collins: Sens. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mark Kirk of Illinois, John Hoeven of North Dakota and Jerry Moran of Kansas. All five switched to oppose cloture Thursday leaving Collins by herself for the GOP. Complicating the picture further was the absence of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) — which cost Reid another vote — but the decisive dynamic was all on the Republican side. (Also on POLITICO: THUD bill is pulled as GOP budget frays) The end result is that Congress will go home for the summer with the House having passed just four of the 12 annual spending bills and the Senate none. Both parties are playing fast and loose with the terms set in the Budget Control Act. But they also show little capacity to work together on what was once a routine, often bipartisan part of managing the government’s finances. It’s popular to talk of returning to “regular order.” But in practice, Congress most resembles an old man struggling to ride his boyhood bike: The machinery is familiar, but without forward movement, he keeps falling off. Republicans feel the sting of this embarrassment, especially the leadership of the House Appropriations Committee. But the dysfunction can also serve a larger purpose for the GOP, which is blocking not just formal House and Senate talks on the budget but also the farm bill — with its Oct. 1 deadline. If there is a strategy, it is to slow-walk decisions into the fall, when the Treasury will be running out of borrowing authority and need an increase in the nation’s debt limit. The hope is to have more leverage then to broker a deficit deal with President Barack Obama. But to get there, the GOP must first navigate past a shutdown crisis next month, when the party leadership could pay a price for not investing more effort in the appropriations process. A stopgap continuing resolution will be needed to keep the government operating past Oct. 1, and Speaker John Boehner has signaled a willingness to extend the current post-sequester levels of about $988 billion. But that’s $21 billion higher than the same House Republican budget that has so disrupted the appropriations process this summer. And Boehner must also contend with those on his right who want to use the CR as a vehicle to defund Obama’s signature health care reforms. Moreover, Obama himself will most likely be a less passive player than he was last spring, when the current CR was negotiated. Within the $988 billion total, the White House will want some adjustments for its priorities, and it knows it can’t afford to accept the “new normal” of sequestration for long. Indeed, to try to salvage Obama’s second term, some in the administration have discussed what amounts to a three-year buyout of sequestration for the remainder of his presidency. The advantage of this would be to reduce the cost of a bargain to a more manageable number — perhaps $330 billion. But there is no agreement on this strategy even in the White House, and it risks seeming so self-serving for the president that it could hurt him with Democrats. Read more: politico/story/2013/08/senate-blocks-transportation-housing-spending-bill-95060.html#ixzz2apqwEdER =
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 13:52:59 +0000
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