MEDICAID: Budget Brawl: GOP V. Republicans

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Mr. Bush will appear on the Tim Russert show Sunday Feb 8. It will be interesting to see if Mr Russert queries the president more about complaints from the Republican or the Democratic side. Prepping Dubya for this interview must be a nightmare for his handlers.Budget Brawl: GOP V. RepublicansFeb. 6, 2004This column from The New Republic was written by Alexander Bolton.

 

It's no secret that fiscal conservatives have had plenty of reasons to be annoyed with the Bush administration. Federal discretionary spending has grown by 27 percent per year since President Bush took office, a significantly faster rate than during the Clinton administration. The Medicare bill Bush signed late last year was the largest new entitlement Congress has passed since 1965, the heyday of the Great Society. And Bush's No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 represented the largest expansion of the Department of Education since Jimmy Carter created it. All told, the White House is currently projecting a deficit of more than half a trillion dollars for this year alone. This explosion in federal spending has opened the door to a new class of conservative revolutionaries. Led by Republican congressmen like Mike Pence of Indiana, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and Jeff Flake of Arizona, the group is composed of about 40 lawmakers, many of whom arrived in Congress after 1998. And while these rebels aren't yet strong enough to attempt the kind of coup that nearly toppled then-speaker Newt Gingrich in July of 1997, they're certainly capable of giving the administration fits as it tries to tack to the center for this fall's election. If anything, the record of the last few months suggests Pence et al will not be easily appeased. At the end of last year, Pence helped lead a conservative revolt against the Medicare bill, Bush's top domestic priority in 2003; he fell just one vote short of killing the legislation. Then, early this year, the administration's proposed mission to Mars further enraged conservatives. The project, they complained, could end up costing half a trillion dollars, leading Ryan, a prominent young conservative who is spearheading a package of budget reforms, to predict the proposal would be "dead on arrival" in the House. Largely as a result of this sentiment, the Mars mission was conspicuously absent from the president's State of the Union speech. But the final straw came January 30, at a closed-door party retreat in Philadelphia, where Office of Management and Budget Director Joshua Bolten shocked conservatives -- and even mainstream Republicans -- by announcing that the Medicare bill would cost $534 billion over the next decade, not the $400 billion that was projected when Congress passed it in November. When Bolten revealed the revised cost estimate, "there was a collective gasp," says one conservative who attended the meeting. The session soon turned into a heated discussion about the budget deficit that left lawmakers bristling. To defuse the situation, the administration, which had already vowed to restrain the growth of non-defense-related discretionary spending to 0.8 percent in next year's budget, further lowered that cap to 0.5 percent. This forced additional cuts in a slew of social programs, such as Even Start (a family literacy program), Native American housing aid, and child-disease prevention programs. The White House also recently abandoned a push for an expensive overhaul of Medicaid and a big expansion of retirement savings accounts, goals that were at the forefront of Bush's legislative agenda as recently as last year. The president and GOP congressional leaders have even dropped plans to include billions of dollars worth of corporate tax breaks in an energy bill that has languished on the Hill since late November. But none of these retreats has appeased conservatives. To the contrary, they only appear to have emboldened them. Conservatives like Pence recently began demanding procedural reforms that would make it more difficult for House leaders to waive budgetary limits (that is, the rules that require the House to stay within the spending levels laid out in each year's congressional budget resolution). They claim that this practice leads to excessive spending, and they point to the fact that the Medicare bill would have died in the House last fall had GOP House leaders not waived a nettlesome budgetary limit. Conservatives also want to crack down on emergency supplemental bills -- another time-honored way of circumventing the usual budget process in favor of additional spending -- by establishing a strict list of criteria programs would have to meet in order to qualify as "emergency." The combination of the two efforts amounts to conservatives trying to strip their own party of the budgetary flexibility that a majority party typically enjoys. Even worse for the Republican leadership, House conservatives are currently plotting to flex their muscles when House Majority Leader Tom DeLay holds the vote on a balanced budget amendment he grudgingly promised conservatives last fall. (The vote isn't scheduled yet, but will come later this year.) House insiders believe that there is now enough support among conservatives that, with the help of trouble-making Democrats, the measure could easily pass. Though the balanced budget amendment would still be a long way from ratification at that point, it would be a hugely embarrassing election-year distraction for the administration. But most worrisome for the president is the prospect that the growing conservative insurgency could produce a stalemate between the House and Senate over the budget. Conservatives, who will likely have a major influence on the House budget bill, are demanding even bigger discretionary spending cuts than the administration has agreed to. For their part, moderate Republicans, such as Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), and Democrats -- both of whom enjoy a much larger say in the Senate than in the House -- are expected to balk at a virtual spending freeze. The likely effect would be to bog down Bush's plan to make his tax cuts permanent -- which, more than anything else, remains the core of his domestic agenda. Alongside the various spending initiatives conservatives have already derailed, the president could find himself headed into November without a single major election-year accomplishment. Two weeks ago, Pence delivered the following admonishment during his keynote address to the Conservative Political Action Conference: "Many Republicans -- even many who call themselves conservatives -- see government increasingly as the solution to every social ill, and -- let us be clear on this point -- this is a historic departure from the limited government traditions of our party and millions of its most ardent supporters." He added, "The time has come for conservatives to retake the helm of this movement and renew our commitment to fiscal discipline." Following the speech, Pence received a standing ovation from the hundreds of assembled activists. It's possible that the White House's conservative problem will go away on its own. But it sure doesn't sound like it. Alexander Bolton is a staff writer for The Hill. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/06/opinion/printable598517.shtml