News Round-Up: Congressional "Conservadems" Perform Radical Surgery to Obama's Proposed Budget, Including Health Care Expansion?

by Damozel | Our in-the-days-of-W-rubber-stamp-wielding Congressional Dems have apparently found their red pens and their Exacto knives (TM) and gone to town ripping up the Obama budget.

It is therefore surprising to hear that "White House budget director Peter Orszag reacted favorably to the Senate blueprint."  (WaPo)  Orszag seems to think that the Dems' separate budget blueprints, despite all the slashes and X'ed out items, will ""fulfill the president's objectives" on health care, education, clean energy and deficit reduction."  And in fact, Obama just had a very pleasant meeting with Senate Democrats....well, with most of them.

Huh.  How can that be? Because WaPo reports:

In the budget blueprints they are scheduled to formally unveil today, Democrats in the House and Senate said they plan to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Obama's spending request over the next five years. They also are scrapping Obama's plan to devote more cash to the financial sector bailout. And they are restoring some of the money-saving budget gimmicks the president said he eliminated last month when he unveiled his $3.6 trillion request for the fiscal year that begins in October...

In the Senate, the result is a leaner package that would drive the annual deficit to $1.2 trillion next year, compared with $1.4 trillion under Obama's policies. By 2014, the deficit would plummet to just more than $500 billion under the Senate's plan, requiring the nation to borrow $3.8 trillion over the next five years, compared with about $4.4 trillion under Obama's proposal...

To meet those goals,  Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, said he would leave out new spending for Obama's proposed expansion of health care coverage, a program likely to cost in excess of $1 trillion over the next 10 years, as well as the president's proposal to make permanent an $800 tax credit for working families.

Lawmakers would be free to adopt those policies as long as they did not increase the deficit, Conrad said. That means health care reform would have to be accompanied by tax increases or spending cuts equal to its entire cost, not just the $634 billion down payment Obama had proposed. And the president's tax credit, dubbed the Making Work Pay credit, would have to be scrapped unless it were paired with a money-raising initiative of equal value.  (WaPo; emphasis added)

TPM DC, Brian Beutler says that "many of Conrad's cuts are geared more toward hiding spending than calling for specific cuts. For instance, "Conrad...pressed some Bush-era budget maneuvers eliminated by Obama back into service: Instead of a 10-year budget that shows deficits steadily accumulating, for example, Conrad is proposing a five-year spending plan.""  Anyway, the budget blueprints aren't binding on Congressional committes anyway.

Well, that's a relief.  After all, what do I care about deficits if I'm dead because I can't afford medical treatment? 

House Democrats, like their Senate counterparts, have also been slashing away at Obama's plan.  WaPo tells again:

Like a competing proposal unveiled in the Senate, the House plan would permit lawmakers to pursue Obama's priorities on health care, education and energy only if those initiatives do not increase the deficit. Unlike the Senate, the House is proposing to use a procedural shortcut to push Obama's health-care and education proposals through the Senate without Republican votes...

White House budget director Peter Orszag today praised the House blueprint, as well as its counterpart in the Senate. "The resolutions may not be identical twins to what the president submitted, but they are certainly brothers that look an awful lot alike," he told reporters.

Chris Bowers at Open Left flat-out accuses WaPo of concern trolling on this issue.

There are a few headlines trying desperately to portray some sense of major conflict between House Democrats and the Obama administration on the budget....Once you read further, all indications are that the House blueprint has actually increased non-bailout public spending, yet still reduced deficit projections and the possibility for conflict over, President Obama's budget...

Slightly more public spending, no more bailouts, lower deficits and easier to pass. Unless I am missing something, it sounds to me like House Democrats made a good budget proposal from President Obama great.

DWT, I should note, has quite a different view about the "Conservadems" and the damage they do impeding the President's policies.  What price this latest show of resistance by the moderates?

As noted above, Obama met with Senate Democrats.  According to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he left them feeling "content, inspired about where we need to go."  (Politico)  

In his first visit to a Senate Democratic lunch since his Inauguration, Obama sought to unify disparate factions of his caucus — especially budget hawks — who have increasingly raised concerns about the size and scope of his budget. And it came at a crucial time, as Democrats are moving swiftly to enact a major budget blueprint that will impact the rest of his domestic agenda in the coming fiscal year....

Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), a centrist who has been skeptical of the budget, said he and Obama are on the same page in that the president "expects us not to rubberstamp his budget."

"He knows this is a collaborative effort," Bayh said. "For some that think that is a hostile attitude - the president doesn't think that."

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) characterized the president’s message as “we’re going to sink or swim together.”

Schumer added that Obama “knows that he’s got to move somewhat in our direction, but that we’ve got to move together. I think he was very supportive of the changes that the Budget Committee is talking about – understanding is a better word.” (Politico)

Er...with one crucial exception.

He continued to meet resistance from one key senator – Budget Chairman Kent Conrad – who told reporters after the meeting that he was still going to phase out Obama’s signature middle class tax cut if it wasn’t offset with spending cuts in the future. (Politico).

At The New Republic, Jon Cohn explains, based on conversations with various sources, why those of us who are praying for health care reform shouldn't necessarily find this discouraging.  

What's the significance of a health reserve fund if there are no dollars attached? And since the whole point of using the reconciliation process is to get health reform through the Senate, without subjecting it to the threat of a Republican filibuster, doesn't the absence of reconcilaition instructions in the Senate proposal suggest certain doom for that idea?

But most of the people I've been consulting over the last few days--a collection of advocates, Hill staffers, and administration officials, all of them friendly to reform--suggest that interpretation is misguided.

It was important that Obama put a number on his reserve fund, these people say, because his interest in making health care a priority was in doubt. That's not the case in Congress, where the leadership has made clear its intention to move forward and the key committee chairmen have been hard at work on a comprehensive package that will, if fully implemented, eventually insure everybody while introducing changes that will ultimately make medical care less expensive. By leaving the reserve fund undefined, these sources say, congressional budgetmakers actually leave more congressional reform architects flexibility.

As for the reconciliation issue, that's a bit trickier. Key reformers in the White House and both chambers of Congress want to enact health care. They'd prefer to do it with large majorities--which means reaching out to Republcians and working with them. But they also realize such efforts might fail. And,if that happens, they realize they'll need to use the reconciliation process...

Keeping reconciliation out of the Senate budget proposal but including it in the House budget proposal allows congressional leaders to pursue a good cop-bad cop strategy. Once each chamber passes its budget, the two must get together and work out the differences between their versions. As long as reconciliation is in the House version, it'll be on the table in those negotiations. And by that time, the thinking goes, leaders in both houses will have a better sense of whether it's necessary to use reconciliation.

As Cohn himself says, you can make of this what you will.  Orszag himself seems to prefer not to make much of it at all. 

"Whether the budget resolution included specific offsets or not is not particularly relevant," Orszag said. "The point is that the finance committee has been tasked with coming up with a deficit neutral health reform."  (TPMDC)

As for Republicans, they are going to moan whatever Obama and their Democratic brethren decide.  So I am glad that South Carolina's John Spratt pointed out the truth that the GOP is desperately trying to bury. 

Republicans assailed it as embodying Obama's plans for what they called a massive increase in the size of government, while Democrats charged that the previous administration of President George W. Bush had saddled his successor with intractable fiscal problems, including a $1.3 trillion deficit.

"President Bush has left President Obama with a hard hand to play," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (D-S.C.), the committee chairman. "President Bush told us we could have it all: guns, butter and tax cuts, too, and never mind the deficit." As a result, he said, the new administration now confronts the worst deficits in U.S. history -- $1.7 trillion this year and $1.2 trillion next year. (WaPo; emphasis added)

Whatever they decide, I think Obama and the Senate Dems agree on one point:  the Republicans haven't got a clue how to fix anything, unless of course they have some Top Secret Plan to Rescue the Economy that they're selfishly holding back on.  (How unpatriotic!)

Memeorandum has more....

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Comments

[Flowerplough]

Just an aside, but, "what do I care about deficits if I'm dead because I can't afford medical treatment?"

Flip the coin over.

What do I care about all the money British/Canadian "free" government health care will save me if I died while on the 7-month waiting list for my first diagnostic MRI?