Republicans to White House: ‘Give Us What We Want Or The Economy Gets It!’
With the April 8th deadline, and a potential government shutdown, fast approaching, it appears that the Republican Party leadership continues to remain beholden to the Tea Party loonies that it rode to power back in November. This is particularly evident in their approach to a bill to fund the government through to the end of the year, an approach that seems to read “My way or the highway”:
It’s been almost a week since House Republicans, Senate Democrats and the White House last sat down to hammer out a budget agreement, and the schedule’s still blank. Accusations of bad faith are now flying from both sides. Republicans are poised to reject a White House offer, TPM has learned, that would cut over $30 billion in current spending because of disagreements over whether the package should include cuts to mandatory spending programs. Democrats are pushing for such cuts, which include the big entitlement programs, though the specific cuts they’re proposing remain unclear. In an ironic twist, Republicans oppose those cuts and want to limit the negotiations to non-defense discretionary spending, a smaller subset of the federal budget.
Taken together, the last several days’ worth of developments bode very poorly for the goal of reaching a six-month agreement on spending. The parties have until April 8 to reach agreement, and the odds of a government shutdown are higher now than they’ve been since this process began.
Asked about the offer the White House has floated, a top Republican aide says, “This debate has always been about discretionary spending — not autopilot ‘mandatory’ spending or tax hikes.”
This, of course, is from a GOP that has spoken in great depth and length since the rise of the Tea Party movement about cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other “entitlement” programs that the “fiscal conservative” elements of their base claim are the basis for all of America’s budgetary woes. The GOP’s answer to what they will accept? Giving them what they want:
Then on Tuesday, in a private meeting with Jack Lew, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, and others, House Appropriations Committee aide Bob Inglee put the kibosh on the agreement, telling Democrats they should reach a spending cut target by choosing from the menu of cuts included in the controversial House-passed continuing resolution — HR 1. The House-passed HR 1 includes more than $60 billion in cuts from existing spending, including to key liberal priorities like Title X, Social Security administration and others.
A Senate Democratic leadership aide confirms this account. A second Republican source says, “The Republican negotiating baseline was always HR 1 — which is the formal and approved position of the new House Majority and that was passed this year.”
For those of you playing the home game, this $60 billion in cuts was declared by the Tea Party as “insufficient” when they were announced weeks ago. It also reads as nothing more than a list of those spending items that the Republican Party, in its apparent belief that “social conservatism = fiscal conservatism,” wishes to see cut, prominent amongst them being funding for Planned Parenthood.
Once again, it seems that the GOP was for something before they were against it, which surprises…absolutely no one.