Aw. Don't you just love Congress? At a point in time only two months or so removed from events that likely contributed to the largest increase in needy people in our country's history, the House decides that we ought to balance the budget on the backs of the needy in favor of the rich.
NPR.org, November 18, 2005
WASHINGTON (AP) -- House Republicans basked in triumph after razor-thin passage of a sweeping budget cut plan in the wee hours of Friday morning. But intra-party tensions are sure to flare again when negotiations begin next month on a House-Senate compromise measure. Differences over opening an Arctic wilderness to oil drilling promise to be difficult if not impossible to resolve.
Still, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Acting Majority Leader Roy Blunt, R-Mo., were buoyant -- if exhausted -- after sweating out a big victory on the budget cut bill. After all, they had just salvaged -- at least for the moment -- a major pillar of their agenda despite divisions within the party and nervousness among moderates that the vote could cost them in next year's elections.
The bill, passed 217-215 after a 25-minute-long roll call, makes modest but politically painful cuts across an array of programs for the poor, students and farmers. President Bush, at a summit in Busan, South Korea, called the budget plan "a significant savings package that will restrain spending and keep us on track to cut the deficit in half by 2009." He urged House and Senate negotiators to reach prompt agreement.
The victory on the deficit-control bill came hours after an embarrassing and rare defeat on a $602 billion spending bill for education, health care and job training programs this year. The earlier 224-209 vote halted what had been a steady drive to complete annual appropriations bills freezing many agency budgets.
The broader budget bill would slice almost $50 billion from the deficit by the end of the decade by curbing rapidly growing benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and student loan subsidies. Republicans said reining in such programs whose costs spiral upward each year automatically is the first step to restoring fiscal discipline. "This unchecked spending is growing faster than our economy, faster than inflation, and far beyond our means to sustain it," said Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle, R-Iowa.
In passing the bill, Republicans buffed up their party's budget-cutting credentials as they try to reduce a deficit swelled by spending on the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina. Democrats countered that a companion tax bill that could advance as early as Friday would more than eat up the savings.
The budget plan squeaked through after an all-day search by Hastert, Blunt and others to round up votes from reluctant moderates and other lawmakers uneasy with the bill. House leaders now face arduous talks with the Senate, which passed a much more modest plan earlier this month. Negotiators face difficult negotiations over Arctic drilling, Medicaid and student loans, among other issues.
Fourteen Republicans voted "no," including several who had harshly condemned the bill in the days leading up to the vote. To win House approval, Hastert ordered modest concessions on plans to limit eligibility for food stamps and require the poorest Medicaid patients to pay more for their care. He ordered killed a provision to deny free school lunches to about 40,000 children whose parents would lose their food stamps. The biggest concession came Thursday evening with inclusion of language to permit food stamp recipients making the transition from welfare to work to continue to be able to receive non-cash benefits for child care, transportation and housing without losing their nutrition benefits.
The bill drew unanimous opposition from Democrats, who objected to both cuts in programs for the poor and the fact that the deficit-reduction bill would increase the deficit when combined with a tax bill slated for a vote later that would extend tax cuts on capital gains and dividend income due to expire at the end of 2008....
Because, really, those people with capital gains and dividends are just so much more needy than those people who need food, medicine, and an education, aren't they?
Really, it just warms the cockles of my heart, and gives me an urge to plant my foot somewhere that Congress can feel just how warm those cockles are. (I know I have a steel toed boot here somewhere...)
When did it become so politically expedient for Congress to be so mean to the needy? To be sure, the poor don't vote all that much, and they don't give to political campaigns the way the dividend-enhanced do. But still, how is it a selling point to say, "I took food from the mouths of the poor and put money in the pockets of my rich donors!" Surely even the rich donors themselves might see how ... unseemly that is, to put it mildly. (One might even say "morally repugnant" ... but then one remembers that we're talking about Congress, the state of whose morals is always in some doubt.)
Posted by iain at November 18, 2005 11:37 AM
