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Politico...
House conservatives
ready to cut
By Jonathan Allen and Jake Sherman
February 7, 2011
It’s finally slash-and-burn time for conservatives, and the programs
they target in a massive spending bill next week will help shape the
national political debate over what the government can, and should, pay
for.
Republicans are planning a freewheeling, open-ended debate that
promises to test the party’s limits on how far it’s willing to go on
spending cuts, and it may divide Democrats between those who want to
embrace modest cuts and those who want to protect domestic programs
from the GOP ax.
The most conservative faction in the House, the Republican Study
Committee, already is preparing amendments that would choke off funding
for President Barack Obama’s new health care law, cut domestic programs
by $100 billion and force the government to pay creditors before
funding other priorities if the limit on the national debt is hit. The
RSC proposals would cut tens of billions of dollars more than Budget
Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has proposed, reflecting new
tension within the GOP majority over how aggressive it should be.
The spending bill, called a “continuing resolution” or “CR,” is
necessary because, without it, the government will run out of authority
to spend money on March 4. Republican leaders rolled out the top-line
spending number last week, and they’re expected to provide the details
of the plan later this week. The bill is likely to hit the floor next
week.
In a way, conservatives already have won in framing the debate: The
president’s budget director, Jack Lew, wrote an op-ed in The New York
Times over the weekend saying that next year’s budget will have to
include cuts in some areas to fund “investments” in others. The debate
has shifted from how to spend to how to cut. But conservatives also
risk overreaching in etching targets on the backs of specific programs,
each of which has a constituency powerful enough to have built its
budget to the current level.
Traditionally, party leaders prohibit amendments on continuing
resolutions. But House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his Republican
leadership team have promised that it’s open season for rank-and-file
lawmakers who want to offer amendments to spending bills — so long as
they comport with new GOP-written House rules that make it tougher to
spend and easier to cut.
That will test Republican leaders’ ability to keep control of their
party’s message in the face of divisions that are certain to be laid
bare by the kind of deep-cutting amendments that Democrats will use to
portray Republicans as insensitive to the needs of their constituents.
Read the complete article at Politico
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