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Conservatives Voice Frustration With Short-Term Budget Bills
Published March 14, 2011

Congressional Republicans, notably freshmen elected on vows to cut spending, are getting fed up with the short-term budget bills that leaders on both sides of the aisle seem content to pass while wrangling over a spending plan for the last six months of the fiscal year.

“An absurd pattern has clearly developed in Washington,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a Tea Party-aligned freshman, wrote in a column Monday posted on the conservative blog Redstate.com. “I did not come to the U.S. Senate to be part of some absurd political theatre.”

Lawmakers in early March approved a two-week stopgap that cut $4 billion from last year’s levels. Now, they’re preparing to vote on another stopgap, this one for three weeks, which would cut $6 billion.

But that only gets Congress a fraction of the way to the $61 billion in cuts Republicans called for this year and a fraction of a fraction of the way toward reducing the deficit. With the federal government lurching from short-term budget to short-term budget, a growing number of conservatives say it’s time for a confrontation.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., while acknowledging the three-week extension is not the “ultimate solution,” told “Fox News Sunday” he expects the upcoming bill to pass.

“I don’t think we ought to let the government shut down,” he said.

Rubio joins a short list of Tea Party senators, including Rand Paul of Kentucky, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah, who already have expressed their discontent with the stopgap budgets. He said he would “no longer” back short-term budget bills, adding that Congress cannot “nickel-and-dime our way” out of the debt crisis.

Resistance on the Senate side is being matched by conservative ire in the House, where spending bills originate.

Fox News has learned that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the influential Republican Study Committee, will oppose the short-term bill, scheduled to hit the floor Tuesday or Wednesday. The study committee represents the bloc of the most conservative voices in the House -- Jordan’s stance could open the door for others to follow suit in voting against the bill.

In a Tweet last week, freshman Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., already announced: “I will NOT be voting for another short term CR. There is a confrontation coming on this budget and the sooner we get to it the better.”

And Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, said the debate is distracting lawmakers from much bigger tasks -- like tackling the $1.1 trillion deficit in President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget.

“We were elected to make bold changes to federal spending and to reverse our unsustainable deficits,” Huelskamp said in a statement, announcing he will vote against the three-week budget bill.

Read the rest of the story at Foxnews


 
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