Budget Plans Defeat Shows Hurdles to Compromise
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Budget Plan's Defeat Shows Hurdles to
Compromise
By: Jonathan Weisman, New York Times
WASHINGTON - As the House moved toward a vote last week on a
bipartisan budget plan modeled on the deficit reduction blueprint
of a White House commission, Washington's conservative and liberal
influence machines swung into action.
Within hours, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform joined
Heritage Action for America, the
Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation and assorted
conservative bloggers in coming out hard against the plan as an
unacceptable tax increase. On the left, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the National Committee to Preserve Social
Security and Medicare, and research groups like the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities denounced the effort as a sham,
disguised as the Bowles-Simpson commission report but tilted to the
right.
After that assault, a plan that its sponsors, Representatives
Steven C. LaTourette, Republican of Ohio, and Jim Cooper, Democrat
of Tennessee, swore would get at least 100 votes across party lines
got just 38, and the prospects for compromise on the nation's
yawning deficit took a major step backward.
"There are only two things in the middle of the road," Mr.
Cooper said: "yellow lines and dead possums."
The beating the Cooper-LaTourette budget took last Wednesday
shined a bright light on the difficulties Congress faces in
defusing the budgetary time bomb before it explodes on Jan. 1,
2013. If Congress does nothing, that is when nearly $8 trillion in
tax increases and automatic spending cuts over 10 years will go
into force - salvation perhaps for the nation's budget deficit, but
potential disaster for its delicate economy.
The Bowles-Simpson deficit plan - named after the former Clinton
White House chief of staff Erskine B. Bowles and former Senator
Alan K. Simpson, the Republican who was chairman of President
Obama's deficit reduction commission - is regarded by the
Washington cognoscenti as the compromise both sides will have to
eventually accept before the end of the year.
"When the two parties get serious about compromise and getting
something done that reduces the deficit by $4 trillion over the
next decade, they will turn to something substantive that is very
similar to what we have proposed," Mr. Bowles said in an e-mail
exchange. "There just aren't that many other viable options."
But last week's attacks showed the opposition to any such
compromise is far more organized than the forces of
conciliation.
The conventional wisdom that a major deficit deal will be worked
out in a lame-duck Congressional session after the November
election is making a dangerous leap of faith, Mr. Cooper said. It
assumes that after a bruising election, the defeated political
party will limp back to Washington ready to give in to the victor.
If not, the victorious side will quickly undo the most onerous
automatic deficit reduction measures early next year.
"They're going to lose the Senate, and they're going to lose the
White House, and the Republicans are going to fix this problem,"
Mr. Norquist said. The need for compromise is "nonsense," he said.
"It won't happen. It doesn't need to happen."
But Mr. Norquist's preferred sequence of events depends on a
clean win by one side or the other and once-in-a-generation changes
to programs like Medicare and Medicaid done through parliamentary
procedures to avoid a Senate filibuster.
Mr. Cooper said it is not so simple. "The traditional political
cure-all is just elect more Democrats or Republicans," he said.
"They'll stick to that until Nov. 6. Then they'll wake up and
realize it won't work."
The Cooper-LaTourette budget was proposed auspiciously last
Tuesday morning in a closed-door meeting of House Democrats.
Initially, only the proponents of the Democratic leadership's
budget plan, as well as the budget proposals by the Congressional
Black Caucus and the Progressive Caucus, were to make their case,
but Mr. Cooper's bipartisan plan was given a chance at the last
moment. He implored his colleagues to vote for the Democratic
leadership plan, as well as one of the other options presented at
the meeting that reflected the views of their district.
Many members gave him their word they would vote for the only
bipartisan budget on offer, he said.
Mr. Norquist said conservatives began focusing on the issue the
day of the vote. He personally called Mr. LaTourette as well as
Representative Charles Bass of New Hampshire, a once-moderate
Republican who came back after his 2006 defeat with a swing to the
right. Both Heritage Action and Club for Growth announced their
opposition and said a vote for the Simpson-Bowles budget would
count against members in their conservative vote ratings. The
groups had voiced concern about the Republican budget drafted by
Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget
Committee chairman, but they were rallying to it.
"We wanted to unify Republicans around Ryan, handle the
'Mediscare' attacks from the left, and force the conversation to be
between right and left," said Michael A. Needham, chief executive
of Heritage Action. "Bowles-Simpson would muddy the message."
With support draining away, Mr. LaTourette went to the House
floor with a broadside at all the interest group allied against
him, and with a pointed message to Mr. Norquist, who enforces the
"no tax increase" pledge signed by almost all Republican
lawmakers.
"We're asking that members tonight stand up, that they stand up
to the bloodsuckers in this town who take 5, 10, 15, 25 dollars
from our constituents to pretend to defend causes on their behalf,"
Mr. LaTourette said. "We're asking people to stand up to pledges
that they made 20 years ago when we didn't have a $15 trillion
deficit owed to China."
It did not work. Republicans stayed with their leadership. Even
Democrats who had publicly pledged to back Bowles-Simpson voted no.
If only Democrats joined Mr. Cooper and Mr. LaTourette, that budget
would not be the final compromise but the Democratic starting
position for future negotiations, aides said.
"I wasn't surprised at the attacks from the left and right. I
was surprised at the ferocity of the attacks," Mr. LaTourette said.
"I got clobbered by some real pros."