Huge House Vote Today
The House is voting on the "Deficit Reduction Act of 2005" today. It is arguably the biggest vote of the year. I know that this bill sounds arcane and I suppose that most people aren't even aware of it, but here's the deal: The government is in charge of two forms of spending - mandatory and discretionary. Mandatory spending is the part of the budget that includes huge entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Discretionary spending is what lawmakers have more control over like funding for the departments of Defense, Education, Labor, etc. The appropriations process is what Congress does each year to handle discretionary spending. In the early part of every year, Congress adopts a budget resolution that authorizes this spending. In this year's resolution, Congress instructed itself to find $35 billion in savings in mandatory programs over 5 years. The process through which they actually do find the savings is called budget reconciliation. Still with me? Budget reconciliation was supposed to be conducted a few months ago, but Hurricane Katrina happened. Ergo, it was delayed. This prompted Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation to quip, "Congress is actually making the excuse that they can't cut spending through reconciliation right now because they are too busy increasing spending." This delay, combined with overall frustration on the part of fiscal conservatives, forced GOP leaders to not only resume budget reconciliation promptly, but to also find more spending cuts. Last week, the Senate passed their version with a vote of 52 - 47. They had originally sought $39 billion in savings, $4 billion above the required amount, but the Senate being the Senate removed that extra savings. As you can imagine, RINO Republicans had to be dragged kicking and screaming in order to pass the bill. Today is the House's turn. Speaker Denny Hastert, to his credit, is seeking $54 billion in net savings (although it's reported that it will be whittled down to $50 billion before today's vote -- the details of the bill are here). To put in perspective, it is not a heavy lift fiscally. While $35-$50 billion sounds like a lot of money, it will only reduce the growth of mandatory spending by 1/10th of 1% over five years. When you deal with a $2 trillion annual budget, that's chump change. However, with the spending habits of Congress, this is a big pill to swallow. And again, the RINO Republicans are the ones who are preventing easy passage. In fact, it was reported late last night that drilling in ANWR was dropped from the bill. It was a provision that many moderates didn't like. House leaders must have concluded that the bill wasn't going to pass with ANWR in it, so they caved. So why is this an important bill? What are the implications of this vote? First, the budget resolution that instructed Congress to find $35 billion in savings also instructed them to cut taxes by $70 billion. If this deficit reduction bill doesn't pass, you can forget about the tax cuts (which are really just extensions to Bush tax cuts that are set to expire soon). Also, if this bill doesn't pass, you can forget about spending reductions next year. Budget reconciliation was last done in 1997 so if it doesn't work this year, it's reasonable to suggest that it won't come back for another 8 years again. We don't want that to happen. So a lot is on the line today. The House has a chance to trim some serious, yet modest, fat off of the government hog. It's something they should do every year. There are various lists floating around the blogosphere that reveal who the RINO fence-sitters are. Since I'm not involved in the backroom machinations in the House, this list gives you a good idea of who they are, but it may or may not be accurate. While a vote is expected today, it is not certain. In any event, I'll keep you posted as the day moves along. THIS IS A BIG VOTE. UPDATE (7:43am): CQ.com ($) is reporting that NO amendments will be offered except the ANWR exclusion, which also removes food stamp reductions and drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. You can thank the RINOs for this.
