Still going...
The scorecard that most political analysts will probably post after today's big Senate showdown is one for two. Republicans -- with the help of Dick Cheney, who rushed back from the Middle East to cast the tie-breaking vote -- managed to squeeze through their big budget package, complete with around $40 billion in spending cuts focused mostly on the least advantaged. However, when they tried, in their second audacious move, to cram ANWR oil drilling into a must-pass defense appropriations bill, they were narrowly rebuffed by a successful filibuster.
The normal give and take of politics, right? Win one, lose one?
Wrong.
Wrong.
The budget is far and away the more important of these two battles, and here the Republican leadership showed that it's not in the slightest bit willing to relinquish control to GOP moderates or change its overall course. The big lesson of today's Senate showdown is that on the overriding tax and budget issues that have defined the GOP's course over the last eleven years (and especially over the last five), Republican leaders and most of their rank-and-file are still willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their larger conservative goals.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has said plenty about what's in the final conference agreement, so we refer you to their fine research for the details. The subject that's not getting sufficient play, however, is how top Republicans have operated in recent weeks. Everyone said they were on the ropes, everyone said they would have to compromise with their moderate wing, maybe even with Democrats. (In a critical review of our book in the New York Times Book Review, for example, Matt Bai insisted that our thesis that Republicans had figured out how to ram unpopular conservative legislation through Congress had been "effectively disproved" because moderates had stopped the GOP leadership's most recent budget shenanigans.)
Instead, Republican leaders used every play in their remarkable playbook for pursuing radical policies, as well as adding a few new moves. For the first time in the history of the modern budget process, they split the tax cuts from the spending part of the bill, so they could talk about a "deficit-reduction" package even as they planned to cut taxes by more than twice as much as they cut spending. They passed a conservative House spending bill, and a more moderate Senate alternative. Then, they pulled the bill way to the right in the conference committee, excluding Democrats from the deliberations and adopting 80-90 percent of the House-passed program cuts -- cuts that weren't even broached in the Senate version. And finally, they slammed the bill through the House and Senate.
Think "slammed" is too strong a description? Well, in the House, they introduced the nearly-800-page bill at 1 in the morning; the vote was held four hours later. To get around the normal requirement that members of Congress have at least a little time to read what they're voting on, they invoked what's known as "martial law" -- on a party-line vote, of course.
In the Senate, the process was just as dramatic. As Mark Schmitt noted in the wee hours of this morning, "the fate of everything in the Reconciliation bill -- student loan cuts that...will add $551 a year to the burden on middle-class families; $16 billion in Medicaid cuts; changes to welfare that are almost as significant as those passed after four years of high-profile debate in 1996, and much else -- will be decided by 9:10 a.m. tomorrow, that is, today. This is barely 48 hours after the conference report was revealed and shoveled through the House, under a procedure known without irony as "martial law." And, of course, conference reports can't be amended even in the Senate, meaning that all of the dramatic movement toward the conservative House bill could not be undone without taking down the bill itself.
So there you have it: In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, confident voices said the national agenda would change. Republicans would tack to the center, even hard-core conservatives would recognize the nation's unmet needs, moderates within the party would stand up and fight back at last. But the GOP steamroller just rolled right over the momentary decency and caution prompted by the nation's disaster.
If there's a silver lining in all this, it's that Democrats are crying foul as they've never cried foul before. And they managed to make a small change to the budget bill that forces it to go back to the House. Since House members have already headed home, it's possible that Republicans in the House will have to pass the slightly modified budget -- and it's a foregone conclusion they will -- just as they are gearing up to pass their big tax cuts for the well off. That might induce a sense of shame in moderate Republican quarters.
Then again, it might not.
--Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
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An excellent post.
Your book is on my Christmas list...
December 21, 2005 2:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
Assuming the House will have to come back and vote, the Dems and their allies in the blogosphere should publicize the add-ons that were stuffed into the budget reconciliation bill. One I have heard gives drug manufacturers liability. These measures are just one more thing to hang around the necks of those GOP pseudo moderates in the midterms. I think (unfortunately) that sometimes these add-ons arouse more public ire than the cuts to the poor. Besides, the Medicaid cuts include middle class seniors who give their assets to their children so that Medicaid will pay their nursing home bills.
December 21, 2005 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Do you think the high-profile fly-Cheney-back-from-Pakistan move was just an elaborate ploy to squeeze out every last drop of backlash insurance out of the budget bill?
Do you think the GOP actually discusses which moderates get to vote against which bills?
(I can just imagine -- OK, you get the budget, you get CAFTA, you get a nomination, you get ANWR, no, not you, you already got to vote against the tax cut extension.)
December 21, 2005 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
it's of course true that the phrase "republican moderate" has become oxymoronic.
the question is why the people who would like to march under that banner even bother to try: are they really as hopeless as they appear? i mean, there are a lot of spineless democrats, no question, but i don't think there's a single democrat who is as spineless as the nominal "moderate" republicans.
December 21, 2005 2:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
I can't help but think we way overrate the ANWAR issue. While I'm not at all inclined to see any drilling in the region, it occurs to me as having become a lousy posterchild for the environmental movement. I would gladly trade ANWAR for an increase in gas mileage standards, for example. That would reap greater benefits in terms of energy security, climate change, etc. than does holding off drilling in ANWAR.
December 21, 2005 3:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where do you get the idea that such a trade is anywhere on the legislative horizon? It certainly wasn't in the defense appropriations bill that was just filibustered thanks to the Arctic drilling provisions.
December 21, 2005 3:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm selfish -- I want no drilling AND raising CAFE.
December 21, 2005 4:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
These guys really can run procedural circles around us, huh?
This post is incredibly enlightening. And depressing.
December 21, 2005 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
Daniel,
You don't get it. Filibustering ANWAR is about pissing off Ted Stevens.
And that, my friend, is priceless...
December 21, 2005 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
As Joe Hill said, "Don't mourn! Organize!"
December 21, 2005 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since the Democrats don't seem likely to win until the Republicans piss off enough people, this is eye-opening (I hope) but not a disaster. Open questions - How to convert this into more people that will switch from voting Republican than those that switch to voting Republican? How to convert those votes into won races?
December 21, 2005 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that may be part of the plan. But we can't very well trade ANWR for something worthwhile until we've proven they can't take it from us by force. As someone already pointed out, we haven't been offered a fair trade yet, cause we're only in this vote finally proving that we're too strong for them to steal it.
I may be wrong; maybe no one intends to trade ANWR. In fact, the enviro groups may be so vested in this that they <i>can't</i> anymore, even if that was the original plan. And I repeat that maybe it never was, I sure don't know. But I do know that the Rs won't trade for something they can steal. I think we may have finally shown Stevens that he can't take it from us for nothing... not even with threats of tough votes and mean ads.
December 22, 2005 1:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you think ANWR drilling has been effectively killed, just you wait. It will resurface again and again, like the SST in the 1970s.
December 22, 2005 8:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Don't accept that it's a "foregone conclusion" that the bill will be passed in February. Part of why they rushed it through under martial law is so that the members wouldn't know exactly what they were voting for. With the dirty details out for all to see, there's still a chance it could be derailed.
December 22, 2005 9:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a symbolic bill -- the $40B is essentially spare change in the Federal budget. The purpose of the bill was to reassure the Repub base that Bush can make spending cuts , not just tax breaks. They didn't want publicity -- they didn't want to play into the anti-Robin Hood image -- so they snuck the bill in at the last minute when the GOP majority should have assured a quick win.
It didn't work like that. The Democrats were able to call attention to the bill. The photo-finish 51-50 assured more publicity. The house vote will guarantee that every GOP rep will be asked "Why did you vote against the poor and the students?" next election. It is a very high price for a symbolic win.
December 22, 2005 10:14 AM | Reply | Permalink