Senate Passes New Stopgap Spending Bill

A three-week stop-gap spending bill cleared Congress Thursday, setting up what’s expected to be the decisive showdown next month between President Barack Obama and House Republicans over budget cuts for the second half of this fiscal year. Final approval came on a 87-13 Senate roll call vote. The action averts any immediate threat of a Friday shutdown, while promising another $6 billion in savings as a down payment toward the final bargain both sides insist they are seeking.

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But as talks continue, the level of paranoia is such that Republican aides won’t even admit meeting with the president’s men, when seen together in the Capitol. And too weak to embrace any bold compromise, Obama and Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) are taking the safer route—getting out of town.

The president is off to Brazil, Chile and El Salvador. Congress and Boehner are going home for another week-long recess. And amid the swirl of bagpipes and St. Patrick’s Day festivities in the Capitol Thursday, it was a bittersweet moment as the two men crossed paths at an annual holiday luncheon: Obama invoking the Irish-American spirit of political camaraderie even as the same stopgap bill served to terminate U.S. contributions to a quarter-century program helping poor communities in Northern Ireland and border counties.

“I suppose you can call it ironic in a way,” Denis Rooney, chairman of the International Fund for Ireland, told POLITICO.

When Congress comes back, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is slated to lay down his 2012 budget resolution, a multi-year plan that will give some wider context to the more narrow fight now over the last six months of 2011. That could yet help Boehner begin to sell a deal to his party, and in the same context, the White House must also decide how far it’s willing to go to lock in any spending cuts now as part of its five-year freeze on domestic spending.

Already Obama is claiming $400 billion in savings over the next decade by imposing a five-year freeze for these programs at their 2010 enacted levels. With passage of the stopgap bill, Republicans have brought this down by about $13.6 billion, and if the White House were to incorporate this into its freeze, it could yield tens of billions in additional savings.

The administration has had no comment on this approach, but the Office of Management and Budget is preparing to make updated projections—reflecting the added cuts—that will be important to framing the debate.

“Today’s vote starts the clock again,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) but he also emphasized that negotiators must look beyond just discretionary appropriations to find the savings needed. Any final deal will also encompass “mandatory” spending Reid said, if not revenues as well. And this would open the door to changes in benefit or farm subsidies, for example, worth billions each year.

Thursday’s stopgap bill, which runs to April 8, is the sixth such continuing resolution or CR for the 2011 fiscal year which began last Oct. 1. And to an unprecedented degree, the entire government, including war funding, remains without permanent appropriations halfway through the year.

Democrats have themselves to blame for failing to adopt a 2011 budget last spring and summer. But Republicans compounded the problem after the November elections by blocking successive compromise efforts, all of which cut tens of billions of dollars from Obama’s initial requests from a year ago.

The GOP’s strong desire then was to set up this fight, forcing an early confrontation with Obama to bring the White House to the budget table. But after taking power in January, the leadership lost control to tea-party forces that insisted on doubling the level of cuts and, by doing so, drove off swing House Democrats and guaranteed a veto fight with the president.

By the time their bill came off the House floor Feb. 19, Republicans had attached dozens of legislative riders designed to cripple Obama’s initiatives, and the level of cuts far exceeded $60 billion. Total nonemergency appropriations would fall by a total of $61.3 billion, and for domestic and foreign aid programs, the net cut is over $66 billion, or 14 percent.

When the Senate balked at this package, the House opted for a series of short term bills, trying to achieve the same results by exacting $2 billion in cuts for every week the government remains open without a budget deal. As a Democrat, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb likens the process to being “nibbled to death by ducks” but new polling released this week by the Pew Research Center suggests that Boehner must worry too that Republicans are losing ground on the deficit among political independents and even key elements of the party’s base.

In a November 2010 Pew poll after the mid-term elections, Republicans enjoyed a 35% vs. 24% edge over Obama as to who had the better approach to fighting deficits. But in new March survey, Pew found that Republicans had dropped to 21%, down 14 points. And while Obama’s standing had not improved, the two sides were on a much more equal basis.
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