Congress’ fiscal truce is an uneasy one
Fiscal peace has arrived in Congress, but the uneasy truce will be tested shortly after lawmakers return in January.
Assuming the Senate passes the budget accord that overwhelmingly cleared the House on Thursday, consensus spending levels will be set for the next two years.
Yet that does not rule out another partial government shutdown Jan. 15.
An expected “omnibus” spending bill will determine whether House Republicans will continue blowing off conservative outside groups and both parties retain their willingness to put aside the priorities of their respective bases.
The Republican chorus to “defund Obamacare” has been largely silent since the shutdown, and there seems to be little appetite for its revival. Witness Rep. Tom Graves, the Republican from Ranger who was one of the leaders of the strategy in the House to tie attacks on the new health care law to any extension of government funding.
Graves on Thursday night voted for the budget deal that replaced $63 billion of across-the-board “sequestration” cuts over two years with $85 billion of deficit reduction over 10 years, including fee hikes and federal pension reforms.
“While it’s true that the overall deal makes a tiny dent in the government’s fiscal problems, it opens the door for better policy moving forward,” Graves said in a written statement. “And, in the near term, keeps all the pressure on President Obama and the Democrats to answer for the Obamacare disaster.”
Notice the shift in strategy: Democrats will have to “answer” for the law and the bad headlines created by faulty websites and health coverage changes. But Republicans aren’t talking about forcing a fiscal standoff.
“What’s the old saying?” asked Coweta County Republican Rep. Lynn Westmoreland. “‘When your opponent is committing suicide, why would you want to murder them?’ It’s going to collapse on its own.”
Heritage Action for America wouldn’t go quite that far, as spokesman Dan Holler said the group “would not take anything off the table” in terms of dealing with the law.
The advocacy offshoot of the Heritage Foundation think tank was the engine behind the "defund" effort over the August Congressional recess, starring Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. It is also one of the groups that earned a big scolding from Speaker John Boehner last week, whose exasperated "Are you kidding me?" dismissal of conservative pressure groups became a viral video.
The tension between Boehner and Heritage, Club For Growth, FreedomWorks, et. al., is nothing new, but Boehner’s ability to bring the conservative wing of the House with him was. Graves and Gainesville Republican Rep. Doug Collins get high marks from the groups, yet they bucked them Thursday in backing Rep. Paul Ryan’s deal.
Holler predicted Republicans who voted for the deal would get a scolding from their conservative constituents over the end-of-year break.
Still, there are no plans at the moment for a revival of Heritage’s defund push. Holler identified several conservative priorities he hoped could make it into the omnibus, such as killing funding to Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid already indicated that in January he will try to rally Democrats around an extension of long-term federal unemployment benefits. That would spark a partisan fight around the omnibus, too.
The momentum is in favor of a swift deal, as most Republicans have little interest in another fight that could lead to a shutdown. Heritage gets that, to a point.
“There was fatigue with a lot of those guys,” Holler said. “That fatigue is felt outside of Washington, too, with the people inside of Washington. They need to be careful of sort of reverting back to this way we’ve always done things.”
