Back to Basics

The term “pre dawn” should only be used to describe two things: Raids and Tony Orlando’s early years. When “pre dawn” is used in reference to the time of day Congress acted, especially heading into a weekend, it probably means potential bad news for the rest of us. That said, at about 5 o’clock this morning — pre dawn — the Senate passed its first budget in four years. Maybe the “no budget no pay” bill did the trick, or maybe Dems decided it’s well past time to raise taxes again. The voting was first and foremost affected by positioning for 2014:

The Senate early Saturday passed its first budget in four years by a vote of 50 to 49.

The close vote was a big victory for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who had to overcome large differences within their caucus to push the resolution through.

Centrist Sens. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) were all non-committal up until the end.

Baucus, Begich, Hagan and Pryor joined the entire GOP caucus in voting against the budget resolution. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) missed the vote.

All the Democratic senators who voted “no” are up for reelection in 2014 in states that voted for GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

No Republicans voted for the Dem budget. An amendment in favor of constructing the Keystone Pipeline was approved by 62 senators, including 17 Democrats.

Republicans were quick to respond to the budget proposal passage:

In a statement released at 5 a.m. today, Senator Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, blasts the budget the Senate passed very early this morning. Sessions’s main concern is that the budget “has zero real deficit reduction” and “never balances.”

“The content of the plan the majority has now approved demonstrates why they were unwilling to reveal it for so long: their proposal, once accurately understood, cannot be publicly defended,” says Sessions.

Which leads us back to “pre dawn.”

The Murray budget that passed was the usual Democrat definition of “balanced”: $1 trillion dollars in tax increases now combined with “cuts” (read: “miniscule decrease in the rate of spending increase”) set to kick in when the sun becomes a red giant and consumes the earth before cooling into a white dwarf — granted that’s an “earliest case” scenario for actual budget cuts ever taking effect.

The budget the Senate just passed sets a quadrennial snail’s pace precedent that shouldn’t be too difficult for Harry Reid’s successors to live up to — that is if he does indeed have successors. Reid might just stick around many more years until forced to retire (see the “red giant” event in the preceding paragraph).

What happens to the budget now? Chances are House Republicans will ask to borrow Joe Biden’s shotgun as soon as it arrives:

It now goes to the House, where it is expected to be shot down. Senators recently voted down a budget proposal passed by the Republican-controlled house.
[...]
Authored by Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, D-Washington, the proposal increases government spending — including repealing the automatic spending cuts required by sequestration — and raises taxes on the wealthy.

It is high time that “We the People” tell our politicians to quit playing games with our lives. The fact that the House Majority Leader committed to a 10-year balanced budget is a media stunt. The likelihood is that the political leadership will change in this period, maybe significantly, bringing along new people with their own agenda – and a new set of special interest friends with their hands out for perks and privileges.

So how does Boehner say that the GOP’s upcoming budget will balance the federal books in a decade when all of the government’s projections have been wildly off-the-mark and cannot be trusted? Where ever piece of legislation is dishonestly scored by an honest accounting group – an accounting group that is constrained by the assumptions provided by lawmakers?

Boehner Commits to 10-Year Balanced Budget

Speaker John Boehner told House Republicans this afternoon that the GOP’s upcoming budget will balance the federal books in a decade.

Due to the Democrats’ control of the White House and Senate, the possibility of that promise becoming law is remote. But the speaker’s vocal support for the idea reportedly drew cheers within the House Republican conference.

<Source: Boehner Commits to 10-Year Balanced Budget – By Robert Costa – The Corner – National Review Online>

Bottom line …

It appears that the Republican are as grossly dishonest as the Democrats when it comes to budgetary excesses. Yes, there are differences in priorities, social policies and the group of cronies with their hands out, but that’s all; as both parties continue to plunder the national treasury.

– steve

An Obama White House report – which was one of the topics of discussion during the weekend news shows – describes the automatic and drastic spending cuts that will take effect at the end of 2012 should the congressional budget battle continue past election day.

The 394-page report highlights the $129 million a year budget that would have gone to maintaining and protecting U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the world that will be cut beginning on New Year’s Day.

“We’re talking about upwards of 400 State Department facilities, some of them located in the world’s most dangerous nations,” said Mike Baker a political consultant and attorney.

But the budget has nothing to do with embassy security. “Ambassador Chris Stevens did not have a Marine detail in Benghazi, Libya. But White House Senior Advisor and Obama confidante Valerie Jarrett has a full Secret Service detail on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard,” Democratic pollster Pat Caddell told Big Government.

According to the Obama White House report, the United States will be forced to drastically cut spending for the security and safety of embassies and members of the U.S. Foreign Service. The cuts would be part of a $100 billion program of automatic spending cuts set to begin on Jan. 1, 2013 if Congress doesn’t compromise on a new budget.

The White House report was released just after the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans were brutally murdered during attacks on the U.S. consulate and a safe house refuge in Benghazi on Tuesday night.

U.S. embassies throughout Muslim nations are being targeted by protesters, who the White House claims were angered by a video produced by a man in California that denigrated the prophet Mohammad. However, most counterterrorism officials and experts on Islam claim the video is merely an excuse for a well-planned terrorist incident to coincide with Tuesday’s 9/11 Commemoration in the United States.

The State Department security cuts are but a small part of the massive cuts planned for the military, air traffic control, the FBI, housing and social welfare programs, government salaries and private contracts that “would have a devastating impact on important defense and non-defense programs,” according to the report from the White House budget office. Starting in January, about $55 billion per year will be cut from defense spending and continuing for at least nine years.

The report details cuts for 1,200 separate budget line items. The White House said the spending cuts would total $984 billion, and the government would spend $216 billion less in interest payments on the federal debt. Salaries for military personnel and Medicare benefits are exempt, but the cuts will be felt across the board.

Air force and navy aircraft procurement is set for a $4.2 billion cut. Defense department operations and maintenance would lose $4 billion. Pentagon healthcare would be cut by $3 billion. The FBI would lose at least $735 million in salaries and expenses.

“As the administration has made clear, no amount of planning can mitigate the effect of these cuts,” the White House budget officer reported. “Sequestration is a blunt and indiscriminate instrument. It is not the responsible way for our nation to achieve deficit reduction.”

The report calls the cuts “deeply destructive to national security, domestic investments, and core government functions”.

What is the point of these rules if the Obama administration is never going to even try to follow them? It is like the Obama administration doesn’t think that the rules apply to them.

The Obama administration has missed another annual budget deadline, failing to send Congress a mid-session budget review before July 16.The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) confirmed Monday that the deadline for the review, due every year on that date, was not met this year.

“There will be a mid-session review and timing is still being determined,” spokeswoman Moira Mack said.

Last year, OMB issued its mid-session review on Sept. 1. The document is supposed to contain revised spending, tax collection and deficit numbers to update the February budget proposal.

Releasing documents late has become a regular event at OMB. Obama this year released his 2013 budget past deadline for the third year in a row. Under the law, the budget is to be released on the first Monday in February, but came out on Feb. 13 this year.

The Obama administration also delayed the release of the budget last year, waiting until Feb. 14. . . .

Did I say narrowly? I meant massively, but you probably guessed that:

President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.

Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.

Republicans forced the vote by offering the president’s plan on the Senate floor.

Democrats disputed that it was actually the president’s plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn’t actually match Mr. Obama’s budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president’s numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.

Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett is working on a project for NBC entitled 1600 Penn (it’s about time a network tried a show about DC politics written from the perspective of the left for a change). I’m thinking about working on a competing program called Everybody Hates Obama’s Budget.

Update: #MorePopularThatTheObamaBudget

The House Appropriations Committee proposed cutting the State Department and foreign operations budget by more than $5 billion next year, in its annual allocations released Tuesday.

The Obama administration actually requested modest increases in funding for the State Department and USAID for fiscal 2013 when it released its budget request in February. While the Congress doesn’t divide up the accounts the same way as the administration, in an apples-to-apples comparison, the House Appropriations Committees’ allocation for State and foreign operations for fiscal 2013, $48.4 billion, would represent a 12 percent cut from the administration’s $54.71 billion request for the same accounts.

The House proposed fully funding the president’s $8.2 billion request for State Department funding related to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, known as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account. Therefore, the remainder of the funding proposed by the House, $40.1 billion for the base budget, would represent a 14 percent cut to the administration’s request for non-war related diplomatic and development activities.

The House proposal would also be a $5 billion or 9 percent cut from the funding levels enacted in fiscal 2012. The Senate Appropriations Committee, in its own allocations, proposed giving the State and foreign operations accounts $53 billion, roughly equal to fiscal 2012 levels, although the Senate proposed shifting $5 billion from the OCO account to the base budget.

Non-governmental organizations that focus on international affairs funding were quick to criticize the House Appropriations Committee’s actions.

“Retreat from our engagement in the world is not an option for the sake of our national security, but these cuts to the International Affairs Budget represent just that,” said retired Marine Corps Gen. Mike Hagee, co-chair of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s National Security Advisory Council. ”The International Affairs Budget is absolutely critical to our nation’s security and economic interests, and the programs it funds are cost-effective ways to prevent conflicts that will eventually require us to put our brave men and women in uniform in harm’s way.”

The allocations released Tuesday are just the first step in a long appropriations process. Next, the subcommittees will write up appropriations bills to fit within the allocation limits, after which both chambers will ostensibly begin marking up appropriations bills and moving them through the legislative process.

Practically, nobody expects the Congress to actually pass appropriations bills this year through both chambers due to the hyper partisanship of the presidential election season. But the spade work done by the committees could influence what ends up getting funded in the catch-all emergency stop gap spending bill that Congress will have to pass when the fiscal year expires Sept. 30 in order to keep the lights on throughout the government.

The House’s proposal could also be just the first step in a multi-year effort by the GOP to steadily reduce funding for diplomacy and development, as is spelled out in the 99 page “Path to Prosperity” document put for by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was on Fox News last night, and Brett Baier asked her about the Dem-controlled Senate’s failure to pass a budget for a thousand days plus three months. The short answer from Wasserman Schultz was “because the Romney-Ryan budget is so horrifying we’re incapable of moving” (was Mitt elected President or to Congress and I missed it?).

Wasserman Schultz started talking about “process,” and Baier seemed to be one step away from digging up Schoolhouse Rock clips on YouTube to show DWS how Congress works. Baier put Debbie Downer through the wringer so effectively that it looks like her perm actually relaxed a bit during the interview:

About halfway through the interview was when Gawker’s mole was supposed to pull the fire alarm and bail DWS out of trouble, but, much to DWS’s chagrin, he was unable to be there.

(h/t MRC)

Here’s a photo of who attended a Senate Budget Committee meeting yesterday, and it explains a lot:

*****

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has more:

The meeting was broadcast on one of the C-SPAN channels, so this isn’t exactly a secret. Only three Democrats bothered to show up at all, out of a dozen assigned to it. Republicans showed up, prepared to cast votes to finally bring the ignominious streak of 1,085 days (as of yesterday) without a budget resolution to an end. Sadly, Democrats — who control the committee, the chamber, and the White House — don’t have the same sense of responsibility.

Oh well… like Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-elusional) says, “Budget? We don’t need no stinking budget!”

Doing the election-year procrastinating no other Americans would do:

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) bowed to pressure from fellow Democrats on Tuesday and postponed a committee vote on a 2013 budget resolution, most likely until after the November elections.

Conrad on Wednesday will begin a committee markup of a resolution based on the Bowles-Simpson deficit recommendations, but told reporters there is no date scheduled on which the markup vote would occur.

“This is the wrong time to vote in committee; this is the wrong time to vote on the floor,” he said. “I don’t think we will be prepared to vote before the election.”

It’s been the “wrong time” to do the basic business of passing budgets for more than 1,000 days.

Where’s President Obama to lambaste the do-nothings for obstructionism now? Guess he’s content to let sleeping dogs lie.

If you thought you’d heard President Obama’s speech about the Paul Ryan budget proposal before, the reason is, you have. It’s not uncommon to parrot similar themes, but these days it sounds as if White House speech writers have hopelessly lost the thesaurus. As evidenced by the RNC video below, some of this speech was a verbatim repeat of presidential rebukes of House budget proposals last year. Maybe the teleprompter hasn’t yet accounted for the time change by “springing forward” from 2011 to 2012.

Alternate MSNBC headline: Environmentally-conscious president leads by example on recycling:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SOx9jtpqA

*****

Past Obama speeches have come dangerously close to owing Jimmy Carter some royalty payments, so at least this time he’s repeating his own words.

If the GOP proposals are so horrible, the Dems should counter by finally proposing their own budget — one that can get at least one vote in the House, that is.

(h/t HAP)