Congress this week will engage in the biggest political standoff in years as Democrats and Republicans push competing spending plans to keep the government running as a March 4 deadline approaches. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., urged Democrats to “not play chicken,” with the budget, which he warned could result in the first government shutdown in more than 15 years. Cantor wants Senate Democrats this week to back a GOP-passed plan to reduce spending to 2008 levels.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have tried to pin the budget stalemate on Republicans, saying they are willing to negotiate cuts but want to pass a monthlong measure that keeps funding at current levels while they work out a compromise for the rest of the fiscal year.
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With a shutdown looming in just a matter of days, both parties are fearing the political fallout. The last budget-related government closures were in December 1995 and January 1996. The public blamed the Republican-led Congress for refusing to compromise with Democratic President Clinton.
Still, Republican strategists say the GOP has far less to lose this time because the public’s mood has shifted toward spending cuts and deficit reduction. GOP leaders say this time Democrats will appear to be resisting compromise.
“I think Democrats are going to have a very hard time convincing the public that there just simply wasn’t anything else in the government they could cut,” said Todd Harris, who most recently worked for the campaign of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. “Unlike in 1996, this fight is a very simple one. Congress is either serious about the debt or it isn’t.”
Republicans on Friday put forward a new stopgap spending plan that will be difficult for Democrats to refuse. The GOP has little hope of quickly reaching a deal with the Senate Democrats on the House-passed bill, which would cut $61.5 billion from dozens of agencies and programs for the last seven months of this year’s budget. So the House GOP has proposed a two-week funding extension that slashes $4 billion in spending.
The $4 billion cut is proportional to the reductions in the seven-month spending bill, but far less painful because the reductions come from removing earmarks and cutting from programs President Obama had already targeted for elimination in his 2012 budget proposal.
“There is really no reason for Senate Democrats to walk away from this,” Rep. Pete Roskam, R-Ill., the House chief deputy whip, said.
Republican leaders are in a political corner themselves. They have little room to compromise with Democrats without angering the large faction of fiscally conservative freshmen backed by the Tea Party.
Brendan Daly, a Democratic strategist and former top aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said he believes Democrats will be willing to accept some cuts. “But the wild card here is the Tea Party and whether they would go along with any agreement,” he added.
