The House GOP plan to get ahead of schedule by passing a fiscal 2017 budget in March has been slowed by a deep split within the party, one that pits fiscal conservatives who want reduced spending against defense hawks looking to boost money for the military.
House Republicans left Washington, D.C., on Friday for a week away from Washington, abandoning the effort until the middle of the month. They departed shortly after Republicans met privately to discuss the latest pitch from their leadership team and the House Budget Committee.
House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., offered a budget plan that sets discretionary spending at $1.07 trillion, the same level agreed to last year. That plan would be paired with a standalone vote on legislation that would reduce entitlement spending by $30 billion, he told the conference.
But it didn’t sell.
“Nothing has changed,” Rep Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a fiscal conservative, told the Washington Examiner after the meeting.
Conservatives want the budget number to come down by $30 billion, to $1.04 trillion. That’s the cap mandated under the 2011 Budget Control Act that was signed into law in order to reduce the deficit and debt.
But Republicans leaders agreed to the higher number in a bipartisan deal with Democrats last year and they don’t want to change it because it will lead to spending bills President Obama will refuse to sign into law. A spending showdown with Obama could lead to disastrous optics for Republicans during the critical final months of the 2016 election.
Instead, leaders want conservatives to sign onto a plan to cut the $30 billion separately, in legislation that would reduce the cost of entitlement spending.
Republican leaders hope to get the budget passed in time to meet an April 15 deadline. Passing a budget makes it far more likely the House and Senate can take up a dozen spending bills needed to fund the budget in fiscal 2017, which is a top GOP goal for this year.
“I fundamentally believe that we need to pass a budget and that we need to have a full, functioning appropriations process,” Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said after the meeting. “And I laid that out to the members why I think that.”
Conservatives aren’t budging. The separate vote on cutting the $30 billion in entitlement spending won’t go anywhere in the Senate or ever be signed into law by President Obama, they argue.
“We need a budget that reflects where we are at, with the deficit going up,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, a member of the Budget panel and chair of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told the Examiner. “The debt is at $19 trillion. We need to reduce spending so we are not increasing the deficit. That’s pretty fundamental. So, we are trying to figure out if there is a way to write what I call a Republican conservative budget.”
Further complicating the budget process are the GOP’s faction of defense hawks, who say military spending is getting the short shrift just as it needs to be boosted in order to combat the global war on terror and the aggressions of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
They argue the military is currently underfunded by $18 billion, based on President Obama’s fiscal 2017 budget request, and are seeking to add the money to the Overseas Contingency Operations Fund, which exits separately from the budget.
“There are still discussions going on about the OCO part of the budget and how we deal with a president who has proposed all these activities but hasn’t proposed the money to pay for the activities, so that is what we are talking about,” said House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas.
Price said he’s not giving up on a budget resolution.
If Republicans raise military spending through the OCO fund, Democrats will insist on a boost in domestic spending, too. When Republicans boosted defense spending in the OCO fund last year, Democrats filibustered spending measures in the Senate.
They’ve threatened to do it again.
Democrats are also threatening to vote against the budget if it includes conservative policy riders that roll back federal regulations or restrict funding for Planned Parenthood, an abortion and health services provider.
“If they’re going to try to make defense not on par with the middle class and then try to put a lot of these riders that we know are trouble, then they’d better be very careful what they bring to us, because we proved last year what we can do, and we can do it again,” warned Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.
Congress isn’t required to pass a budget number and can instead designate a top-line number for appropriators who are writing the spending bills. But Republicans don’t favor that plan either.
“I don’t think that’s a viable option,” Price said. “I don’t think it’s productive and unifying for the conference.”
