At the fiscal responsibility summit President Barack Obama held at the White House, he asked for bipartisan help to slash the deficit in half by the end of his first term by making “difficult decisions” and scouring the budget to “root out waste and inefficiency.”
But Obama cannot accomplish his goal without Congress, and even before the members who attended the session made it back down Pennsylvania Avenue, the fight over spending was already back on.
Lawmakers who attended the summit, which included breakout sessions to address topics like health care reform and taxes, generally had positive things to say about the effort.
House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he appreciated the president holding the summit, adding, “I really do hope we are able to move forward in a bipartisan way to stabilize our entitlement programs and bring fiscal sanity to our government,”
But the bipartisanship may have ended at the White House door, at least for this week.
The Democrats tomorrow are expected to unveil a $410 billion spending package for running the government from March until October and so far Boehner and other Republicans think it is far too costly, calling it one of the largest increases in discretionary spending in decades.
Boehner said the cost of the spending package has ballooned by billions in just the past month.
“That’s not a good start,” to fiscal responsibility, Boehner told The Examiner. “I guess that’s just pocket change for them.”
House Republicans were firing off e-mails to the media about the spending package while lawmakers at the White House were talking about ways to slash spending.
“The dichotomy could not be more striking,” read one missive from Boehner’s office.
Congressional Democrats, on the other hand, say their party has been left to get rid of a nearly $9 trillion deficit created by former President George Bush.
“When they talk about fiscal responsibility, they ought to remind people that they overspent the budget by $1 trillion a year for the eight years Bush was in office,” said Rep. Robert Scott, D-Va.
Scott said re-instituting rules requiring spending be matched by corresponding cuts or additional revenue, or “pay-go” rules in Congress, which Obama supports, would go a long way in preventing the deficit from getting bigger.
“It’s going to be difficult,” Scott admitted. “That is where pay-go comes in.”
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said despite the partisanship that has ruled Congress lately, the present could be “one of our best opportunities in history,” to cut back on spending.
“It’s not going to be easy to do it, but at least you start with a president who says he’ll do it and a Republican Party that has consistently said it would do it,” Cummings said.
