CQ WEEKLY
Nov. 19, 2011 – 1:42 p.m.
Political Economy: Deal, or No Deal
By John Cranford, CQ Columnist
Anyone who wants to understand why Speaker
When the votes in the House were tallied, the $128 billion spending bill had passed by a whopping 298-121. Two out of every five members of the House Republican Conference voted against the measure. Most of the yes votes were supplied by Democrats.
This is what it has come down to: Boehner must rely increasingly on Democrats, not his fellow Republicans, to pass fiscal-policy legislation that the Senate will accept.
OK, so that isn’t a real surprise to anyone who pays close attention to the dynamics of Capitol Hill. But until recently, the Speaker has tried every which way to avoid yielding to this circumstance. In order to govern, and to avoid the ugly brinkmanship of the summer, Boehner has to let his people go.
The vote in the House on the minibus was instructive because it was arguably one of only two significant legislative matters to pass the House with a bipartisan majority in the 112th Congress. (The other was the August debt limit increase, but on that the House Democrats split down the middle, and it passed without a true bipartisan majority.)
The trend has been moving in this direction all year long.
Back in February, the newly ascendant GOP majority — full of vim (and more than a little bit of tea) — was insistent that it would dictate a major course change in fiscal policy. With zero yes votes from Democrats, the chamber passed a spending bill for the remainder of fiscal 2011 that would have carved $100 billion from President Obama’s budget request for the year.
Then in April, again with zero Democratic support, the House adopted a budget resolution that would have sliced $40 billion or so more from fiscal 2012 appropriations.
Neither of those measures went any further.
In fact, at almost the same time that the budget was adopted, House and Senate appropriators agreed on a new version of the fiscal 2011 spending bill whose bottom line provided essentially no less money than the previous year’s.
Boehner weathered just three GOP defections on the first fiscal 2011 spending bill and four on the budget resolution. But 59 Republicans voted no on the second fiscal 2011 measure. And the margin of victory was supplied by 81 Democrats who voted yes.
The GOP defections only increased when the climactic debt limit deal was brokered, after threats of default and downgrades made Congress a public laughingstock. On passage, 66 House Republicans voted no, and 95 Democrats voted yes.
The die had been cast. Last week’s vote shows that — at least when it comes to spending — Boehner is now a bipartisan Speaker.
Political Economy: Deal, or No Deal
Complicity in the Senate
Boehner has really had no choice in his evolution. As adamant as some members of his caucus are about whacking appropriations, there is no consensus for such aggressive steps. Among the most significant elements of the debt limit deal were appropriations levels for the next decade that, after a two-year freeze, allow an annual increase to more or less keep pace with inflation.
The just-enacted minibus hews to that agreement, and that’s why so many House Republicans rebelled. But a sizable contingent of Senate Republicans voted yes, even though it was almost a free vote for them. Senate Minority Leader
It would be wrong, of course, for the Democrats to crow very much. This has been little more than a somewhat successful defensive stand against Republican calls for austerity. The debt limit accord pared almost $1 trillion from discretionary spending over the next decade. And it set up a process for carving $1.2 trillion more from the deficit — either by legislative means or across-the-board cuts. That’s not a plank in most Democratic platforms.
Still, House Republicans are smarting from the compromises. And some are plainly trying to keep the heat on their Speaker. Their last redoubt has been staunch opposition to tax increases, which is the reason Boehner wasn’t able to cut a deficit deal with Obama in the summer. And that has been the biggest roadblock to an agreement by the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
But the walls of that redoubt have been showing cracks. Boehner has been willing to give ground on the tax issue. And a paltry 72 of the 242 House Republicans signed a letter last week absolutely objecting to tax increases as part of a deficit reduction deal.
If the joint committee does send a deficit reduction compromise to the House and Senate, it will be because Boehner has concluded that letting Democrats provide the ultimate margin of victory would not be the worst outcome for him, politically. If there is no deal, that will be in no small part because he is still trying to stave off the inevitable.