Battle Is Drawn in G.O.P. Over How Conservative to Be
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and CARL HULSE
The New York Times
November 12, 2005
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - If there was a message to be drawn from this week's Republican meltdown over tax and spending cuts, it was this: Conservative hopes for an economic agenda of big ideas and sweeping change are in tatters for the moment.
The failure of House Republicans to agree on painful but modest spending cuts and the inability of Senate Republicans to agree on extending President Bush's tax cuts exposed a deep and increasingly bitter battle between ardent and ideological conservatives and emboldened Republican moderates.
The battle is being fueled by fears about the political environment going into next year's elections. Conservatives argue that the best way to secure the Republican base is renewed dedication to fiscal austerity; moderates fear that cuts in social programs could alienate independent voters crucial in swing districts.
The anger in the party was palpable on Friday, one day after House Republicans retreated on a bill to cut spending by more than $50 billion over five years.
"This would have reduced the growth in mandatory spending by one-tenth of 1 percent over five years," said Patrick J. Toomey, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Club for Growth, a conservative fund-raising group. "This is trivial. This is symbolic. And if we can't get enough votes for this, I'm afraid we won't be able to retain a Republican majority in Congress."
But Republican moderates, taking their cue from President Bush's plunging popularity and their status as the decisive bloc, given solid Democratic opposition, are pushing back with increased bluntness and confidence against the policy proposals of their party leaders.
"I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that when we voted to cut spending last week to help deficit reduction we can now then turn around two weeks later to provide tax cuts that exceed the reductions we just made in spending," said Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, who this week pledged to oppose tax cuts.
The divisions and dissension among rank-and-file Republicans have been building for months, and the list of stalled priorities is long and growing.
President Bush quietly abandoned his campaign to overhaul Social Security months ago. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, predicted this week that the effort would go nowhere until at least 2009.
In September, Senate Republican leaders dropped their effort to repeal the estate tax permanently, a change that would benefit the wealthiest 1 percent of families but would cost about $90 billion a year once it was fully repealed.
On Thursday, the Senate Finance Committee failed to line up enough votes to pass a $68-billion package of tax cuts. The stumbling block: objections from Senator Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine, who said that she could not swallow a provision that would extend the tax cut for stock dividends by one year.
Then House Republican leaders accustomed to getting their legislative way were forced to confess that they were short a "handful" of votes to gain initial approval of their spending cuts despite major concessions, including a decision to delete a proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. The budget cuts were left teetering, a decision that did not bode well for a pending effort to trim current spending across the board.
The fight over tax and spending cuts is far from over, but Republican ambitions have been greatly diminished. On Friday, House Republicans unveiled their own package of tax cuts, including a two-year extension of the lower tax on stock dividends.
But the cuts most likely to succeed were those that were incremental and familiar: an extension of tax credits for research; an extension of tax breaks for college tuition; an extension of tax breaks for companies that hire troubled teenagers and people on welfare.
The Republican ruptures over budget and tax priorities stem in large part from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Conservative Republicans were alarmed by rushed approval of more than $60 billion in federal aid and complained that no effort was being made to compensate for the burst of new spending.
They became angry when Representative Tom DeLay, the powerful Texas Republican, seemed to suggest that years of Republican control of Congress had already pared the budget to the bone.
"I think Hurricane Katrina was a small tipping point," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Budget, a nonprofit group that advocates stricter budget discipline. Ms. MacGuineas said "the goal of fiscal responsibility or deficit reduction has been elevated from where it was a few months ago."
President Bush and Republican leaders quickly came around to the conservatives' view on hurricane spending, in part to rally House Republicans after Mr. DeLay's indictment on criminal charges in Texas. . Indeed, House leaders upped the ante, seeking cuts beyond targets agreed to earlier this year - raising the level to $50 billion from $35 billion.
That set off the Republican moderates, who viewed the new goal as too much to ask. "I think the panic of what Katrina could cost kind of got out of hand," said Representative Nancy L. Johnson, Republican of Connecticut, a foe of the budget-cutting plan. "I philosophically don't agree with their belief that in order to balance the budget we have to up this year's goals."
The upshot of all the chaos could turn out to be smaller spending reductions than hard-liners demand and bigger tax cuts than the moderates want. House Republicans are expected to try to rework their budget proposal early next week to entice more moderate support, and officials expect the scope of the cuts to be scaled back.
At the same time, House and Senate tax panels are set to begin getting serious about their tax bills. To lessen the opposition, the Senate Finance Committee is expected to omit an extension of Mr. Bush's tax cuts on stock dividends when it begins drafting a tax cutting measure Monday night. But House lawmakers have included the stock provision in their bill, and it could become a point of contention should it end up in any final measure worked out in House-Senate negotiations.
The House bill omits two sets of tax cuts that many lawmakers in both parties view as must-pass legislation: tax breaks to help Gulf Coast areas hit by the hurricanes, and a provision to prevent the alternative minimum tax from engulfing millions of additional families next year.
Those provisions cost nearly $19 billion in the Senate approach, and few lawmakers expect them to be lost in the shuffle next week, driving up the price of the tax cuts.
"The rhetoric about fiscal restraint turns out be Orwellian, because the net effect is going to be to increase deficits rather than reducing them," predicted Robert Greenstein, director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group in Washington.
Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, serving as the No. 2 Republican, said the difficulties faced by Republicans as they tried to enact the intertwined budget and tax cuts illustrated why Congress had not tried to advance a similar package since 1997.
"This is hard," Mr. Blunt said. |
