Posted on 09/10/2001 2:01:05 PM PDT by hawaiian
September 10, 2001
Gephardt Rallies the Troops
By Ethan Wallison
Laying out the party's strategy for the fall, Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (Mo.) pleaded with Democrats last week to oppose Republican spending measures, telling Members that the party's prospects in the 2002 elections ride on the outcome. Gephardt has pinned the party's hopes on the argument that the budget crafted by the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans - and particularly the tax cut at its heart - has already forced the government to dip into Social Security revenues.
In what was described by sources as a "fiery" and "impassioned" speech, Gephardt warned Members at a closed-door Caucus meeting last Thursday that Democrats could not afford to have their "fingerprints" on the spending bills at the same time they are calling the GOP budget framework irresponsible.
"If you vote for all the bills, you are voting to go into the Social Security surplus," one senior Gephardt aide said, characterizing the leader's views. "We have an obligation to tell our Members about the political peril of that."
Although sources in the meeting said that Gephardt's remarks drew a rousing ovation from Members, the road map from there appears hazy.
Gephardt aides were careful after the meeting to stress that the leadership has not yet targeted any specific spending measures. Rather, the Minority Leader's main point was that the White House needs to draw up a new budget that takes into account updated surplus estimates, the aides said.
Republicans "need to back up and look at the whole picture again," a Gephardt aide said.
Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), who sits on the spending panel, called Gephardt's plan "realistic" and "responsible."
Nonetheless, Moran was hesitant to offer any guarantees about whether he would abide by leadership demands that Democrats oppose specific bills.
"I'm not going to say before the military appropriations bill is marked up that I'm going to oppose it," he said, citing one hot spot in the appropriations process. If it came down to a choice between higher defense spending, which benefits his northern Virginia district, or using a relatively small portion of Social Security's "surplus" funds, Moran said it would be a "judgment call."
Among Caucus liberals, meanwhile, there is fairly strong support for the view that Democrats should not allow themselves to be "straitjacketed" by Bush's $1.35 trillion tax cut. This group believes Congress should spend, then blame the President's budgeting for whatever problems ensue. "Just because he mismanaged his budget doesn't mean the American people should pay the price in reduced spending for education and health care and other things," said one senior Democratic aide aligned with Caucus liberals.
Some insiders wondered after the meeting how Gephardt would be able to enforce the leadership strategy and thereby prevent his own Members from being tarred by the same brush that Democrats sought to use on the GOP. "I would say [the strategy is] totally unrealistic - it's nonsensical," said John Scofield, the GOP spokesman on Appropriations.
Scofield suggested that Congress is engaged in an eerie redux of the fight that consumed Capitol Hill in 1995, when Republicans lined up behind projections put forward by the Congressional Budget Office, while Democrats argued that the numbers from the White House Office of Management and Budget were correct. Now that Republicans have control of the White House, the two sides in the debate have swapped positions.
"They're arguing the argument we lost in 1995 - that CBO is better than OMB," Scofield said of the Democratic leadership. "If that's their argument at the end, we're going to win this thing." Privately, some Democrats agree that it will at least be very difficult for Members to put their necks on the block over what is basically an accounting dispute.
"I think it's going to be hard to get Democrats to vote against these bills, because there's a lot of stuff in there that we like," one senior Democratic staffer said. There is, in fact, relatively little daylight between the dueling surplus projections from OMB and CBO.
But while the OMB estimates show the Bush plan spending all but $1 billion of the available surplus revenues outside of Social Security, the CBO figures suggest that Bush's budget will need $9 billion of the remaining surplus revenues. In a press conference last Wednesday, Gephardt said he was "confused" by the outcome of a meeting between Bush and Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle (D-S.D.).
Emerging from the White House, Daschle said he is confident that Congress and the administration can avoid dipping into money being set aside for Social Security. By week's end, however, Daschle had joined Gephardt's call for a new budget from the White House.
It sounds like Daschle lied to Bush. And what was the first thing Bush said to Daschle when he met him for the first time?
-PJ
The dems would crap if President Bush did- because it would get us back on track. To an economy Clinton had early on with his bud Greenspan helpin.
Bush should fire Greenspan and grab the surplus that is not really there from a lock box that is not really there.
Bush cornering the DomonRats into having to be extremely careful of spending money! “Head I win, tails you lose!” HAHAHA!
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