It was very close, but last night conservatives in the House sustained the President's veto of Labor/HHS. The vote was 277-141 (roll call). If two nays votes had switched, they would have had enough to override. The Washington Post has more.

This is bad news for the people who depend on the programs funded by Labor/HHS. Most likely, the Democrats will reduce funding to enact this bill. Funding may go down in other appropriations bills as well, since it is now fairly certain that the House will sustain the President's veto of any of those bills, too. Indeed, Democrats are already making overtures to begin negotiations with the President over funding reductions.

Remember when the Democrats came to power earlier this year and promised to end the culture of corruption in Washington? Then remember when they passed a fairly significant lobbying and ethics reform bill? Ok, then what is going on here - Roll Call: Earmarks in, Reforms out of Trans-HUD Measure

Roll Call reported today on some disturbing news - that the Transportation-Housing and Urban Development (T-HUD) appropriations bill has include earmarks that have not been disclosed yet under earmark transparency rules. In total, 18 earmarks worth $24 million were included in the conference report for the bill. The House Rules Committee website claims the vast majority of these new earmarks are for relatively benign projects.

Yikes. Let's go through this. First off, who is deciding the relative benign-ness of these projects? Maybe Duke Cunningham thought the earmarks he was including as paybacks to companies who bribed him were "relatively benign" too? Wouldn't it be better to let everyone see them from the beginning and let an open process decide their benigninivity?

Second, if the vast majority are relatively benign, what are the ones that are not benign? Shouldn't those be excluded until they can be properly reviewed?

That's not even the worst of the news in the Roll Call article. The T-HUD bill also includes language that prohibits federal agencies from disclosing their "budget justification" documents to any committee in Congress other than the appropriations committees before the May 31 after the president's budget is released. I assume this would mean those agencies could not make these documents public either, as many of them do now. All this comes after OMB Watch joined with the National Taxpayers Union and 52 other organizations last year to strongly support the publication of these documents and we were ultimately successful as OMB agreed to voluntarily publish the budget justifications.

The fact that there are attempts moving forward to clamp down on access to this information is truly unfortunate. What happened to the cleanest, most open Congress in history?

The Bush administration is up to some of its old tricks this week. After the Washington Post reported at the end of October of a movement within the administration to implement as much policy as possible through administrative functions rather than convincing Congress to adopt its policies, we are beginning to see some specific instances of their plan. In September, the White House issued new principles for agencies in conducting risk analysis that could impact agencies ability to protect the public. Then on Tuesday this week, Bush signed a new executive order (EO #13450) that attempts to "improve government program performance." Sounds like a good thing, no? let's look a bit deeper.

Dive into the Exec Order

Posted by Adam Hughes, 04:27:59 PM



Bush on Fiscal Policy: Born Again, Again?

I've been thinking about President Bush's actions this week on fiscal policy, and I've got to admit, I'm pretty darn confused. Let's review:

• Bush vetoed the $150.7 billion Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill, which contained a 4.3 percent increase in funding, for containing too much spending, but signed the $471 billion Defense appropriations bill, which had a 9.5 percent increase in funding. Bush has also been pressuring Congress to approve an additional $197 billion in "emergency" war funding. Huh?


• Bush has vowed to veto the AMT patch bill moving (slowly) through Congress because it is fiscally responsible and doesn't add to the deficit. Wait, what?

I suppose Bush believes we should never pass a tax increase and continue to burden our children and grandchildren with mountains of debt. But he is vetoing appropriations bills left and right over much smaller levels of funding (less than 10% as much in many cases) that are not deficit financed. It's difficult for me to understand exactly how the president decides to be the decider on these issues. He has shown he doesn't really care about fiscal responsibility (based on his position on the AMT bill, and, well, on his horrendous fiscal record as president. Actually, he's probably the worst fiscal manager we've ever had as president). He also doesn't seem to care about giving Americans the support and investments they need to succeed - unless those Americans are currently living in Iraq, Afghanistan, or on a military base. Even then his support is suspect as he has worked to cut back veteran's health benefits and often stiffed soldiers on pay increases. Most of the increases are more likely to end up with Halliburton or Lockheed Martin than soldiers).

It's funny how much more opposed Bush is to Democratic pork than he was to Republican pork, isn't it? But whatever. I don't think anyone seriously believes that Bush really cares about the earmarks in this bill. Basically, he seems to have decided that the only way to stay relevant is to veto stuff. Within the borders of the United States, it's pretty much the only influence he has left. Democrats don't care about him, Republicans wish he'd go away, and the American public is bored with his snooze-inducing speeches. What else can he do to attract attention?

Drum just might be right, particularly considering that the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that since 2001, Bush has signed 50 appropriations bill from Republican Congresses that exceeded his budget requests - failing to veto a single one of them. Bush has already been a born-again Christian once. He can't claim to have found religion on this issue too.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the spending debate has been the President's reliance on scare tactics. Essentially, Congress has not given him a big enough target, so he must conjure one up.

He calls the tobacco tax "habit-forming," while closing the carried interest loophole will raise everyone's taxes. He says that Congress wants to spend over $200 billion more than he would with this year's appropriations bills. SCHIP will ineluctably bring us down the path to "socialized" medicine.

But SCHIP is a small program for children's health, not socialized medicine. The only spending this year's appropriations bills will do is this year's spending- that's a $22 billion difference. Carried interest has nothing to do with 99 percent of all taxpayers, and tax increases aren't drugs.

The basic point is that the President and his backers are not interested in the policy- they're interested in scaring the public. Capitulating to the President, I think, will legitimize this fear. If offered a compromise, the President will be able to tell the public that he kept the Democratic majority from spending $200 billion, from socializing medicine, taxing everyone, and so on. It will appear as if the Democrats had given the President the giant target he wanted, and were forced to come down from it.

Congress should stand up to the President. They should stand up for their modest spending requests and tax proposals. They should not give an inch unless the President and his backers begin to speak substantively about policy differences. I'm not holding my breath, though.

The House Labor/HHS veto override vote will likely be held late Thursday night, far sooner than most expected. Perhaps the House leadership is confident of a veto override, fresh off overriding the President's veto of the water resources bill. One last push might be all it takes! Take action!

Update: Visit this site to send an email to Congress.

You've read his columns (excerpted maybe too often on this blog)- now you can read his new blog.

If you are like many Americans who perceive geometrically escalating costs of the wars in Afghanistan and especially Iraq, unaccountably greater now than in recent years, you might look ahead at cost projections and just drop your jaw.

There appears to be a very serious misunderstanding. Many Americans are suffering under the misapprehension that current troops levels in Iraq are unsustainable and that, in any case, the weight of political sentiment strongly militates against maintaining current troop strength and increases in American treasure expended on the war going forward.

But with the "success of the surge" and the Administration's eye-popping, record-breaking $200 billion request for war funding in 2008, one is safer to assume a stay-the-course strategy.

A Joint Economic Committee report released today assesses the cost of stay-the-course:

• What the Bush Administration Said the War in Iraq Would Cost: $50-$60 Billion
• Total Economic Costs of Iraq War Through 2008: $1.3 Trillion [JEC Report, "War at Any Price?" 11/13/07]
• Projected Costs of Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Through 2017 Even If U.S. Does Drawdown to Korea-Like Levels: $3.5 Trillion [JEC Report, "War at Any Price?" 11/13/07]
• Cost to a Family of Four to Fund Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Through 2017: $46,400 [JEC Report, "War at Any Price?" 11/13/07]

Congress has now sent the President the Defense appropriations bill, an extension of this year's continuing resolution, and the Labor/HHS appropriations bill. The President will sign the Defense bill, the first appropriations bill of the year to be enacted, and the CR, but he's expected to veto Labor/HHS, and doesn't even seem to be considering negotiating with Congress over its funding levels. The Hill:

President Bush rejected a plea this past weekend to open a dialogue with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to resolve the impasse over federal spending.

Pelosi and Reid, who had hoped to send Bush a $65 billion veterans and military construction spending bill, pleaded in a letter sent to the president on Saturday that he show "some willingness to find common ground."

"We write today to make it clear we welcome this dialogue," Reid and Pelosi wrote. "Key to this dialogue, however, is some willingness on your part to actually find common ground. Thus far, we have only seen a hard line drawn and a demand that we send only legislation that reflects your cuts to critical priorities."

The White House declined their offer and demanded that Congress send Bush the appropriations bills "one at a time — as they promised the American people — and within the reasonable spending limits recommended by the president," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement Saturday.

Update: It's official- the President has vetoed Labor/HHS.

Posted by Matt Lewis, 10:05:15 AM

Friday, November 09, 2007

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Roughing the passer, on CQ. That's a 15-yard penalty for this lede ($):

If Congress' appetite for earmarks has been greatly reduced by recent scandals and public pressure, it is not especially evident in the nation's largest domestic spending bill.

And then we find out that the bill has "more than 2,200 earmarks and special projects totaling more than $1 billion." Holy cow! That's a lot of earmarking. But then here comes the late hit:

That is about seven-tenths of one percent of the bill's total discretionary spending of $150.7 billion...Lawmakers in charge of the legislation have estimated that they cut the volume of earmarks in the measure by 40 to 50 percent compared to fiscal 2005, the last year that the bill contained earmarks.

Image by Flickr user jotefa used under a Creative Commons license

Monday, November 05, 2007

Thursday, November 01, 2007