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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Friday, November 18, 2005
More Hypocrisy (Reg-Related!) from Budget/Tax Fights
If you haven't already been reading all about it, be sure to look over the OMB Watch BudgetBlog's coverage of the late night fiscal policy fiascoes -- the disastrous spending cuts bill in the House and the atrocious tax cuts bill in the Senate. The OMB Watch budget team is already calling out hypocrisy from a fiscal policy perspective, but there are additional hypocrisies worth noting from a regulatory policy perspective:
- Two-Face Talk about "Up or Down Votes": The GOP mantra when radical conservative judges were renominated to the appeals courts -- nominees so radical that they threaten the very ability of the federal government to protect the public -- was that parliamentary maneuvers such as holds and filibusters should not prevent the nominees from going to the floor and getting an up-or-down vote (in other words, being allowed to simply be elevated to lifetime judgeships without any real fight). Much of this talk died down when a centrist coalition agreed to tie the hands of Democratic Senators and "save" the filibuster by making it irrelevant. Apparently, though, hashing things out in the open only matters when it comes to lifetime appointments to the federal bench, not when it comes to $60 billion tax cuts for the wealthy.
- Unfunded Mandates -- Now They Care about Them, Now They Don't: We have been monitoring developments that threaten to expand the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act. A recent change to an UMRA parliamentary procedure was invoked to kill a proposal to raise the minimum wage. So "unfunded mandates" -- in the GOP parlance, it means opposing protections of the public on the grounds that federal policy decisions result in costs to state and local governments -- matter when it comes to killing the minimum wage, but not when it comes to kicking abused and neglected children out of federally-funded foster care. By restricting eligibility for the Title IV-E entitlement, the House bill shifts the cost for the now ineligible abused and neglected children entirely to the states. (By the way, those kids aren't getting any less abused or neglected.) Get more details on the cut programs here.) Just goes to show that the phrase "unfunded mandates" does not signify a problem that demands solutions; instead, it is a political weapon, deployed to freeze new public protections and then conveniently holstered when it would otherwise threaten an anti-government agenda.
Hypocrisy and hot air ... apparently, business as usual in Washington, where so many politicians fail to recognize that, just as 9/11 changed everything, so too has Hurricane Katrina changed everything when it comes to the government's role in protecting the public. Make sure you tell your representatives in Congress what you think.
Posted by Robert Shull
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