I think we will all have to bone up on how a Conference Committee works, particularly one that is working on budgetary matters. In short, a Conference Committee, when it can come to an agreement, creates a report:
The conference report proposes new legislative language, which is presented as an amendment to the original bill passed by each chamber. The conference report also includes a joint explanatory statement, which documents, among other things, the legislative history of the bill.
The conference report proceeds directly to the floor of each chamber for a vote; it cannot be amended. The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 limits Senate debate on conference reports on budget reconciliation bills to 10 hours.
The House and Senate have each passed budget resolutions for the next fiscal year. A Conference Committee will be set up to reconcile the two bills. If (a big if) there is a compromise and a report, then the bill cannot be filibustered in the Senate. If there is not a compromise and a report, then we’ll be back to passing continuing resolutions or facing a second government shutdown.
The Democrats will have two basic bottom lines. The first is that spending will be above the sequestration level. The second is that there will be additional revenues to help fund governmental operations. If the Republicans don’t accede to those two demands, the Conference Committee will fail.
Most observers consider this, by far, the most likely outcome. All previous attempts to get the Republicans to agree to new revenues have failed. However, there is less appetite for governing through the sequester than there used to be, and almost no appetite for a second government shutdown. Moreover, if the Republicans actually want to do anything about our long-term fiscal outlook, they will have to trade some new revenue for any cuts to entitlement spending.
If you want some idea what might happen, you should read a recent column by Walter Pincus about the 2014 sequestration cuts. Here’s a taste:
For the fiscal 2014 budget, both houses of Congress took care of defense, pushing numbers far above the BCA cap.
Should sequester continue, the House’s fiscal 2014 defense figure would have to come down $47.9 billion, while the Senate’s would have to drop $54.1 billion, according to the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center.
Subsequently, the center says, “the impact of the defense sequester . . . will double in fiscal 2014 and triple in fiscal 2015 compared to fiscal 2013.”
The report found that if the defense sequester caps were not changed, between the Reagan administration defense budget and the end of the sequester in fiscal 2021, ground divisions will drop from 20 to six, Air Force fighter and attack planes will drop by 1,632 aircraft, and Navy ships will drop by 338, with the aircraft carrier force declining from 15 carriers to seven in 2021.
On the other hand, the GOP-controlled House slashed the non-defense fiscal 2013 figure below the fiscal 2014 BCA cap level while the Democratic-led Senate would have to drop its figure, $34.3 billion, for 2014 non-defense discretionary funding
On Saturday, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) discussed the impact the sequester would have this fiscal year on domestic programs, beginning with Head Start, which would cut an additonal 177,000 children.
The rest of his list was equally harsh: 1.3 million fewer students would receive Title I education assistance; 760,000 fewer households would receive less heating and cooling assistance under the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program; 9,000 fewer special education staff would be in the classroom; $291 million less for child-care subsidies for working families; $2 billion less for the National Institutes of Health, which would mean 1,300 fewer research grants.
Congress had to do something affirmative to avoid these draconian cuts. They can put off the day of reckoning with more continuing resolutions, but there will be a lot of pressure on Republicans to make a deal. Since making a deal will require them to violate their pledge to Grover Norquist, this process will be painful. But the odds of it actually happening have never been higher, thanks to them overplaying their hand and losing the support of the public.
Now comes the real work. We get to see if the defeat of the GOP over their extremist tactics can be leveraged to defeat their extremist policies.
BTW, check out the amazing mapping diary at DKos that shows which districts voted blue, red or tea. It’s crudely done but wonderful all the same:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/17/1248179/-There-are-three-U-S-parties-now-with-maps
More John McCain moments where he’s outright telling R’s that they overreached. If leadership and business join in and stand firm against the already growing screech from the loons that they ‘just didn’t go far enough movement forward has a chance. Nice that Hatch is commenting that Heritage has too much power.
Obama this morning was his Presidential best. Charlie Rangel close to tears listening to him, then his comment, ‘he got it’. Faced with what Obama has faced, Reagan would have shouted, ‘put back the wall, I’m comin over’.
Thanks for the reminder of what goes on in a conference committee and that going to a conference committee now under normal events would be the next step.
I find this interesting because it frames the issues all out of kilter.
The Reagan administration was the peak military of the Cold War. The Reagan administration shoved money at the military that the military did not need and then made arithmetic errors that were biased to add even more to the budget (David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed) Just citing abstract numbers without reference to the national security environment is dishonest argument. And the analysis fails to ask the question that if there has been that much cut in equipment, where is the money going? Given the scrutiny that non-defense programs, especially social programs, are under from a policy perspective this is a horrendously bogus argument that is likely to wind up hurting a lot of people whose help on the non-defense side will be severely cut just to maintain balance.
Which brings the point that “balance” in these budget negotiations has become for members of Congress the functional form of false equivalence in the media coverage of politics. Any Democrats who cite this garbage are automatically suspect IMO.
Which comes back to “Iz our Republicans larnin’?”, doesn’t it.
And what do you think of this?
In the short term, if the Republicans want their military, they must agree to a financial transaction tax that will raise enough revenue to pay for the increased spending. But don’t legitimate false arguments about it. In the long term, the military has to be adjusted to the real national security situation of the United States and it must be prevented from making the world more dangerous just to keep itself in business.
Another commission is just bullshitting and kicking the can down the road. If the parties can’t negotiate directly, they can’t negotiate through a commission.
The Republican members of Congress IMO must be forced into betraying Grover Norquist in order to break them. It’s how Democrats broke Poppy Bush in 1992.
The Democrats own the military just as much as the Republicans do. Blue states have plenty of military bases and MIC-related industries and Democratic politicians are not invulnerable to pressure from those constituencies. It’s in the Republicans’ interest to get something for free if Democrats allow them to do so but let’s not pretend Democrats have no interests here.
I would rather maintain sequester levels on the military and use a financial transactions tax for infrastructure projects instead.
I’m trying to figure out how to get Republicans to vote for taxes.
And to get jobs going in the economy.
A financial transaction tax would force longer-term views of financial investments and make Main Street investments more attractive. A necessary but not sufficient condition for job growth.
Increasing the minimum wage under the current conditions would create job growth but only if the minimum wage is increased high enough for folks to be able to shop again.
So would increasing Social Security payments and for the same reasons.
Those two would create the demand that would swing the private sector into job-creating investment.
That’s the policy issue. The political issue is building a box the forces enough Republicans to vote for those measures.
For the financial transaction tax, continuing military spending is the only one I can think of. Democrats would vote for that sort of tax for infrastructure or for the military.
Increasing job growth increases revenue without raising additional taxes and creates the “virtuous cycle” that folks saw in the Clinton administration. The financial transaction tax is there to prevent the sort of bubbles we saw in the Clinton administration as the economy picked up.
Of course, Ezra argues for a policy that would benefit him. Shocking!!
That’s…. crazy. Wow. He’s nuts.
Ezra is flat wrong. Reducing our insanely bloated spending on the Orwellianly renamed Department of War is an unalloyed good. If we can’t get the plutocrats to contribute their fair share, at least we can trim back the military-industrial complex while the Republicans shoulder the blame.
I understand Ezra’s position; we hear quite a bit of it from supposed allies these days. He makes the best case he can, but that case is unpersuasive to me.
Ezra is unwilling to insert the predictable Republican negotiating style into his equation. He is behaving as if the Republicans will respond to unilateral surrender on revenue by being rational on expenditures. This gang is irrational right now. We can be highly certain their requested cuts will be DEEPER if Murray shows her throat this way. It’s how they roll.
New Deal/Great Society programs and needed infrastructure, research and education investments are almost impossible to sustain unless we get more revenue from those who can afford to provide it. We will need to fight, unpleasant as it is now and will surely be.
Which is why we can already say the Conference Committee will fail. The question is can we extract any political benefit from the failure. IMO we will get some if the negotiations are semi-public but none otherwise.
What happens next is that left leaning groups need to be united in opposing any deal messing with Social Security short of expanding it. The sausage making I don’t care about. I’m not convinced the Republicans have learned their lesson yet either and we could be in for a repeat. At least a shorter one.
At some point we really do need to talk about this bullshit Norquist Pledge. I would like to see Democrats highlighting that. The Republicans are the ones running around screaming about the deficit and the debt like the whole sky is on fire or something, but at the same time they have preemptively and categorically rejected one of the most obvious solutions.
They always like to compare the federal budget to a family’s household budget, so let’s imagine Mr. and Mrs. Republican at their kitchen table, trying to figure out how to make ends meet. “We could stop paying the gas bill.” “No, they’ll shut us off again.” “We’ll RESIST!” “Look, we’re both overdue for a salary increase. Why don’t we just each ask for a raise?” “NEVER! NEVER! THAT WOULD VIOLATE THE MOST SACRED PRINCIPLES THAT THIS HOUSEHOLD IS FOUNDED ON!!!”
In thinking about the future, we should look at what was learned yesterday. We learned that the party of Moderate Moderation (somehow previously controlled by just a “small handful” of lunatics) actually has 144 members (i.e. a strong majority) who are apparently willing to bring on a certain financial calamity rather than deviate from their politics of poisoned ideology and braindeath. At least they’re willing to put their vote in that column.
We learned that 87 of their members would relent from their lunatic ideology when “holding firm” meant global economic panic, but not to avoid shutting down the gub’mint. Well, I guess it’s something to build on, ha-ha.
And we learned that every member of the Dem caucus is not crazy.
As a result of their sacred Norquist pledge, raising any new revenue, from the most obvious and merited sources (financial transaction tax, increases in capital gains, absurd hedge fund carried interest loophole, multitudinous corporate loopholes) would be absolute heresy—and these aren’t even “income” taxes! We know Boner and Cantor will always hold Wall Street Wizrds harmless. We’ve also learned Repubs resist new taxes on plutocrats more than cuts to the military.
Hard to see any possibility of a deal under these conditions. Repubs will shoot their beloved troops and dynamite bases before making the plutocrats and “financiers” pay even a tiny slice of their (mostly) ill-gotten gains. At least the sequester now has the wasteful, bloated military and useless “defense” spending in its sights (if Dems hold firm).
Other than wasteful subsidies to wealthy white farmers and AgriBiz CEOs, what non-defense program does a single Repub not want to cut to zero? Oh yeah, WWII memorials and national parks in Red States…I shudder to think what the “price” of new revenues would be given the makeup of the House.
Finally, has the Drunken Boner learned there is some (slight) possibility that he could be an actual Speaker of the House? One who accomplishes something? He won’t bring financial calamity down on the county, but is happy to shut down the gub’mint indefinitely.
what happens now is that “progressives” get back to their first, truest love: whining about Obama “betraying” them.
I don’t see the teabaggers as having learned anything from the shut-down, except that they weren’t conservative enough. Will they approve additional spending? No! Will they approve revenue enhancements? Never! Will they compromise on their principles? Not in this lifetime.