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| FILE - In this Feb. 26, 2013 file photo, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks on Capitol Hill in Washington. President Barack Obama will meet Friday with the top leaders in the House and Senate to discuss what to do about automatic cuts to the federal budget, White House and congressional leaders said. The meeting is set to take place hours after the $85 billion in across-the-board cuts will have officially kicked in. This suggests both sides are operating under the assumption a deal won't be reached to avert the cuts ahead of the March 1 deadline. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- With big, automatic budget cuts about to kick in, House
Republicans are turning to mapping strategy for the next showdown just a
month away, when a government shutdown instead of just a slowdown will
be at stake.
Both topics are sure to come up
at the White House meeting Friday between President Barack Obama and top
congressional leaders, including Republican House Speaker John Boehner.
A breakthrough on replacing or easing the imminent across-the-board
spending cuts still seems unlikely at the first face-to-face discussion
between Obama and Republican leaders this year.
To
no one's surprise, even as a dysfunctional Washington appears incapable
of averting a crisis over economy-rattling spending cuts, it may be
lurching toward another over a possible shutdown.
Republicans
are planning for a vote next week on a bill to fund the day-to-day
operations of the government through the Sept. 30 end of the 2013 fiscal
year - while keeping in place the new $85 billion in cuts of 5 percent
to domestic agencies and 8 percent to the military.
The
need to keep the government's doors open and lights on - or else suffer
the first government shutdown since 1996 - requires the GOP-dominated
House and the Democratic-controlled Senate to agree. Right now they
hardly see eye to eye.
The House GOP plan,
unveiled to the rank and file on Wednesday, would award the Pentagon and
the Veterans Administration with their line-by-line budgets, for a
more-targeted rather than indiscriminate batch of military cuts, but
would deny domestic agencies the same treatment. And that has whipped up
opposition from veteran Democratic senators on the Appropriations
Committee. Domestic agencies would see their budgets frozen almost
exactly as they are, which would mean no money for new initiatives such
as cybersecurity or for routine increases for programs such as
low-income housing.
"We're not going to do that," said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. "Of course not."
Any
agreement needs to pass through a gantlet of House tea party
conservatives intent on preserving the across-the-board cuts and Senate
Democrats pressing for action on domestic initiatives, even at the risk
of creating a foot-tall catchall spending bill.
There's
also this: GOP leaders have calculated that the automatic cuts arriving
on Friday need to be in place in order for them to be able to muster
support from conservatives for the catchall spending bill to keep the
government running. That's because many staunch conservatives want to
preserve the cuts even as defense hawks and others fret about the harm
that might do to the military and the economy. If the automatic cuts are
dealt with before the government-wide funding bill gets a vote, there
could be a conservative revolt.
"The overall sequester levels must hold," said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif.
Little
to no progress has been made so far between House and Senate leaders
and the White House, and given the hard feelings engulfing Washington,
there's no guarantee that this problem can be solved, even though the
stakes - a shutdown of non-essential government programs after March 27 -
carry more risk than the across-the-board cuts looming on Friday.
The
funding plan for the rest of the fiscal year will be a main topic at
the White House meeting on Friday, the March 1 deadline day for averting
the across-the-board cuts.
Obama, speaking to
a group of business executives Wednesday night, said the cuts would be a
"tumble downward" for the economy, though he acknowledged it could
takes weeks before many Americans feel the full impact of the budget
shrinking.
The warring sides in Washington
have spent this week assigning blame rather than seeking a bipartisan
way out. In a glimpse of the state of debate on Wednesday, Republicans
and the White House bickered over whether the cuts would be under way by
the time Friday's meeting started. A spokesman for Boehner said they
would be in place; the White House countered that Obama would in fact
have until midnight Friday to set them in motion.
The
cumbersome annual ritual of passing annual agency spending bills
collapsed entirely last year - not a single one of the 12 annual
appropriations bills for the budget year that began back in October has
passed Congress - and Congress has to act by March 27 to prevent a
partial shutdown of the government.
By
freezing budgets for domestic agencies, the Republican plan would deny
an increase for a big cybersecurity initiative, additional money to
modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and money to build new Coast Guard
cutters. GOP initiatives such as more money for the Small Business
Administration or fossil fuels research would be hurt as well, but
there's little appetite for the alternative, which is to stack more than
$1 trillion worth of spending bills together for a single up-or-down
vote.
But the GOP move to add the line-by-line
spending bills for the Pentagon and veterans' programs to the catchall
spending bill would give the military much-sought increases for force
readiness and the Veterans Administration additional funding for health
care.
That approach has few fans in the White
House, which is seeking money to implement Obama's signature efforts to
overhaul financial regulation and the nation's health care system, or
within the Democratic Senate, where members of the Appropriations
Committee want to add a stack of bills covering domestic priorities such
as homeland security, NASA and federal law enforcement agencies like
the FBI.
"You need balance," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. "We feel as strongly about the domestic side as we do defense."
The
catchall spending measure, known as a continuing resolution or CR
inside Washington, was originally seen as a potential must-pass measure
to avert Friday's cuts or make them less severe. But no serious talks to
avert the cuts have been under way.
On
Thursday, Democrats will force a vote on a measure that would forestall
the automatic cuts through the end of the year, replacing them with
longer-term cuts to the Pentagon and cash payments to farmers and
installing a minimum 30 percent tax rate on income exceeding $1 million.
But that plan is virtually certain to be toppled by a GOP-led
filibuster vote.
Republicans in turn are
considering offering a measure that would give Obama authority to
propose a rewrite to the 2013 budget to redistribute the cuts. Obama
would be unable to cut defense by more than the $43 billion reduction
that the Pentagon currently faces, and would also be unable to raise
taxes to undo the cuts. The GOP plan would allow a resulting Obama
proposal to go into effect unless Congress passed a resolution to
overturn it.
The idea is that money could be
transferred from lower-priority accounts to accounts funding air traffic
control or meat inspection. But the White House says that such moves
would offer only slight relief. At the same time, however, it could take
pressure off of Congress to address the sequester.
In
the House, where Republicans in the past Congress passed legislation to
replace the cuts, Boehner has said it's now up to Obama and the Senate
to figure a way out. The Senate never took up the House-passed bills,
which expired when the new Congress was seated in January.
