THE SENATE: Convened at 10 and will recess from 12:30 to 2:15 for the weekly caucus lunches, which should yield a strong sense of how easily the midyear spending cut bill will move through Congress.
The only real business will be votes this afternoon confirming white-collar defense lawyer Vincent L. Briccetti as a federal judge in New York and state trial judge John A. Kronstadt as a federal judge in Los Angeles.
THE HOUSE: Convenes at noon to debate extending the life of the Reagan Centennial Commission for eight months and naming a West Virginia federal courthouse for a former judge there. Votes to pass those bills — and, more important, to give the whips an opportunity to gauge support for the spending bill — will be at 6:30.
THE WHITE HOUSE: At noon Obama and Biden will launch a national initiative headed by their wives to support and honor military families. The White House has asked Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last June as the top general in Afghanistan, to chair the program’s three-member advisory board.
The president has separate meetings during the afternoon with Clinton, Gates and OPM head John Berry.
This morning the vice president dedicated a plaque honoring Bob Dole at the World War II Memorial.
SPEED READING: After nine hours in the sunshine, so far nothing in the fine print of the midyear spending bill is being labeled a deal-breaker that could blow the compromise off course.
Even though the bill wasn’t actually introduced until about 2 this morning, GOP leaders say they still plan a House vote tomorrow evening — a clear violation of their oft-stated promise to put 72 hours between the unveiling of any legislation and the roll call. If that timetable holds, Democratic Senate leaders say there’s a solid chance they can get the bill cleared by Thursday night. (That’s because, if the outcome is clear, then senatorial opponents will want to get a head start on their two-week recess, and perhaps a bit of campaigning, more than they’ll want to make dilatory speeches.)
All that speed is designed to create the minimum window for opposition to build, especially in the House. Boehner knows he’ll be unable to achieve his goal of getting 218 Republican “yes” votes (which would show he could triumph without Democrats lifting a finger), but the GOP whip team isn’t really looking around in earnest for Democrats, because the backing of Obama and Reid will surely bring a decent supply of them along.
COMPLEX ACCOUNTING: All told, the bill would allocate $1.05 trillion for fiscal 2011, but only 24 weeks of that budget year will remain by the time Obama signs the deal into law. There’s still some argument about the best way to precisely measure how much of a cut that represents, but all the negotiators agree it’s between $38.5 billion and $39.9 billion — and that about $12 billion of that has already been dictated in the three most recent stopgap spending laws.
At least $12 billion more in purported savings would come from decisions that critics will describe as “accounting gimmicks,” and which would not actually count on official deficit reduction scorecards. This includes not spending on already-mothballed earmarks, not using some leftover or previously frozen highway construction money, not allocating more funds that had been set aside for the 2010 census, not spending all the money set aside in a rarely used crime victims compensation fund, not continuing a special dairy subsidy program that had already lapsed and not spending money that turned out to be more than necessary to subsidize medical care of poor children.
WHAT’S CUT, WHAT’S NOT: The Pentagon will get $513 billion, which is $5 billion more than last year but $2 billion less than what Republicans wanted. And there’s nothing for continued development of an alternative engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, suggesting that one of the most intensely lobbied procurement fights in memory is coming to an end.
The Homeland Security Department will see a 2 percent cut, mostly from grants to local first-responders — the first spending reduction since the department’s creation nine years ago. There’s also a $414 million cut from Justice Department grants to state and local police.
The EPA’s budget will be cut 16 percent, or $1.6 billion, mostly from suspending clean-water grants to cities. That’s about half what the House initially proposed.
Renewable-energy programs will be cut 20 percent, or $407 million.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees flood control and river dredging, will be cut 10 percent, or $578 million.
The maximum Pell grant will remain at the current $5,550; Republicans had proposed a 15 percent trim. (Pell grants for summer school will be cut, though.)
The National Institutes of Health will take a 1 percent cut of $260 million, one-sixth of what the House GOP proposed. But $600 million will be cut from a separate community health center program.
The National Science Foundation will get $6.9 billion, $307 million more than the House voted for back in February.
Family planning aid will be cut 5 percent, not totally ended as Republicans wanted.
Obama’s “Race to the Top” competitive education grants will be given a $700 million boost. The president also will get a combined $110 million more to help the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission start implementing the financial services regulatory changes enacted last year. And the FDA will get the money it needs to begin implementing last fall’s overhaul of food safety law. The House had voted against all of that.
That legislation also would have ended funding for AmeriCorps and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But both will survive under the bill.
ENTITLEMENT ENTANGLEMENTS: McConnell signaled in blunt terms today that Republicans aren’t going to simply and graciously take “yes” for an answer if Obama embraces the cause of curbing the growth of health care entitlements.
“Hopefully the president will put forward a plan that doesn’t just pay lip service to the commitments we’ve made to seniors and the poor, but which acknowledges the unique problems that this generation and a rising generation of Americans face,” the Republican leader said on the Senate floor. “But at least the president is joining in the conversation. Hopefully that conversation is an adult one and doesn’t devolve into the kind of unhelpful scripted, and frankly juvenile, name-calling that we saw in the closing hours of the debate over the continuing resolution.”
McConnell fired his warning shot as word spread that the president is ready to reverse course and endorse the approach advocated by his own bipartisan fiscal commission. The Simpson-Bowles panel in December advocated reducing cumulative deficits by $4 trillion in the next decade through controls on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security as well as from new taxes and reduction in defense as well as domestic spending.
Obama didn’t mention the commission in his own budget or his State of the Union address. Doing so now — in a speech tomorrow afternoon before an invited audience at George Washington University — is designed to set the president apart (but within compromising reach) of the Paul Ryan budget the House is going to adopt Friday, which would achieve a similar amount of deficit reduction mainly by privatizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid — and without defense spending cuts or new taxes.
It will also add enormously to the pressure building on the bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators to come up with a proposal that would tackle all those fiscal policy sacred cows at once. Republicans in that group said yesterday that, while a deal is very close, any announcement will be postponed until after Congress returns May 2 from its two-week recess.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: GOP Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan (60)
— David Hawkings, editor
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