Dems accuse GOP of breaking ‘Pledge’ vows at ‘dizzying’ pace out of the gate

Democrats are reveling this week as GOP leaders have walked back some of their top campaign promises just days after taking control of the lower chamber.

Republicans stormed to power in November’s elections on vows of balanced budgets, increased transparency and reduced deficit spending. Yet in the first days of the 112th Congress, GOP leaders have adopted rules allowing deficits to explode; dismissed Congress’s nonpartisan budget score-keeper as irrelevant; slashed a spending-cut promise in half; and declined to pay for a controversial bill repealing the new healthcare law.

{mosads}Republicans have defended their actions, insisting they still intend to make good on the goals outlined in their “Pledge to America.” But Democrats have pounced on the moves as an indication that the Republicans’ campaign messaging was simply political theater, not a governing strategy. That the events have happened so quickly has only fueled Democrats’ criticisms.

“Since we’ve been sworn in, the Republican broken promises have been dizzying,” Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.) said Friday.

Slaughter, the top-ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, went after GOP leaders for allowing no amendments — and scant debate — on their healthcare repeal bill, which is scheduled for a vote on Wednesday.

“It violates all the promises we heard from our Republican friends — no public hearings; no committee consideration; a completely closed process; legislative text that no member has read; four minutes of debate on an important constitutional issue; and on and on,” she said. “I hope that this disappointing first effort will not be a pattern for the future.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday that the GOP’s promised openness was never meant to apply to every proposal.

“I promised a more open process,” Boehner told reporters in the Capitol. “I did not promise that every single bill would be an open bill.”

Complicating the picture for the Republicans, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the neutral scorekeeper of legislative costs, estimated this week that the repeal bill will add $230 billion to federal deficits over the next 10 years, with costs exploding even further in the following decade.

Anticipating such a score, Republicans on Wednesday approved rules exempting the repeal bill from pay-as-you-go budget considerations. The exemption allows Republicans to offer their bill without proposing to pay for it with cuts elsewhere in the budget — another episode leading Democrats to fling charges of hypocrisy.

“This is ‘Exhibit A’ of an Enron-style accounting,” said Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), the ranking member of the Budget Committee.

Republicans have defended the absence of offsets by dismissing the CBO score as fiction.

“I do not believe that repealing the job-killing healthcare law will increase the deficit. CBO is entitled to their opinion, but they’re locked within constraints of the 1974 Budget Act,” Boehner said Thursday.

Yet during the months-long healthcare debate, Republicans had repeatedly referred to the CBO as a neutral referee “speaking the truth to power” and “telling us the facts,” in the words of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas).

House Republicans are also under fire because, while their rules require offsets for new federal spending, the same edict doesn’t apply to tax cuts. GOP leaders have insisted that tax cuts simply don’t require offsets because the money is being returned to people’s pockets. But the effects on deficits could be severe, potentially adding trillions of dollars to the debt over time.

“If they’re serious about addressing the debt and the deficit, they’ve got to look at both sides of the equation, which is income and outgo,” Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said Friday. “They’re off to a bad start.”

Republicans also focused their campaign on cutting federal spending. Indeed, the “Pledge” vows to cut $100 billion in discretionary spending this year alone.

“We will roll back government spending to pre-stimulus, pre-bailout levels,” the pledge reads, “saving us at least $100 billion in the first year alone and putting us on a path to begin paying down the debt.”

More recently, however, GOP leaders say the target now falls somewhere between $50 billion and $60 billion — an acknowledgement, the Republicans say, that the fiscal year would be well-eroded by the time the cuts went into effect.

The contradictions between the Republicans’ campaign pledges and their actions since taking control of the House have already riled up some of the conservative groups that helped sweep them into power.

“I actually don’t think it would be possible to fall from grace any faster than this,” Mark Meckler, spokesman for the Tea Party Patriots, told The Daily Caller this week.

Republicans have made good on at least one of the pledges in the pledge — on Thursday, the House overwhelmingly approved a bill cutting its own operating budget by 5 percent each year, or roughly $35 million annually.

With that vote, Boehner said, the House sent “a strong signal of its commitment to making the tough choices necessary to end Washington’s job-killing spending binge.”

The $35 million represents about .003 percent of this year’s $1.3 trillion annual deficit. If lawmakers can make the same cut about 37,000 more times, they’ll have balanced this year’s budget.