House Democrats give dim view of Schumer’s entitlement reform suggestion

A Senate push to include entitlement reform in this year’s spending bill will only snarl the debate and threaten any potential deal, a number of House Democrats warned this week.

While those lawmakers support Sen. Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) goal of reforming entitlements to cut deficits, they don’t think it’s feasible within the already tumultuous debate over 2011 spending. 

In short: they like Schumer’s idea, but not his timing.

{mosads}”We should just focus on passing this [continuing resolution],” Rep. Frank Pallone (N.J.), senior Democrat on the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, which oversees Medicaid, said Thursday. Bringing entitlements into the mix, he said, “is just going to complicate things and make it harder to get anything done.” 

Rep. Sander Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, agreed. Levin said Schumer’s proposal is valuable for highlighting the futility of tackling deficits through discretionary spending alone. But, he added, including entitlements to this debate would only exacerbate the impasse over how to fund the government this year.

“We’re having enough trouble wrestling with this already,” Levin said.

With the government’s spending authority set to expire March 18, House Republicans and Senate Democrats cut a deal Friday to extend government funding for another three weeks. The measure is scheduled for a House vote Tuesday.

Both sides say they want to finalize a long-term agreement, through fiscal year 2011, which ends Oct. 1. But Democrats are opposed to the $57 billion in cuts proposed by Republicans over that span, while GOP leaders have so far refused to budge from that number.

All of the GOP cuts target programs under the portion of the budget known as non-security discretionary spending, which represents between 12 and 14 percent of total spending, depending on how “non-security” is defined. Many of the programs that get funding from such appropriations benefit low-income Americans – a situation that’s only entrenched the Democrats’ opposition to the cuts.

“It may be possible to portray taking on 14 percent of the budget as fiscally responsible — but only because doing so exploits Americans’ misunderstandings of the budget,” Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said. 

“Which child, firefighter, policeman or veteran in America targeted in the Republican job destroying budget caused these deficits?” asked Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the Democratic Caucus, said in an e-mail. “Sen. Schumer is trying to get the budget negotiations back on track and focused on the fats cats and sacred cows that are really driving the budget deficits.”

Schumer made headlines Wednesday when he proposed to “reset” the current spending debate by including certain entitlement reforms and revenue increases. Schumer’s plan comes with some significant asterisks: He doesn’t want to touch Social Security, for instance. 

Focusing all of the cuts on a small sliver of the budget, he warned, will only harm poor populations who’ve been most harmed by the recession. 

“Some might say, ‘Well, it’s a start,’” Schumer, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, said during a speech at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group. “But in relation to the damage these cuts will do, it’s a meaningless start.”

Schumer suggested an “all of the above approach” where the sacrifices were split evenly between discretionary spending, entitlement programs and taxpayers.

“If we are serious, then we need to scour all parts of the budget that contribute to the deficit, not just the parts of the budget that some of us don’t like,” Schumer said.

House Democrats, however, are much less enthusiastic. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) noted the sharp ideological differences between the parties when it comes to entitlement reform. Democrats, in this debate, have long-sought to bolster Medicare and Social Security under existing, government-run structures, while Republicans prefer taking steps toward privatization. Trying to overcome those differences would likely cripple the current budget negotiations even further.

Quite aside from the policy concerns, there’s also a lingering fear of the political heat sure to face lawmakers who would propose to scale back Medicare or Social Security – even in the name of fiscal prudence. The Democrats’ healthcare reform bill, for instance, cut hundreds of billions of dollars from projected Medicare spending over the next decade, leading Republicans to blast the law on the campaign trail as a threat to seniors.

The result has been that neither party wants to be the first to endorse any significant entitlement reforms this year.

“Nobody,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), “wants to take that first step.”

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) made headlines last week when he vowed political cover for President Obama if the White House went first on entitlement reform. But Boehner doesn’t control the entirety of the conservative message machine, and so far there’s been no indication that either side is ready to stick its neck out.

With that in mind, a growing number of observers on and off Capitol Hill are urging leaders from both parties to get together behind closed doors and come up with an entitlement reform plan that both sides could endorse simultaneously. The political backlash would be inevitable, but neither party would be at a disadvantage during election season.

“The question is,” Cuellar said, “how do we get both parties to step across the line at the same time?”