House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Thursday doubled down on the Democrats’ opposition to a GOP bill that would offset disaster assistance with cuts elsewhere in the budget.
The California Democrat said her troops simply won’t tie the emergency disaster funding to debate over deficit reduction.
{mosads}”We’re not going to balance the budget on the backs of people who’ve been affected by natural disasters,” Pelosi told a large crowd gathered for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference in Washington.
The House on Wednesday shot down the House Republicans’ continuing resolution (CR), which included almost $3.7 billion in funding for victims of recent natural disasters. To pay for early stages of that relief, the Republicans proposed a $1.5 billion cut to a Democratic program designed to help the nation’s automakers develop more fuel efficient vehicles.
To protest the offset provision, all but six Democrats voted against the CR.
“This was a very important message to the Republicans that if they’re going to have a bad bill they’re going to have to produce their own bad votes,” Pelosi said Thursday. “We want them to move to a better place.”
Meanwhile, 48 Republicans bucked their leadership to oppose the measure as well. The Republicans objected to the CR’s 2012 spending levels, which exceed those in the House-passed budget bill by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Thursday took a jab at the conservative critics, suggesting they’ll force GOP leaders to come back with an even more expensive proposal for the sake of attracting Democratic votes.
“What they’re in essence doing is they are voting to spend more money,” Boehner told reporters in the Capitol.
{mossecondads}House Democrats, meanwhile, are reveling in their rare budget victory.
“Now the Republicans have to go back and put together a bill that meets our needs for disaster and is not an anti-jobs bill,” said Rep. Sandy Levin (Mich.), senior Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee. “Democrats basically united on both counts.”
Levin said the Democrats have taken a strategic lesson from Wednesday’s surprise vote: “Stand up for what we believe,” he said. “Don’t be cowed by the notion that it’s a CR [and] therefore you have to buy anything.”
A senior Democratic leadership aide said after Wednesday’s vote that the caucus seems to have turned a corner, recognizing more than ever that Boehner and the Republicans can’t pass the toughest budget bills facing Congress without Democratic support.