Budget season starts in earnest this week, giving Democrats and Republicans the opportunity to score political points in an election-year battle. But though they’ll be vying over issues of great interest to the business community, don’t expect K Street to bring on the full-court press.
To be sure, lawmakers will cast votes this week that will be keenly noted by big business. In the Senate, lawmakers are expected to drive a cavalcade of amendments to the floor on hot-button topics such as taxes, immigration and entitlement-program spending.
{mosads}For K Street, however, the budget debate has more value as an educational tool than as an opportunity to achieve victories for clients.
Lobbyists for business interests say that budget resolutions, and the battles in the House and Senate to create them, make great political theater and provide the influence industry with a guide to how the congressional year might play out. The budget itself, however, is less important from a lobbying perspective.
Rich Gold, who heads the government affairs practice at Holland & Knight, said the budget “gives you a hunting license” for the authorizing and spending bills that come next.
“It’s not to say that folks don’t spend time on it, but in some ways it’s more important as a political document than it is a real roadmap” for lobbyists to follow throughout the legislative process, Gold said.
The budget, and the amendments proposed on the Senate floor, can provide lobbyists with intelligence on where a particular senator stands on an issue on which he or she has never cast a vote. “These votes are remembered. These are markers for people,” one Republican business lobbyist said.
For appropriations lobbyists, the budget may not even have that value, suggested Jim Dyer, a lobbyist at Clark & Weinstock and a longtime appropriations staffer who said he could not remember ever lobbying on a budget resolution. “The only thing I’m concerned about is the actual size” of the allocations to the appropriations committees, Dyer said.
This year, K Street is uncertain there will even be a budget resolution, given the entrenchment of the parties’ leaders, the dysfunctional relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill, and the encroaching shadow the presidential campaign casts over Washington.
“I think there is a sense, particularly this year, that it’s going to be hard to get a budget resolution,” said Democratic lobbyist and strategist Steve Elmendorf. This is particularly true in the Senate, where Democrats hold a slim majority.
While the budget battles serve as a sort of crystal ball for lobbyists, the two parties will use them to highlight their differences and fire up their respective bases.
On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the floor to set the stage and the tone for the debate, which is expected to culminate in a full-scale “vote-a-rama” Thursday where dozens of votes could be cast. {mospagebreak}
Senators are positioning themselves for the political battles of the year to come, not least of which is a presidential contest that will pit two members of their exclusive club against each other. Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who has locked up the Republican nomination, and his Democratic counterparts, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.), are expected at votes this week.
Reid criticized the Bush administration for the $400 million-plus budget deficit, and said Democrats would take action on the mortgage crisis, unemployment insurance, home-heating assistance and roads and bridges.
{mosads}McConnell labeled Democrats as tax-and-spenders, and said Congress should continue to promote Republican ideals of low taxes, fiscal restraint and big defense spending.
The big wild card for K Street is budget reconciliation, which gets the business community’s attention, lobbyists agreed. The procedural device allows the Senate to pass controversial bills to increase or decrease spending or taxes with a simple majority rather than the 60-vote majorities usually needed, thereby avoiding crippling filibusters.
This relatively smaller margin makes it easier to win support for an item a client wants — but markedly harder to stop something it does not want.
The House’s budget resolution includes reconciliation instructions to the Ways and Means Committee to cut $750 million in spending — much of which would go toward paying for Medicare, Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program spending. It also calls for the committee to prevent the costly Alternative Minimum Tax from hitting more middle-income taxpayers, which will cost $70 million.
The Senate version, however, does not include any reconciliation instructions, despite interest among some Senate Democrats to use reconciliation to smooth the path for priorities such as blocking a 10 percent cut in Medicare fees for physicians that would otherwise kick in July 1.
Reconciliation could be the end game, but that presumes both chambers will actually pass their respective budget resolutions. As a result, a conference package where the Senate and House would work out their differences is far from a foregone conclusion.
Senate Democrats will want to pass the budget not only to tout it as an accomplishment, but to ease the way for the appropriations process and the rest of the majority’s legislative agenda. “For the majority, the interest [is] making the trains run on time,” Gold said, and they may be willing to make deals with GOP senators to get that done.
On the other hand, the Republican business lobbyist said, Senate Republicans don’t have much of an incentive to play along with the Democratic majority. “We would probably be just as happy without a budget resolution,” the lobbyist said.
Manu Raju contributed to this report.