Dems weigh tactics after approps loss

Democratic leaders are weighing their strategy for this year’s spending battles with President Bush, after hearing party grumbling for capitulating to the administration last month.

Pondering how to advance domestic priorities such as school lunch funding and medical research, party leaders must decide whether to try negotiating despite the president’s recent inflexibility on appropriations. Instead they might choose to bring bills forward that offer Democrats the best opportunities to argue that Republican rule is bad for the country.

{mosads}At the end of last year, Democrats capitulated in a standoff with Bush by agreeing to the limit he set for total federal spending. Democrats initially passed a group of appropriation bills exceeding Bush’s ceiling by $22 billion. The additional money would have paid for veterans medical care, transportation infrastructure, medical research, Pell grants, and low-income students.

Democrats offered to split the difference between the White Housse, submitting a package $11 billion above Bush’s budget, but gave in when White House officials refused to budge. Several senior members of the House Appropriations Committee told The Hill that Democratic leaders rewarded the Bush administration’s hard line.

Rep. John Murtha (Pa.), the second-ranking Democrat on Appropriations, said a White House official told him Bush would have agreed to spend more on domestic programs if Democrats pushed harder.  

“One of the [White House] staffers called my staffer and said, ‘You guys gave up too early, we thought we were going to end up at 7 or 8 billion dollars more.’”

Murtha said his leaders’ decision to offer a compromise before White House officials gave any ground “was a mistake.”
“We should have negotiated at $22 billion [over the president’s number] to start with,” he said.

Other senior appropriators voiced similar criticisms.

“I completely agree with Mr. Murtha,” said one subcommittee chairman, who also disliked the decision to abandon the $11 billion proposal and hew to Bush’s spending limit.

“This was our budget and we made decisions to add money in important priorities,” said the lawmaker, who requested anonymity to avoid angering his leaders. “We ought to have stayed with our priorities and seen what happened. I think we would have gotten half of the $11 billion.”

One senior Democratic aide said: “We could have gotten the administration to agree to $4-$5 billion above their request. [House Appropriations Chairman David] Obey [D-Wis.] essentially decided that it was better to give the president full responsibility for the final number and blame him for the cuts instead of blessing a package that was a few billion above the president but still inadequate.”

The aide said Democrats must weigh the pros and cons of similar tactics in an election year.

“One of the lessons for this year is that we need to decide whether we want to preserve that message going into the election — pass bills at the president’s levels to highlight the consequences of a Republican administration — or try to win some increases for programs we care about.”

Democrats claimed partial victory by noting they allocated extra money to their priorities.

They provided $3.7 billion above Bush’s request for veterans’ healthcare; an extra $486 million for energy efficiency and renewable energy; $613 million extra for medical research; and an extra $1.1 billion for the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency responsible for improving healthcare access.

These increases were obscured by the sheer size of the package, which agglomerated 11 spending bills. The news media focused instead on the nearly 9,000 earmarks in the bill.

“The more you amalgamate the [spending] bills, the more difficult it is for people to understand the issues in the bills,” said Scott Lilly, who formerly served as Democratic staff director on Appropriations.

Lilly, who now works at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said the public would understand differences between Bush and Democrats on domestic issues better if Congress passed the bills individually.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) has pressed his leadership to take that approach.

During a closed-door caucus meeting before senators recessed for Christmas, Byrd told colleagues that he wants to pass the 12 appropriations bills through the Senate separately in 2008.

He took the same position last year but Democratic leaders ignored his advice. In 2007, the Senate Appropriations Committee passed all 12 bills but five failed to receive floor votes.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) decided last year not to give much floor time to appropriations because many Democrats believed the war in Iraq was more important, said aides familiar with behind-the-scenes decision making.

So if Democratic leaders want to use the spending debate to drive home political points with voters, as one senior aide said, then they will have to take account of Byrd’s argument that they need to spend more time considering appropriations bills on the Senate floor. Otherwise, their political arguments may be obscured again.

A senior Democratic aide said plans to blame Bush for under-funding domestic programs went awry because of time spent on Iraq.

“Any chance we had of breaking through with a message on appropriations was undermined when we decided to have an Iraq fight in the fall, which sucked up all the attention and colored the entire appropriations debate,” said the aide.

Jim Dyer, former Republican staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, said voters expect Congress to fund domestic programs adequately.

“We’re starving the non-defense side of the budget and I think that’s wrong,” he said.

Democratic leaders must decide how much to emphasize that argument this year compared to the war in Iraq and other issues.