Life for the House Appropriations Committee under Republican rule is a little like being Mitt Romney?s dog, forced to ride in a kennel lashed atop the family car while Speaker John Boehner drives and the tea party freshmen sing camp songs in the back.
Yet when all the turmoil of 2011 has subsided, the only real deficit reduction accomplished by the House GOP may very well be at the hands of this once-proud panel, kicked out of its Capitol offices by Boehner at the beginning of the year and exiled to a third floor, well, doghouse.
Continue ReadingSitting in those offices Monday, Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) smiled ? and just let that thought sink in for a moment.
?No they don?t,? he told POLITICO, when asked if his leadership understood what his panel really did. ?But we have a great working relationship with leadership. They let us do our thing. ?We ask their policy direction for where they would like us to try to go. We try to go there.?
Indeed, the leadership?s disconnect or disdain for appropriations is such that can seem blind to how much the landscape has changed in the past 12 months. Total discretionary spending will be down for a second year ? counting emergency money or not. And as lawmakers struggle to complete their 2012 deal by next Monday, the biggest single obstacle may be that House Republicans can?t seem to come to grips with what they have won.
A year ago when Boehner was just being sworn in as speaker, the Congressional Budget Office pegged non-emergency discretionary spending at $1.091 trillion, with almost half or $508.7 billion for the Pentagon. The deal now being negotiated by House and Senate Appropriations cuts $48 billion from that total even as the Pentagon goes up to $518 billion ? meaning the rest of the government will get a real cut of $58 billion or 10 percent of discretionary spending as of a year ago.
This is not as deep as tea party Republicans once envisioned but when adjusted for inflation, it comes very close to rolling back non-defense appropriations to the last year of the Bush administration.
Those 2008 numbers were dictated by another pre-Christmas deal almost exactly four years ago between what was then a Democratic Congress and Republican president. Two thirds of the $110 billion increase since then is owed to the Pentagon budget and veterans spending. If all the remaining domestic programs are lumped together with foreign aid and homeland security, the proposed spending levels for 2012 ? $454 billion ? are virtually the same as 2008 when adjusted for inflation.
That means President Barack Obama will go into the last year of his first term with no more purchasing power in many cases than his predecessor four years before ? and $55 billion less than Obama requested for the same accounts in his own 2012 budget last February.
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