GOP falling short of budget promises

WASHINGTON -- It's a busy, unhappy budget week on Capitol Hill. At a time when Republicans are eager to prove their mettle on spending restraint, their deeds are falling far short of their election-year promises.

The House is poised to pad the deficit by passing $91 billion in debt-financed funding for the war in Iraq and for hurricane relief, while the Senate is working on a budget plan shorn of tax and spending cuts wanted by President Bush.

To top it all off, by week's end the Senate must vote on permitting the federal debt to grow by $781 billion to avoid a disastrous government default. The measure would allow the debt to grow to almost $9 trillion -- $3 trillion more than when Bush took office.

Just this past weekend, a bevy of GOP presidential aspirants and southern politicians trooped to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, promising to be more thrifty with taxpayers' money.

'Unexpected challenges'

"We've been hit with unexpected challenges -- a recession, 9-11, homeland security, the war on terror, Katrina," Majority Leader Bill Frist told the GOP faithful in Memphis. "But they're not justification for a one-way ticket down a wayward path of wasteful Washington spending."

Election-year political concerns have forced Budget Committee chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., to drop Bush's proposal to shave $36 billion from Medicare over five years from his plan. But fellow Republicans agitated for more funding for defense, veterans benefits, education, health research and border security.

Senate debate began Monday, but it's not certain that GOP leaders can muster enough votes for Gregg's bare-bones budget plan.

Environmentally friendly Republicans are upset that the measure would pave the way for opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

The GOP faithful is unenthusiastic over a blueprint that fails to deliver tax cuts and new spending curbs.

"It's not near enough," said Sen. Sam Brownback," R-Kan., a prominent conservative. "It's what we can get through and we'll be pressed to get this through."

On the other side of the spectrum, Bush's proposed cuts on domestic Cabinet department budgets have GOP moderates like Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania threatening to oppose the budget altogether.

Specter chairs the Appropriations subcommittee that funds education and health programs. He is pushing to add $7 billion to the budget to bring such funding back to the levels of two years ago, and he's threatened to oppose the budget altogether over Bush's cuts to programs like education and health research.

"We have done more than cut the fat. We have done more than cut through the muscle. We have done more than cut through to the bone," Specter said. "We have cut into the marrow. It is that serious."

The pressure for new spending was illustrated by a series of votes to increase spending on pet programs such as $3 billion to restore cuts proposed by Gregg to the Pentagon budget, $2 billion in additional funding aimed at special education and almost $1 billion more for veterans' benefits.

These increases, however, were financed by illusory across-the-board cuts to all other accounts funded every year by appropriations bills. And in the case of the $3 billion hike for defense, pushed by Jim Talent, R-Mo., the across-the-board cut took away about half of the increase.

Democrats and a handful of mostly moderate Republicans lost a bid to restore so-called pay-as-you-go budget rules requiring tax cuts and new entitlement programs to be financed by tax increases or spending cuts elsewhere in the budget. The amendment failed by a 50-50 vote after Tom Coburn, R-Okla., switched his position from a pair of votes last fall.

Congress' annual budget resolution is a nonbinding blueprint that sets the limits of subsequent bills, including special so-called reconciliation bills -- to cut taxes or trim benefit programs -- that are immune from Democratic filibusters. It also gives Republicans procedural tools to block Democrats from adding money to appropriations bills.

Since Congress is unlikely to advance a reconciliation bill this year, there's less pressure for a budget resolution. Gregg predicts the Senate will pass his budget, though it's likely to require Vice President Dick Cheney to cast a tie-breaking vote.

"There goes my 51st vote right there," Gregg said as Cheney exited the weekly GOP luncheon meeting.

Across the Capitol, House GOP conservatives are restive over a $91 billion measure funding the war in Iraq and providing further hurricane relief to the Gulf Coast.

Debate begins Wednesday and conservatives are pushing to finance some of the costs of Katrina relief with spending cuts elsewhere in the budget, though that effort is doomed to fail.