GOP fears paying at the polls

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.

"People are not enthusiastic," said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas.

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

"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.

Gregg also opted against using the budget resolution to help Bush extend his first-term tax cuts beyond their 2010 expiration date.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that extending them through 2016 would cost $1.5 trillion — 10 times Bush's proposed Medicare and Medicaid cuts.

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.

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.

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 has 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."

Specter's amendment, co-written by Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, is only the beginning.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, said he and Chairman Susan Collins, R-Maine, will introduce this week an amendment to broadly raise spending on homeland defense.

Senate Democrats on their own will move to increase spending for homeland security by nearly $3 billion more than Bush's wishes.

Reps. Daniel Lungren, R-Calif., and Jane Harman, D-Calif., are proposing legislation that would raise spending on port security by $801 million a year.

Three times since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the House has voted against Democratic efforts to raise port security spending. But in the wake of a Dubai company's effort to take over management responsibilities at six major U.S. ports, such opposition appears to be collapsing.

Additional information from

The Washington Post