Other Stuff

There is at least one Republican on Capitol Hill who both recognizes that Congress is spending like Linda Blair hurled ectoplasm when she was possessed by the devil and has bellied up to the bar with legislation that can actually slow down the billions-spewing:

How fortunate, then, that Senate Budget Committee chairman Judd Gregg is giving his party a chance to redeem itself before the midterm elections. Recognizing that much of what’s wrong with the way Washington spends money is a product of the budget process itself, Gregg has proposed a series of reforms to that process. His legislation—the Stop Over-Spending (S.O.S.) Act—is one of the most encouraging efforts toward spending discipline in years, and is eminently worthy of passage.

Congress has been especially profligate on the matter of discretionary spending. Spending caps in effect from 1990 to 2002 largely held discretionary spending in check, but since then it has grown by 9% a year. The S.O.S. Act would bring back the caps, starting at $873 billion in fiscal year 2007 and rising by 2.6% in 2008 and 2009. If discretionary spending passed these limits, the Office of Management and Budget would be empowered to bring it under control by making across-the-board cuts.

But it is entitlements that pose the greatest fiscal threat....Perhaps the most valuable provisions of the S.O.S. Act, then, are those that address entitlement spending. One such provision would set deficit targets and require budget committees to reduce entitlement spending if the deficit is expected to exceed them. (The targets start out at 2.75% of GDP in 2007 and decline to 0.5% by 2012.) If the committees fail to make cuts, automatic reductions in entitlement spending (with the exception of Social Security) would take effect....It also contains a provision targeting runaway Medicare costs: If more than 45% of those costs were covered by general revenue (as opposed to payroll taxes and fees), a point of order against entitlement expansions would take effect until that figure dropped back below 45%....

Other main provisions include giving the president a line-item veto that would allow him to send rescission requests to Congress for an up-or-down vote, and introducing a biennial budget process. Moving away from the present, annual process would free Congress to spend more time on oversight and reform of federal programs.

Sounds like the old Gramm-Rudman-Hollings provision from the mid-late 1980s that was so effective in slowing federal spending and, in combo with the Reagan tax cuts, had the budget gliding toward balance until the Dems suckered Pappy Bush into raising taxes during a recession and exploded the deficit again. Ah, memories.

The line item veto is also a pleasant memory, if only in concept since it was wasted on Bill Clinton. But that provision has been revived, albeit in weaker form (via CQ):

Lawmakers voted to give Bush and his successor a new, weaker version of the line-item veto law struck down by the Supreme Court in 1998, despite a recent series of lopsided votes in which they've rallied to preserve each other's back-home projects. It would expire after six years.

The idea advances amid increasing public concern about lawmakers' penchant for stuffing parochial projects into spending bills that the president must accept or reject in their entirety. ...

The bill would allow the president to single out items contained in appropriations bills he signs into law, and it would require Congress to vote on those items again. It also could be used against increases in benefit programs and tax breaks aimed at a single beneficiary.

Under the proposal, it would take a simple majority in both the House and the Senate to approve the items over the president's objections.

The hope is that wasteful spending or special interest tax breaks would be vulnerable since Congress might vote to reject such items once they are no longer protected by their inclusion in bigger bills that the president has little choice but to sign.

This sounds like an election year gimmick, in all honesty. Like all fiscally sane policy in this decade, the damn thing is sunsetted. I doubt we'll ever see the same feature applied to any spending program. And what's the point of even calling it a "veto" when a supermajority isn't required for Congress to override it? Couldn't 'Pubbies have even gotten a 60% threshold if Dems and RINOs wouldn't stand for the standard two-thirds? After watching the bipartisan brazenness of the appropriations process the past few years, count me as skeptical that pork-barrel spending and earmarks would be as "vulnerable" as this LIV's architects are trying to sell.

Still, one can think of this as getting the camel's nose of frugality back inside the bread & circuses tent. For six years, or until the Democrats regain the majority, whichever comes first. And that's if the bill can get through the Senate, which is like [insert favorite lobbyists-are-like-whores joke here].

Speaking of the Senate getting hosed, House Speaker Denny Hastert has done one thing to redeem himself this week: drive a spike through the heart of "comprehensive" immigration "reform," followed by feeding the remains through a woodchipper, incinerating the fragments, burying them, paving over the grave, and jumping up and down on it for good measure (via CQ):

In a defeat for President Bush, Republican congressional leaders said Tuesday that broad immigration legislation is all but doomed for the year, a victim of election-year concerns in the House and conservatives' implacable opposition to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants.

"Our number one priority is to secure the border, and right now I haven't heard a lot of pressure to have a path to citizenship," said Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-IL, announcing plans for an unusual series of hearings to begin in August on Senate-passed immigration legislation. ...

Gotta love the Speaker's droll manner - "I haven't heard a lot of pressure to have a path to citzenship" - which translates to, "If you pass another amnesty, we'll drive a stake through your hearts, feed the remains through a wood chipper, then..." well, you get the idea.

I also can't help but chuckle at the reactions from the various wings of the border erasure crowd. Like the ASSociated Press: "Conservatives' implacable opposition to citizenship for illegals." "Implacable" is defined as, "impossible to placate or appease." Which doesn't make the term particularly applicable here since the White House and Senate have made little or no attempt to "placate or appease" the enforcement-first concerns of the House (and two-thirds of the American citizenry). But leaving that aside, the implication of the term the way the AP uses it is that House Republicans' opposition to a "comprehensive" bill is somehow unreasonable, and from there flows naturally to "callous" and "uncaring," and finally to "xenophobic" and "bigoted." We get nothing in the AP story about the amnesty proponents being "implacable" in their opposition to at least postponing the determination of what to do with the illegals already here until after the border is first secured. The structure of the graf is that there is a Rose Garden signing ceremony/photo-op to be had, full of fluttering (Mexican?) flags and salsa-eating grins and handshakes and back-slaps and token immigrants and all other manner of cynical self-congratulation, and the only ones standing in the way are those "implacable" conservatives in the House.

Next there is the White House, which, on this issue, remains as, well, "implacably" clueless as ever:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said after Hastert's announcement of hearings, "The President is undeterred. We are committed and we have been working very hard with members (of Congress) to see if we can reach consensus on an issue the American people have said they want action on."

The "action" the American people want is to actually start (and keep) enforcing the immigration laws already on the books. The "action" the American people want is to start (and keep) controlling the borders and choke off the passive Mexican invasion of the United States. The "action" the American people want is for their elected leaders to stop letting foreigners who haven't gone through the legal immigration process come here, stay, and freeload off our social safety hammock, stop looking upon illegals as the next political constituency (for which Republicans could never really compete in any case - "poor, huddled masses" don't generally gravitate toward the party of personal responsibility, fiscal restraint, and law & order - not after the Dems get hold of them, anyway), and stop allowing the meaning of citizenship to be eroded. And the "action" the American people want is for this President to grasp that "demographics" is not the doodles Harry Reid draws on his legal pad during Senate floor debates, but the very future of America as we have known it for the past 230 years.

Senate GOPers, by contrast, seem to recognize the handwriting on the wall:

In the Senate, Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-TN, told reporters he welcomed hearings. "As much examination of the House bill and Senate bill as possible is good," he said.

Senator John McCain, R-Sith, a principal author of the Senate-passed measure, offered to testify at House hearings. Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said, "I'm hopeful" of a compromise before the elections.

I wouldn't mind seeing Darth Queeg cross the Capitol to testify. I'd love to see if putting him in close proximity to Tom Tancredo would make the hearing room spontaneously combust.

The moral of these two stories? Republicans, particularly on the House side, appear to be waking up in time and distancing themselves from the electoral implosion toward which their spendthriftedness and immigration policy tin-ear had had them drifting. Combined with the Democrats' latest self-immolations on the war, those GOP majorities are looking safer all the time.