On Wednesday it was drilling in ANWAR, yesterday the GOP leadership caved in on their entire plan to cut the federal budget.
House Republican leaders were forced to abruptly pull their $54 billion budget-cutting bill off the House floor yesterday, amid growing dissension in Republican ranks over spending priorities, taxes, oil exploration and the reach of government.
A battle between House Republican conservatives and moderates over energy policy and federal anti-poverty and education programs left GOP leaders without enough votes to pass a budget measure they had framed as one of the most important pieces of legislation in years. Across the Capitol, a moderate GOP revolt in the Senate Finance Committee forced Republicans to postpone action on a bill to extend some of President Bush’s most contentious tax cuts.
And if that wasn’t enough to make you scream:
The House budget vote was supposed to reestablish the Republican commitment to a smaller government that would change the federal approach to Medicaid, food stamps, agriculture subsidies, student loans and a host of other programs.
But moderate Republicans made it clear that was not the way they wanted the party defined. The GOP leadership had already abandoned a provision in the budget that would have opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, a policy goal Bush has embraced since he came to office. But it was not enough to secure the votes of moderates who said remaining policy changes were hitting the nation’s most vulnerable citizens just as the party was preparing another round of tax cuts that would benefit the most affluent.
(….)
Meanwhile, the Senate Finance Committee broke up in disarray yesterday morning after failing to secure support for a tax package that would have extended the president’s 2003 cut to the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Joining the panel’s Democrats, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) declared she could not support a tax cut that primarily benefited the rich as Congress was trying to cut programs for the poor. But when the panel’s chairman, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), tried to win approval of a tax package without the investment tax cuts, panel conservatives refused to go along.
And to top it all off:
Bush’s call to make his first-term tax cuts permanent has had so little support that Grassley drafted a bill that would simply extend some of the Bush tax cuts for a single year. Even that may go nowhere.
“It should go away,” Sen. George V. Voinovich (R-Ohio) said of the tax package. “We ought not to be involved in it.”
Some of this is attributable to the declining power of the President as his poll numbers continue to sink, but most of it reflects the complete abandoment by these “moderates” and by the House and Senate leadership of any semblance of principle. At this point, the GOP is doing everything it can to hand Congress to the Democrats in 2006 on a silver platter.
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