Real, Or Perceived, "Bush Loses" Finally Makes News

As a follow-up to this post, from The NY Times comes "In Blow To Bush, Senate Rejects Cuts To Medicaid".

The Senate last night dealt a slap to President Bush and the Republican leadership, approving a 2006 budget that would gut much of the GOP's deficit-reduction efforts by restoring requested cuts to Medicaid, education, community development and other programs.

With their deficit-reduction targets disappearing, Senate Republicans also nearly doubled the budget plan's tax cuts to $134 billion over five years. The budget passed 51 to 49, with four Republicans voting no.

The Senate's actions set up a major fight over budget priorities, as the Senate, House and White House try to iron out an agreement that would allow for the first entitlement cuts since 1997, as well as oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The House yesterday narrowly passed a tough $2.6 trillion budget that includes $69 billion in entitlement cost cutting, with as much as $20 billion in savings from Medicaid, the government's primary health program for the poor.

Fancy that... a fight over budget priorities. it's about time the Senate stopped rubber-stamping the radicals in the house, and don't think Bush's loser Social Security scheme has no role in this. From the WaPo (Senate Rejects GOP Budget cuts):

"Certainly it appears it is going to be challenging," said House Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle (R-Iowa).

On Wednesday, the Senate budget plan barely survived an effort to strip out parliamentary language opening the refuge to oil exploration and drilling. The language would protect drilling legislation from a filibuster, allowing it instead to pass with a simple 51-vote majority. But that parliamentary protection will happen only if the House and Senate agree on a compromise budget resolution for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.

So... that means even ANWR isn't a done deal yet. It means that the GOP is the party of screwing the poor and backhanding the bipartisan Governors of all 50 states. And it means another Bush initiative that gets a little coverage in the media (his proposals don't do as well when they're actually covered). And it means that at least for a day, the press did a decent job covering the radical maneuvers taking place in Congress to dismantle the safety net in the name of corporate profits.

For more detail on the Medicaid crisis, see The Crisis Is Now (But It's Not S.S.) and for Medicare see The Crisis Is Now (Let's Talk Medicare).

 

 

Comments

[DemFromCT]

and note this from the NY Times:

That vote was a rebuke to both the White House and the Republican leadership, and it threatens to prevent Congress from adopting a final budget this year.

"We have arguably our work cut out for us now," said Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the House Budget Committee. He characterized the Medicaid vote as a setback for Mr. Bush's domestic agenda, suggesting that "the momentum" of the entire package, including spending control, Social Security and tax code changes, was now at stake.

"If the Senate is not going to follow in the first item on the president's agenda," Mr. Nussle said, "then that is, I think, a signal that the president needs to receive and react to immediately."

[Charlie Angel]

This is the best news I've heard in quite some time. Seems some Republicans are taking the long view and deciding that they don't want the party to share a place in history with the Nazi Party.

Great blog, btw. I'm going to permalink to you from Sacred Begging.

(Remove underscores from e-mail address as given -- trying to thwart spambots.)

[Plutonium Page]

Very good news! For once, that is...

[Mimikatz]

Read The Decembrist for a cogent analysis of these votes. There are several Republicans who voted against the PAYGO rules and for stripping the Medicaid cuts out of the budget. They are cowards who will not pay for the programs they support.

Then there is the Bunning measure, to add another $64 billion in tax cuts that will not be subject to a filibuster. They are supposedly earmarked "to repeal a 1993 tax increase on Social Security benefits claimed by relatively wealthy seniors," according to the WaPo, but the authority can be used for other things, like another fix in the AMT.

These budget measures, particularly the tax measures, are the most important items on the legislative calendar this year, and deserve much more attention. Once the Budget Bill is passed by both houses, the committees just come up with the taxes and spending to come within the caps they have been given. The Bunning Amendment assures that many of the Bush tax cuts will be made permanent this year, adding trillions to the cumulative debt in the years after Bush leaves office. There is literally not much money left to deal with.

And watch them try to put into the final Budget bill a shift from wage to price indexing for Social Security.