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Dancing the Budget Tango

Even before the fight erupted over whether to replace deceased Justice Antonin Scalia, President Obama and Republicans in Congress were squaring off on the nation’s spending priorities. Republicans from the region are proving a thorn in the president’s side on the final budget he sent to Congress

Every year here in Washington there’s a special dance that occurs between the White House and lawmakers in Congress. Feel free to think of it as the Budget Tango: like all things policy oriented, it’s not sexy. But this year Republicans decided there would be no dance. G-O-P leaders upended decades of sacred congressional protocol and refused to even invite Obama administration officials to the Capitol to discuss their budget numbers. Northern Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly says Republican’s presidential snub reeks of petty partisanship run amok.

“In denying him a normal hearing process I think actually is un-American and a terrible violation of the most basic glue that allows the two branches to work together and to compete.”

But most Republicans are fine with the move. Virginia Republican Morgan Griffith says there’s no way Republicans like him were going to support the president’s four point one trillion dollar budget.

“It’s more of the same, and in the previous years I think he’s gotten a total of two votes for his budget – even the Democrats won’t vote for it. So I’m not sure what his purpose is in putting something forward that doesn’t have a chance, I mean, it never has.” 

The G-O-P is facing its own internal party squabble over the budget. A small but powerful group of House Republicans are trying to slash the budget numbers already agreed to by congressional Republicans and the Democratic White House. The tea-party tinged House Freedom Caucus which is dead set on slashing the budget agreement reached at the end of last year by thirty billion dollars – even though that could derail the GOP’s chances of even passing a budget this year. Griffith says Republicans were elected to rein in spending and they need to do just that.

“We need to do something to show the American people that we’re still serious about the debt and the deficit, and the debt will continue to go up until we get the deficit under control.”

Let’s get into the details of the president’s budget. It has practical implications on your life: It calls for a focused effort to eradicate cancer, and for expanding access to early education. It also seeks to double down on efforts to boost the renewable energy sector, as it would hike taxes by ten dollars a barrel on oil. Former Virginia Governor Mark Warner sits on the Senate Budget Committee. He says the president laid out a solid blueprint for the nation’s future.

“Where it adds new spending programs it actually pays for them, as somebody who has been enormously concerned that we’re about to leave our kids with a $19 trillion debt, I think we need to make new investments, particularly in infrastructure, but we’ve got to pay for them. And the president does pay for them.”

Warner says the president’s budget is also good for the commonwealth.

“It takes on new areas of concern around cyber security, this is an area I’ve worked very hard on in both building up the cyber workforce in Virginia but also realizing if we don’t do that we are as vulnerable in cyber as we are in any field. Virtually every American company has been penetrated at one point or another.”

But Republicans accuse the president of playing budget gimmicks with defense by shifting money from an overseas contingency fund for ongoing wars to the military’s baseline budget. Virginia Republican Rob Wittman says it goes in the wrong direction and hurts Virginia’s military installations and troops. 

“The long-term prospects for our military are problematic, because we’ve lost the investment that we’ve had from the previous years in training our troops, maintaining their equipment and modernizing.”

This is an election year. While neither party is likely to see many items on their competing wish lists checked off, the competing budget priorities will play a central role when voters cast ballots. Whether Republicans overplayed their hand or whether the White House had no hand to play is yours to decide at the ballot box.