Congress hasn’t even settled the 2011 spending fight and many lawmakers already are looking ahead to the next big battles over raising the country’s debt ceiling and the 2012 budget — with top Republicans beginning to draw lines in the sand.
A growing number of Republicans say they will not vote to raise the country’s debt limit unless it is accompanied by big changes to the way the government taxes and spends.
“If all we do is go in there in three or four weeks or in a couple months and extend the debt limit again and do nothing else, the world is going to look at us and say America and its political leadership is not serious about dealing with this incredible issue,” Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
That drew condemnation from Sen. Mark R. Warner, Virginia Democrat, who has been working with a bipartisan group of senators on a framework for bringing government spending and taxing into balance. Mr. Warner said the responsible option is to raise the debt limit so the government can borrow funds to pay for its operations.
“It just frightens the heck out of me that anyone responsible would say, ’Let’s go ahead and light the fuse that might create the next economic meltdown,’” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
As lawmakers fanned out across the Sunday political talk shows, spending and record deficits dominated the debate.
This week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, will present a budget blueprint for 2012. Beyond that, he said, lawmakers will cut more than $4 trillion over the next decade, including slowing the growth of spending for Medicare and Medicaid.
“We intend to not only cut discretionary spending and put caps on spending, you have to address the drivers of our debt,” he said, previewing his plan on Fox.
He said his budget will tackle entitlement spending for Medicare and Medicaid, and he accused the White House of ignoring both of those programs’ long-term problems in the budget that the president sent to Congress last month.
Mr. Ryan also said he expects Democrats will attack the GOP for the slower pace of spending: “Yes, we will be giving our political adversaries things to use against us in the next election, and shame on them if they do that.”
The most pressing problem, however, is a final 2011 spending plan, already six months overdue. Congress is now racing a Friday deadline, when the current stopgap funding expires.
After remaining mostly out of the fray, President Obama inserted himself into the debate this weekend by making phone calls to the two men who are trying to hammer out a deal: House Speaker John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.
A White House statement said the president urged the negotiators to find common ground and would not accept extraneous “policy riders,” the legislative add-ons House Republicans passed in their spending bill to defund Planned Parenthood and stop the Obama administration’s health care and environmental plans.
Mr. Obama said both sides are at least working off the same set of numbers for potential cuts — about $33 billion below 2011 spending — though Mr. Boehner said nothing is final on that score.
Democrats have moved substantially off of their initial stance that no cuts were in order. Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat who just months ago decried any cuts, now says $33 billion is “very reasonable.”
Republicans, meanwhile, say they are still fighting for $61 billion in cuts compared with 2010 spending.
Of the $33 billion in cuts the White House and top Democrats have embraced, $10 billion already has passed in two short-term funding bills. Another $10 billion would come on mandatory spending, which generally is renewed every year automatically. That leaves negotiators to haggle over about $13 billion in real discretionary spending cuts.
Rather than look at what programs can be cut, negotiators appear to have settled on a dollar figure — in this case, $33 billion — and are now going back to write up the cuts necessary to achieve that.
“We’ve agreed on a number. Let’s work to get that number done,” Mr. Reid said.
Mr. Reid drew his own lines, saying the cuts cannot come to education or veterans programs, or other Democratic priorities, which he said are not major contributors to the national deficit.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
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