Freshman Sen. Marco Rubio’s statements against short-term spending measures are part of a small, but burgeoning, conservative rebellion against the three-week spending bill introduced Friday by GOP House leaders.
The Florida Republican joined a push by several key outside groups opposing bill, including the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council’s political arms. Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Republican Study Committee (RSC), the conservative caucus in the House, is against another short-term spending bill. And many in the freshman class are “pissed,” in the words of a GOP House aide.
Insiders say a recent speech before the RSC by Rep. Mike Pence, in which the Indiana Republican said it was time to draw a line in the sand, galvanized the hard line against the bill. A second GOP aide says momentum is with the conservative critics. “I keep hearing of members supportive of the CR — or undecided — switching to opposition, but I have yet to hear of a single member who was originally opposed now switching to support,” the source said.
On the other hand, Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, called opposition to the short-term bill a tactical mistake in a weekend appearance on CSPAN.
Why are some conservatives opposing the bill, which is designed to avert a government shutdown while Republican House Speaker John Boehner negotiates a longer-term bill with Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and President Obama?
The answer has to do with both the substance of the bill and differences on political strategy.
The new continuing resolution (CR) doesn’t include any of the policy riders that are included in the House-passed CR. Those riders would defund Obamacare, EPA climate change and other regulations, Planned Parenthood and National Public Radio, among others.
More importantly, opponents fear the three-week CR is playing into Reid’s and Obama’s hands, allowing Democrats to lump three debates into one: the CR, a vote to raise the debt ceiling and next year’s budget.
Conservatives itching for bolder spending cuts want Boehner to extract concessions from Democrats on each of these. They think allowing Reid and Obama to lump them together reduces the leverage of Republicans.
“A three-week CR would expire on April 8, 2011, just as the House of Representatives is passing the FY2012 budget out of committee and sending it to the floor. This has always been Senator Reid’s endgame strategy: continually pushing short-term CRs to move this fight back far enough that it starts to overlap with conservative attempts to use the FY2012 budget debate and debt-ceiling debate as opportunities to get our nation’s fiscal house in order,” Michael Needham, the chief executive of Heritage Action, wrote in a March 14 open letter.
“Merging the continuing resolution debate and the debt ceiling debate together would be the worst possible situation for conservatives. It would limit their negotiating position for substantive cuts when the clock is ticking toward what Democrats and Republican leaders are calling not just a shut-down situation, but a default situation,” wrote the influential blogger Erick Erickson Monday.
Reid’s office did not respond to a request for comment. But a March 9 post by left-wing blogger Ezra Klein lays out the rationale: “Democrats need to bring [the debates] together, which is part of why they’re trying to slide the 2011 spending bill into a larger deficit-reduction conversation that can also include a rise in the debt limit,” Klein wrote.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, pointed to Democratic inaction on the House-passed spending bill that would fund the government through the rest of the fiscal year.
“The House has passed a funding bill for the rest of the year that will cut spending to help the private sector create jobs and includes other important policy priorities. At this point, the Democrats who run Washington have yet to offer anything but the status quo — and the status quo is unacceptable to the American people,” Steel said.
What’s the endgame for GOP leadership? And how does the three-week CR play into it? One GOP leadership aide told The Daily Caller that the end result of the negotiations will likely be an adoption of the continuing resolution originally introduced by GOP leaders that cut $31 billion – about half the $61 billion the freshman class helped convince Boehner to cut in the final version.
If that’s what Republicans get – especially if it’s part of a deal that includes a vote to increase the debt ceiling – conservatives would be deeply unhappy, insiders say.