Cantor’s office says the House will return to the bill after the August recess. THUD bill pulled as GOP budget frays

With support collapsing, a $44.1 billion transportation and housing bill was pulled abruptly from the House floor Wednesday, and top Republicans conceded it was a further sign that the party’s budget strategy is unraveling.

Putting the best face on the situation, Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office said the House will return to the bill after the recess. But House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers bluntly said the chances of resurrecting the measure are “bleak at best.”


“With this action, the House has declined to proceed on the implementation of the very budget it adopted three months ago,” the Kentucky Republican said. “Thus, I believe that the House has made its choice: Sequestration — and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts — must be brought to an end.”

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Republican moderates of the Tuesday Group were among those most upset with the level of cuts. And while $350 million was restored Tuesday night to soften the reductions from popular community development block grants, the combination of these moderate defections plus a predictable bloc of conservatives who oppose most appropriations bills was fatal.

The decision came even as the House Appropriations Committee was locked in a bruising partisan markup on a $24.3 billion natural resources bill, which also demands deep reductions to meet the GOP’s targets. And the panel has all but abandoned any chance of reporting its nearly $122 billion labor, health and education bill before the August recess.

The Senate has sought to avoid these reductions by crafting its appropriations bills within the higher pre-sequester caps set by the Budget Control Act. Rogers made clear that he thinks these more generous funding levels “are also simply not achievable in this Congress.” But a critical test could come as early as Thursday, when the Senate’s own transportation and housing proposal is subject to a cloture vote.

In recent days, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has weighed in heavily trying to get Republicans to withhold their support. But the bill came out of the Senate Appropriations Committee on a strong bipartisan vote in June, and just as in the House, moderates, like Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), have been willing to fight for the added infrastructure investments.

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At this stage, McConnell appears to have the upper hand. But he damaged his own credibility Tuesday with fellow Republicans when he lent his support to a proposal to cancel about $1 billion in unobligated U.S. assistance for Egypt and instead use the money to repair aging bridges in this country.

The amendment, which was easily tabled on an 86-13 vote, has been proposed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as a first challenge to President Barack Obama over how the U.S. should respond to the recent ouster of Egypt’s elected president, Mohamed Morsi.

But it was strongly opposed by the Republican national security establishment, and the fact that McConnell — who once oversaw the entire foreign aid budget on Appropriations — should give into the political pressures generated by Paul was striking.

Indeed, these same national security Republicans, like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), are pivotal to the Democratic hopes of building some bipartisan coalition to defuse the threat of a second round of sequestration cuts this winter. Defense spending will again be on the chopping block, and absent some agreement between Congress and the White House, tens of billions in new cuts will take effect.

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Knowing this, the whole House Republican budget strategy has rested on the pretense that the Pentagon can somehow be protected even at the reduced spending levels demanded by the machinery of the BCA.

Since the first automatic cuts March 1, discretionary spending has been running close to $988 billion, of which $519 billion is for defense. The House budget pledged to meet the second round of sequestration, reducing total discretionary funds to $967 billion for 2014. But within this universe — to win needed votes — Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) promised hawks that defense would grow to $552 billion or $54 billion higher than the BCA assumes.

To pay for this, tens of billions would have to come from domestic programs — and the transportation and housing bill pulled by the GOP leadership was the first of three measures that had become virtual banks to make the numbers work.

The natural resources package, before the House panel Wednesday and covering Western lands and wildlife programs as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, was the second. Third, and the biggest of all, is the labor, health and education bill, which has yet to see the light of day.

Altogether, two-thirds of the $54 billion needed to protect defense came from just these three bills, and the level of appropriations cuts go well beyond anything attempted by the so-called Republican Revolution under Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.

When Republicans came back into power after the 2010 election, the battle cry was to roll back spending to levels set under former President George W. Bush. But the proposed new budget for the EPA overshoots, reverting to 1990 levels under his father’s presidency. And the initial funding for Community Development Block Grants underbid President Gerald Ford in the ’70s.

House Republicans on the Appropriations panel requested a meeting with the GOP leadership late Wednesday in the aftermath of the transportation bill being pulled. That session interrupted the markup of the natural resources bill, and Rogers indicated that he doesn’t expect to return to that subject now before the recess. “We’ll reconsider that in September,” he said.

Rogers said he had talked with Cantor Tuesday night but had not been consulted directly on Wednesday prior to when the measure was pulled.

But a floor exchange Tuesday afternoon between Reps. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and David Price (D-N.C.) might have been a harbinger of all that followed.

Both former professors — and still professorial — they are two of the more thoughtful and respected Appropriations members on both sides of the aisle.

“This is where we are and where we will continue to be until we control entitlement spending,” Cole said in defense of the GOP’s strategy. “Many of my friends on the other side of the aisle seem to reject this hard reality.”

But Cole side-stepped the fact that the domestic cuts are certainly worse for the House because of its desire to break the BCA and protect defense spending from sequestration.

“It is an impossible trade-off,” Price said. And the required reductions in domestic spending forces the two parties “far, far beyond the usual zone of political disagreement.”