The RSC proposals would cut tens of billions of dollars more than Paul Ryan proposed. House conservatives ready to cut

It’s finally slash-and-burn time for conservatives, and the programs they target in a massive spending bill next week will help shape the national political debate over what the government can, and should, pay for.

Republicans are planning a freewheeling, open-ended debate that promises to test the party’s limits on how far it’s willing to go on spending cuts, and it may divide Democrats between those who want to embrace modest cuts and those who want to protect domestic programs from the GOP ax.


The most conservative faction in the House, the Republican Study Committee, already is preparing amendments that would choke off funding for President Barack Obama’s new health care law, cut domestic programs by $100 billion and force the government to pay creditors before funding other priorities if the limit on the national debt is hit. The RSC proposals would cut tens of billions of dollars more than Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has proposed, reflecting new tension within the GOP majority over how aggressive it should be.

The spending bill, called a “continuing resolution” or “CR,” is necessary because, without it, the government will run out of authority to spend money on March 4. Republican leaders rolled out the top-line spending number last week, and they’re expected to provide the details of the plan later this week. The bill is likely to hit the floor next week.

In a way, conservatives already have won in framing the debate: The president’s budget director, Jack Lew, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times over the weekend saying that next year’s budget will have to include cuts in some areas to fund “investments” in others. The debate has shifted from how to spend to how to cut. But conservatives also risk overreaching in etching targets on the backs of specific programs, each of which has a constituency powerful enough to have built its budget to the current level.

Traditionally, party leaders prohibit amendments on continuing resolutions. But House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his Republican leadership team have promised that it’s open season for rank-and-file lawmakers who want to offer amendments to spending bills — so long as they comport with new GOP-written House rules that make it tougher to spend and easier to cut.

That will test Republican leaders’ ability to keep control of their party’s message in the face of divisions that are certain to be laid bare by the kind of deep-cutting amendments that Democrats will use to portray Republicans as insensitive to the needs of their constituents.

GOP sources said the leadership is encouraging such fights, arguing that the House should work its will through several tough votes on spending cuts.

Besides, it’s all symbolic for the moment. The House version of the CR won’t become law. Rather, it’s a first stab at positioning the House for later negotiations with the Senate and the White House over what a final fiscal 2011 spending bill will look like. Some GOP aides were miffed that their party didn’t put forth a plan that cut $100 billion, if only to strengthen their negotiating hand with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

And the open process promises to divide Democrats, too, giving Republicans a better idea of which centrists might work with them on next year’s budget.

GOP leaders do not believe the CR should become a vehicle for anything but bringing so-called nonsecurity discretionary spending back to fiscal 2008 levels — a message that is sure to anger some of the more conservative members of the House Republican Conference because they know that’s a tiny drop in the seemingly bottomless bucket of national debt.

“The goal of the CR is not to defund health care,” a GOP leadership aide said. “The House passed a measure to repeal Obamacare. It’s not that we’re not dealing with that and not achieving other goals. The CR is the vehicle by which we’ll cut spending to ’08 levels.”

This all comes at a difficult time for House Republicans. After spending the past two years contending that sky-high unemployment was tied to Democratic governance, aides in the leadership have not been able to convert their efforts to cut spending into a message of creating jobs. That concern lingered last week as lawmakers were in their districts, while the Senate and White House remained in Washington pounding away on their talking points.

Their carefully planned agenda was first knocked off kilter by the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) in Tucson. And last week, the turmoil in Egypt — not slashing federal spending — captured the nation’s attention.

When the conversation turned to spending, it wasn’t how Republicans envisioned it. The “Pledge to America” — the election season document that Republicans believe carried them into the majority — called for $100 billion in spending cuts. By any measure, the GOP came up short of that goal when it unveiled the framework for the CR.

Republican leaders set an overall discretionary spending level of $1.055 trillion for fiscal 2011, an accounting year that is already five months old. That’s a $74 billion cut from the president’s proposed spending for the year — which was never enacted — but only about a $35 billion cut from the amount appropriated for fiscal 2010, according to figures provided by the House Appropriations Committee.

GOP leaders say their $100 billion promise should be judged on a combination of the upcoming CR and next year’s budget because they weren’t in charge when Democrats funded the first five months of fiscal 2011.

Americans for Prosperity called the plan a step in the right direction but said it hopes RSC Chairman Jim Jordan of Ohio’s more ambitious plan is adopted. Americans for Tax Reform noted that the plan met GOP promises.

Heritage Action Association, the think tank’s advocacy wing, was less kind, saying “what conservatives need to know is that the proposal leaves an unacceptable $42 billion on the table.” Of the $74 billion in reductions from Obama’s budget proposal, $58 billion is from the portion of the budget not directly related to national security. So Heritage Action’s number represents the difference between the $100 billion GOP leaders promised in cuts to domestic programs and the $58 billion envisioned in the CR.