Erick Erickson:
Republicans in the Senate want to restore veterans benefits to the Paul Ryan – Patty Murray Budget plan.
Harry Reid is blocking the amendment so Republicans are blaming Harry Reid for cutting veterans benefits.
That is intellectually dishonest of the GOP.
Paul Ryan, a Republican, drafted the plan with Patty Murray, a Democrat.
House Republicans overwhelming approved the plan before it even made it to Harry Reid for a vote. The Republicans could have restored the cuts themselves in the House. Instead, they voted for the plan with the cuts to veterans benefits and went home.
Were Harry Reid to restore the cuts, he’d need to get the House back from Christmas vacation.
Republicans are going to have to own this. Paul Ryan drafted it. John Boehner pushed it through and didn’t give even the 72 hours he promised he’d give for people to look through his legislation. Maybe had John Boehner spent more time reading through the legislation instead of blasting conservatives for opposing cuts to veterans’ benefits and tax increases he could have done something.
Uhm, not. It is quite likely there won’t BE any such cuts. The Senate changed it to take effect in calendar 2016 rather than 2015. If the Republicans take the Senate, it gets undone in the next budget agreement.
November 2014 — next Congressional elections.
January 2015 — next Congress seated.
Spring-Summer 2015 FY 2016 budget is drafted
September 30, 20015 – current budget agreement expires.
October 1, 2015 FY 2016 budget takes effect.
Republicans can remove that item before it ever takes effect if they take the Senate in 2014.
9 Republican Senators stupidly voted for this Budget deal. Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Ron Johnson (R-WI), John Hoeven (R-ND), and Rob Portman (R-OH).
You can’t fix stupid, you have to vote it out of office.
No, they didn’t “stupidly” vote for the budget deal. The alternative of not voting for it would have been worse. First of all, Democrats refused to remove the retirement COLA provision of the bill. Several amendments were proposed to remove it, Reid would not allow it.
In 2013 there were $85 billion in sequester cuts, some of which still had not been implemented. Without this deal, ANOTHER $109 billion in cuts were to be made nearly all of it coming from the military. We already have an Army that hasn’t had any significant training in months. This would have idled a good part of our military for the entire year of 2014.
The alternative to not passing this deal would have been gutting the military with no prospect of any better deal. They took the least bad option they had. The House can not FORCE Harry Reid to accept a better outcome. Anything the House produces has to get Senate buy off to become law. This was the best deal they could get. They DID manage to get the retirement COLA provision pushed back to 2016 which means we can get rid of that if we can take the Senate in 2014 and knock Reid out of his chair. Attempting to blame this on the Republicans is intellectually dishonest. This was a case of Democrats trying to force the Republicans into a situation where they had to vote for something the Democrats knew the Republican base would not like. It took some stones for them to actually pass this despite that fact in order to save our military capability in the coming year.
The fault for this goes squarely on the Democrats and as long as Reid sits in that chair, changing the Republican faces in the Senate does absolutely nothing. We could have 45 Cruz clones in the Senate but it wouldn’t change anything. We have tried everything. We have sent bill after bill to the Senate, and they sit on Reid’s table. We tried defunding, and the public ran in support of the Democrats. There really are no options left and changing the people are not going to make any difference if you don’t have the votes and if Reid is still in charge of the Senate.
Never in my life have we had a Senate leader like Reid. He needs to go. The Senate Democrats are the biggest threat facing us right now. We can straighten out the Republicans later but first we need to get Reid out of that chair.