SENATORIAL SENSE

Good for the Senate, and Maine’s senators in particular, for returning fiscal discipline to the federal budget debate. By voting for two amendments to the budget resolution this week, Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe brought back pay-as-you-go restraints to the process and kept Medicaid from being set up for more cuts. By doing so, they put the demands of the nation ahead of the pleading of their party.

Both supported an amendment by Sen. Russ Feingold to fully reinstate the pay-as-you-go requirement. Along with a growing economy, this provision in the 1990s dramatically reduced the federal deficit and could again now. It requires new spending or tax changes in Congress to not add to the federal deficit, leaving proposals to be either budget neutral or accompanied by offsets with savings found in existing funds.

Both senators also supported a successful amendment by Sen. Max Baucus to strike a “reconciliation instruction” provision, which otherwise would have required the Finance Committee to make $21.4 billion in cuts over five years to entitlement programs, likely Medicaid and the earned income tax credit among them, while adding $18 billion for the child tax credit, for a net savings of $3.4 billion in entitlements.

It is important to note that the Baucus amendment did not remove the money for the tax credit, only the special instructions that protect it. This popular idea, supported by President Bush, will pass in the Senate without the protection – and now without the near-certain cuts to Medicaid.

The primary problem with the reconciliation instruction was that it would have locked the Senate into a course of action before the real debate had begun. Such instructions began appearing two decades ago as a way of promoting fiscal discipline; then they were for deficit reduction. Now they are being used to ensure that tax cuts can be protected from filibuster, are difficult to amend and can pass with a simple majority. These protected cuts are especially harmful when coupled with service reductions that target such essentials as health care. In Maine, the Medicaid cut, if the cut were distributed evenly nationwide, would have come to $81 million, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Maine’s senators have voted against Republican Party wishes to support important programs in the past and they deserve credit for resisting political pressure to support health care for the poor and fiscal restraints on further tax cuts this time.