Fiscal Conservatives

Some congressional Republicans last week might have wished Senate moderates, including Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, would go away. Sen. Snowe said the other day that she wished those Republicans would come home to the party. A dispute over spending restrictions in the budget resolution has placed most of the GOP on the side of larger deficits, not where they traditionally have resided, but by holding to conservative principles both of Maine’s senators can steer the debate toward saner fiscal ground.

The Senate has been searching for a compromise between the position held by most Republicans, who don’t want new tax cuts to be forced to pass a three-fifths vote threshold or be offset by cuts elsewhere, and Democrats plus the Maine senators and GOP Sens. John McCain and Lincoln Chafee, who do. In a closely divided Senate, those few Republican votes make all the difference. The compromise left by Republican leadership as the Senate adjourned last month would provide the pay-as-you-go provisions for one year, an unacceptable time given that the costs for many of the tax-cut provisions would not take effect for two or three years.

The criticism of “pay-go,” like the criticism of spending restraints such as Gramm-Rudman-Hollings in the 1980s and the first round of pay-go and the Balanced Budget Amendment in the 1990s, is that they are crude tools for crafting a budget, more gimmicks than sound policies. (Of the Balanced Budget Amendment, Sen. Snowe observes, “If it was a gimmick, Congress would have passed it by now.”) But for a Congress that can resist everything but temptation and the pressure to deliver goodies to the home state, a measure that demands restraint, however crude, is a necessary device. Republicans, until a couple of years ago, used to demand that the Democratic majority at the time use them.

Getting a budget resolution – essentially the blueprint for spending for the upcoming year – is important. Without one, the appropriations process becomes more complicated, raising the debt ceiling becomes an opportunity for amendment mischief and, politically, it makes the majority party look as if it can’t run Congress. But these hardly explain the ham-handed comments about the GOP moderates – that they’ll take any small favor they’re offered or they’ll go along with pay-go and let it be killed the next year. House Speaker Dennis Hastert found himself in the interesting position of doubting that Sen. McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, understood the meaning of sacrifice.

Sen. McCain replied in part, “I fondly remember a time when real Republicans stood for fiscal responsibility. Apparently those days are long gone for some in our party.”

It shouldn’t be. With a war that may cost $50 billion this year, a record-setting deficit of $420 billion in 2004 and baby boomers getting ready to retire, Congress should take extra care with new spending, and the safeguards under pay-go are a reasonable standard for doing that. “These are Republican principles that I’ve fought for,” said Sen. Snowe. “I don’t understand what has happened” to the party.