POLITICAL WRECK AHEAD

Continued Republican anger over the president’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is mere distraction from more pressing issues in Congress. Ms. Miers, barring surprises, has a long set of hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee before a decision is made about her fitness for the court. But poorly considered spending and tax cuts are a more imminent and insid-ious problem that will emerge in a hundred ways in Congress.

Operation Offset began as a lengthy list of suggestions by conservative House Republicans to nominally pay for reconstruction after Katrina. The list contained all sorts of programs these members of Congress had been trying to kill for years but could not get the support for. That remains true, but a much smaller list – worth perhaps $50 billion, maybe more – now seems much more likely. Having just finished a fiscal year more than $300 billion in the red, Congress should think about balancing its budget, but this isn’t the way to do it.

Generally, Congress should try to make sure its ongoing programs – and tax cuts – are paid for. But one-time spending on, for instance, the war in Iraq is usually not offset. An emergency on the scale of Katrina certainly qualifies as one-time spending and is now expected to cost some $200 billion, a considerable sum but much less than Iraq and much less than the president’s total tax cuts will cost the budget over the next five years.

Speaker Dennis Hastert last week backed the cuts after making the intra-caucus mistake of appointing Rep. David Drier as majority leader, a decision conservatives made him rescind in favor of Rep. Roy Blunt. President Bush, with conservatives ensuring he had no political capital left after naming Ms. Miers, is now also supportive. Senate leaders Bill Frist and Judd Gregg are enthusiastic about cutting programs. The debate that will soon take place in Congress over which social services to cut for the poor and elderly – food or health care or both? – is not about fiscal conservatism but political muscle.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, as a member of the Finance Committee, is at the center of this debate because she represents a crucial committee vote. As usual, she is standing up for programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Food Stamps, the safety net that the offsets target. But she is facing enormous pressure to accede to more program cuts even as Republicans are looking to expand tax cuts under the guise of Katrina funding.

She deserves support in her committee and among the public for remaining a strong voice for the vulnerable. She should stick with no more than the level of spending cuts agreed to earlier this year in reconciliation, reject cuts that dig deeper into health care programs and work to postpone any further tax cuts within reconciliation that do not need to be addressed this year and add to the deficit permanently.

Congress is taking a dangerous course with tax dollars and crucial programs; it badly needs the senator’s fiscal common sense to prevent an otherwise likely wreck.