An internal fight is holding up the House Republican effort to pass a budget that would inflict the maximum possible pain on working Americans, Politico reports in an article that would have to work hard to get in one more piece of Republican messaging. House Budget Committee Chair Diane Black found a way to get in the military spending to make “defense hawks” happy,
But several committee chairmen are now balking at the second part of the deal: a promise of about $50 billion in additional cuts to mandatory programs to make those very defense increases more digestible for conservatives. [...]
At the crux of the hold-up are chairmen like [Agriculture Committee Chairman Mike] Conaway and [Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg ] Walden who don’t want to slice billions of dollars from programs in their own jurisdiction. Some don’t want to give away valuable offsets that could be used for their other legislative priorities, like Conaway’s upcoming farm bill.
It takes nearly 30 paragraphs of references to “mandatory programs” and “entitlements” and “programs” and lamentation from far-far-right sources about how the committee chairs “that are kind of stonewalling” need to “be part of the team here” before we learn what is at stake for the American people, and one of the reasons this is so fraught for Republicans:
It would hew closely to conservative budgets of years past, including the Medicare premium support model popularized by now-House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). It would also roll back huge sums of Medicaid spending while stripping hundreds of billions from anti-poverty programs.
Like past GOP budgets, big federal programs like food stamps, agriculture subsidies and Medicaid would be on the chopping block. But this time, those mandatory cuts could go into effect if the budget plan is adopted by Senate Republicans as well.