News and updates

Today, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) said that “no substantive progress has been made” on fiscal cliff negotiations, and warned that if Democrats don’t come up with a better compromise on entitlements and spending then “there’s a real danger of going off the fiscal cliff.”  This confirms that talks to stave off the full range of tax increases and spending cuts at year’s end have made little apparent progress since President Obama met with congressional leaders at the White House on November 16^th.

There has been some speculation the past few days that a deal is in the making, and would most likely include a tax increase totaling nearly $1.2 trillion – the middle ground of what the President wants and what Republicans say they could get enough votes to pass. Entitlement programs, mainly Medicare, would be cut by no less than $400 billion to get Republicans to swallow those tax hikes. There will be at least $1.2 trillion in spending cuts and “war savings” but details on these cuts have not yet been released.  Regardless of all this speculation, any final deal will come not by a group effort but in a private deal between two men: President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner.

It appears that earmarks will remain “taboo” when the new congress convenes in January. During organizational meetings the week before Thanksgiving, the House Republicans voted to extend the current ban on earmarking for the entire two years of the 113th Congress. That leaves the House Democrats, who meet for their organizational meetings on Thursday, no choice but to accept a continuation of those rules. The Senate Republicans also voted to refrain from adding earmarks to appropriations bills in the next two years. That leaves the Senate Democrats with little choice but to go along — because writing in special line-items of spending for their favorite university research centers, highway expansions, urban renewal projects and the like would look unprincipled and politically inept if they’re acting unilaterally (and, besides, doing so would be pointless so long as the House won’t go along with writing any spending-bill conference reports with earmarks included).

 Many senior lawmakers would like to see a return of what they call “directed spending,” but they concede there’s no way for that to happen until the fiscal cliff is averted and deficit reduction efforts are well underway. So it looks like it could be the middle of the decade, at the earliest, that we could see the practice of earmarking return to Congress.