Bush's Priorities: Found in Translation
In a speech last week to the Business and Industry Association for New Hampshire, President Bush explained his mindset when determining how to spend American taxpayer dollars. "Of course, you'd like to take a vacation every week, you know, some exotic place -- but you've got to set your priorities -- you can't do that. You want do this or do that, go to a fancy restaurant every night, but that's not setting priorities." Given the make-up of his budget, President Bush apparently thinks that funding priorities like education, veterans' health, and a strong defense is akin to buying a cruise to Tahiti. Below, we've translated some other Bush's other priorities, as evidenced in his proposed 2007 budget. (For the best coverage of the latest budget news, visit American Progress' new Budget Blog.)
BUSH: 'TOO MANY POOR KIDS GO TO COLLEGE': Federal programs to help students pay for higher education "take significant hits" in President Bush's budget: "The Perkins Loan program would be eliminated, and Pell grant funding for college students would drop by $4.6 billion."
Smart poor kids should not go to college! It hurts us C-students who don't have much on the ball, besides their name
BUSH: 'OIL COMPANIES AREN'T MAKING ENOUGH MONEY': "The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years," the New York Times reports today. "New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government."
Hell, Daddy and his friends gotta make plenty before the oil runs out, coz I'll be needing my inheritance, so I can buy me a big old hunk of land in Patagonia.
BUSH: 'LEAVING NO CHILD BEHIND ISN'T WORTH THE COST': Department of Education spending on vital programs -- Upward Bound, GEAR UP, dropout prevention, etc. -- would fall by $2.1 billion, or 3.8 percent, under the president's budget. In all, Bush proposes to cut "42 Education Department programs to save $3.5 billion" while flat-funding two of education's most important programs, Title I and IDEA.
Besides being racist as hell!
BUSH: 'NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE ARE ENTERING OUR COUNTRY UNDETECTED': While some want to make border security the only answer to illegal immigration, it must be a significant part of the solution to the estimated 700,000 people who slip through our borders undetected each year. Despite congressional approval to hire 10,000 new border agents over five years, the administration only requested funding for 210 new hires for 2006. For 2007, the administration wants to hire 1,500 new border agents, a move in the right direction but still less than what was authorized by the December 2004 intelligence reform legislation.
BUSH: 'VETERANS SHOULD PAY MORE FOR HEALTH CARE': Veterans younger than 65 would pay up to two or three times more for the military's health care program "under a controversial set of fee increases" proposed in the latest budget. "About 3.1 million retirees and their families nationwide would be affected," the San Diego Union-Tribune reports.
This takes nerve, from guys who never served! I hope that military families remember this the next time they are about to pull that old Rethug lever in the voting booth.
BUSH: 'TRUST ME -- TERRORISTS WILL NEVER TRY TO HIDE EXPLOSIVES IN AIRLINE CARGO': The Department of Homeland Security once again fails to address air cargo security, the Achilles heel of aviation security. The Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) continues to devote a disproportionate share of its resources to passenger aviation security, in essence, fighting the last war. However, while adding significant amounts in new technology for air passenger checkpoints and in-line luggage screening, only 1 percent of TSA's 2007 $4.7 billion budget, or $45 million, is devoted to the air cargo that is carried in passenger aircraft. While passengers and their baggage are thoroughly scanned, the vast majority of air cargo is not, a vulnerability well known since September 11.
Why the hell should Americans have to fly through airports in their sock feet while cargo still goes unchecked? Makes one wonder if the Bushites even expect another terrorist attempt?
BUSH: 'I STILL WANT TO PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY': When President Bush first launched his campaign to privatize Social Security last year, just 39 percent of Americans approved of how he was handling the issue. A year later, that number has dropped to 35 percent. Apparently, Bush didn't get the message. "[T]his year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal," Newsweek reports. Beginning in 2010, people could set up private accounts at a cost of $700 billion dollars over seven years, all funds diverted from Social Security tax revenues.
A little like the Total Information Awareness program; Congress through a fit, so the program just showed up somewhere else. Bush and Cheney are going to do as they damn well please until they are impeached, tried and imprisoned.
BUSH: 'DRINKING CLEAN WATER IS A PRIVILEGE': President Bush's budget would dramatically reduce community environment funding by 13 percent, with cuts proposed for the Environmental Protection Agency eight times larger than other agencies on average. A very short list of cuts: Clean Water State Revolving Fund (provides states with low-interest loans for infrastructure so they don't have to drink polluted water), Superfund Toxic Cleanup (funds clean-up of toxic waste sites), State and Tribal Air Grants (funds local community efforts to improve healthy air quality), Clean School Bus Initiative (completely eliminated). (More details here.)
Who lobbied for this? The bottled water people, who fill their 6 dollar bottles of water right out of the tap?
BUSH: 'MY HIGHEST PRIORITY: TAX CUTS FOR THE WEALTHIEST': American Progress fellow Gene Sperling has spelled out Bush's budget narrative: "in the face of unpredictable, external, deficit-exploding forces beyond their control [like Katrina and Iraq], these brave budget warriors are successfully battling to return Washington to fiscal sanity." Actually, we could fund our legitimate priorities and reduce the deficit if not for Bush's tax cuts and his costly Medicare prescription drug benefit. If the tax cuts are made permanent, those two programs combined will cost more than $550 billion in 2011 and each year after.
This is, of course, highway robbery and there should be an all out tax revolt, by the working poor and the middle class.
The Constitution Is Not A Technicality
Last week, before proposing his 2007 budget (discussed above), President Bush signed into law the 2006 budget that would cut Medicaid and other programs by $40 billion over five years. Or so it seemed. It turns out the Senate voted on a different version of the bill than the President signed. In this case, the Senate clerk's office typed "36 months," rather than "13 months" in a section dealing with Medicare payments for oxygen tanks. "Staff discovered the Senate clerk's mistake in January, before the House took up the measure," CQ reported, "but the glitch was not disclosed" until last week. The right-wing covered up the problem because it isn't confident the Senate would not vote to pass the draconian budget measure again to fix the error. The Framers, however, knew exactly how they wanted a bill to become law. The Constitution's "Presentment Clause" (Article I, Section 7) mandates that "every bill," before the President signs it, "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate." "Each house has to pass the whole law and the same law," said Alan Morrison, a lecturer at Stanford University Law School. "This is a case where the Constitution is very clear."
WE JUST WENT AHEAD AND FIXED THE GLITCH: A congressional staffer said that "the Senate clerk's glitch had been noticed by staff in January," but the House was allowed to vote on the erroneous bill anyway. Once the House voted, the Senate clerk fixed the error and House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) "certified" the bill before sending it to the President. The mistake was then "re-discovered" last week, forcing the Senate to pass a resolution saying "the intent of the Congress in enacting the bill into law." The House has not yet taken up the Senate's corrective measure. Clearly, leaders in both houses of Congress would prefer to sweep the issue under the rug because the Senate and the House barely approved the bill after considering it five times. Few want to vote again on controversial cuts to services for the poor.
CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR: If Congress chooses not to re-vote on the bill, the thorny constitutional issues will remain because "as anyone who passed high school civics knows, a bill can only become a law if the House and Senate pass it in identical form." Congressional Research Service reports confirm that the two versions must be "in precisely the same form." Even if the House were to approve the Senate's corrective resolution, courts may still have to settle the problem. "It wouldn't surprise me if a court struck [the bill] down," said Michael Gerhardt of the University of North Carolina's School of Law. Added George Washington Law's Jonathan Turley, "I would find it surprising that a court would give the Speaker a pass on effectively negating the bicameral requirement of the Constitution." Courts would be interested in resolving the issue because of the possibility of future cases "where there isn't a clerical mistake but there's an effort to deceive or change the result."
CONGRESS TOO OFTEN FINISHES AT THE ELEVENTH HOUR: The bill's right-wing supporters claim the mistake was no big deal. "This type of thing happens more often than people realize," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's (R-TN) spokesperson said, "but most of the time technical corrections happen pretty quietly." But in the end, the mistake points to the larger problem of how quickly the leadership brings legislation to the floor. Members of Congress often do not have enough to time to read a large bill, much less understand the effects it will have on their constituents. In December, the House leadership pushed the budget through under "martial law" provisions, allowing the bill to go through without waiting the time required under House rules. Rep. Jim Gerlach (R-PA) later changed his vote on the budget, complaining that "even the providers of these services weren't aware of these problems until after the House passed the report in December." Rather than haphazardly pass rushed legislation, Congress should adopt a proposal Rep. David Obey (D-WI) and others unveiled at the Center for American Progress in December: printed copies of all legislation should be made available "to all members of the House for a period of 24 hours." At the very least, this would give Congress the opportunity to fix obvious typos, and perhaps even allow them to know what's in the bill.
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