No Shutdown, But a Lot of Sellouts
by John Nichols
If you had asked Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman or
John
Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Jimmy Carter or even Bill Clinton what
Democrats would defend in a fight over the future of government, there's
no real question that funding for housing, public transportation,
community development programs and safe air travel would be high on the
list.
Yet, in order to achieve the Friday night deal that averted a government
shutdiown -- for a week and, potentially, longer if an anticipated
agreement is cobbled together and agreed to -- all of those programs
took serious hits.
The arrangement worked out Friday night
averted the threatened shutdown with a two-step process. First, the
House and Senate passed a one-week spending bill that addressed the
immediate threat. That should give Congress and the White House time to
finalize a fiscal 2011 spending deal -- on which they have agreed in
principle -- before an April 15 deadline.
So who won the standoff? President Obama says the deal is good for the
future, and that might make some Democrats think that he and the
Democrats prevailed.
They didn't.
The one-week spending bill enacted by the House and Senate contains $2
billion in spending cuts to transportation, housing and community
development programs.
A Senate Appropriations Committee review
says that most of the $2 billion in cuts contained in the one-week
bill come from a $1.5 billion slashing of the Federal Railroad
Administration's High Speed and Intercity Passenger Rail program. More
cuts are achieved by hacking $220 million from the Department of Housing
and Urban Development's Community Development Fund. And research into
making air travel safer and more efficient took cuts as well.
In other words, precsiely the sort of programs that Democrats used to defend
were slashed.
The Senate agreed to the one-week plan by unanimous consent.
Seventy House members opposed the bill. Of those 70 "no" votes, 42 came
from Democrats. They did not want a shutdown, as some of the GOP "no"
voters did. But the dissenting Democrats said the cuts went too far.
They were right.
And we will need a lot more FDR Democrats to prevent the broader deal
from becoming the greatest triumph yet in the GOP campaign to end the
New Deal and bend the arc of history against progress.
John Nichols is Washington correspondent for The Nation and associate
editor of The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. A co-founder of the
media reform organization Free Press, Nichols is co-author with Robert
W. McChesney of The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution
that Will Begin the World Again and Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media
Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. Nichols is also author of
Dick: The Man Who is President and The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders'
Cure for Royalism.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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