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FoxNews.com...
Conservatives Voice
Frustration With Short-Term Budget Bills
Published March 14, 2011
Congressional Republicans, notably freshmen elected on vows to cut
spending, are getting fed up with the short-term budget bills that
leaders on both sides of the aisle seem content to pass while wrangling
over a spending plan for the last six months of the fiscal year.
“An absurd pattern has clearly developed in Washington,” Sen. Marco
Rubio, R-Fla., a Tea Party-aligned freshman, wrote in a column Monday
posted on the conservative blog Redstate.com. “I did not come to the
U.S. Senate to be part of some absurd political theatre.”
Lawmakers in early March approved a two-week stopgap that cut $4
billion from last year’s levels. Now, they’re preparing to vote on
another stopgap, this one for three weeks, which would cut $6 billion.
But that only gets Congress a fraction of the way to the $61 billion in
cuts Republicans called for this year and a fraction of a fraction of
the way toward reducing the deficit. With the federal government
lurching from short-term budget to short-term budget, a growing number
of conservatives say it’s time for a confrontation.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., while acknowledging
the three-week extension is not the “ultimate solution,” told “Fox News
Sunday” he expects the upcoming bill to pass.
“I don’t think we ought to let the government shut down,” he said.
Rubio joins a short list of Tea Party senators, including Rand Paul of
Kentucky, Jim DeMint of South Carolina and Mike Lee of Utah, who
already have expressed their discontent with the stopgap budgets. He
said he would “no longer” back short-term budget bills, adding that
Congress cannot “nickel-and-dime our way” out of the debt crisis.
Resistance on the Senate side is being matched by conservative ire in
the House, where spending bills originate.
Fox News has learned that Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the
influential Republican Study Committee, will oppose the short-term
bill, scheduled to hit the floor Tuesday or Wednesday. The study
committee represents the bloc of the most conservative voices in the
House -- Jordan’s stance could open the door for others to follow suit
in voting against the bill.
In a Tweet last week, freshman Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., already
announced: “I will NOT be voting for another short term CR. There is a
confrontation coming on this budget and the sooner we get to it the
better.”
And Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, said the debate is distracting
lawmakers from much bigger tasks -- like tackling the $1.1 trillion
deficit in President Obama’s proposed 2012 budget.
“We were elected to make bold changes to federal spending and to
reverse our unsustainable deficits,” Huelskamp said in a statement,
announcing he will vote against the three-week budget bill.
Read the rest of the story at Foxnews
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