The Reflecting Pool

A Shocking Admission
Pssst. This is just between you and me, OK? If this gets out, my big new contract as an analyst on the Lehrer News Hour could be in jeopardy. Is it a deal? OK. Here's my confession. I really don't understand the federal budget process. Maybe it was those 11 formative years spent in Denver, when I actually helped at least one legislature revamp its appropriations process. Maybe the mostly straightforward approach that state legislatures take to pass their budgets became too engrained, but, I have to tell you, I've spent the past 22 years dreading federal budget season. "Oh, no," I think. "Here it comes again. Another excruciating stretch of weeks (actually months) of faking it. Budget resolutions? Reconciliation? 302(b) allocations? Reserve funds? What's that all about?" There are people who know this stuff inside and out. Michael Bird, NCSL's chief lobbyist, does. Bill Hoagland, former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee, does. Stan Collender, once a Hill rat and now a columnist for Roll Call, a newspaper that covers Congress, does. Wendell Primus, the budget advisor to Speaker Pelosi, does. But I don't.

So, given this shocking announcement, you have every right to be skeptical when I tell you this week has been huge on the federal budget front. But, you really can trust me on this. I've talked to Michael Bird. I've read Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly and the Washington Post and they all agree. This is a big week on the budget front. Why? Because, the Senate and House Budget committees are marking up their different versions of a budget resolution for FY 2009.

(Just in case you are as nearly in the dark as I am about all of this, we'll take a short time out here to try to explain. Adoption of the federal budget begins each year when the president submits the administration's budget proposal to Congress. The Senate and House Budget committees then develop budget resolutions, which may or may not incorporate the president's proposal. The resolutions, which do not, by the way, require the president's signature, are considered by the full Senate and House, passed in some version, conferenced, then presumably approved in the same form by both bodies. Once passed, the resolution establishes the parameters that guide the work over the next several months of the Appropriations committees and their dozen subcommittees. Although the blueprint offered in the resolution is malleable, the resolution is, nevertheless, subject to fierce lobbying from the outside and intense negotiations within Congress. Get your key issue covered in the resolution and you've got a good start toward success in an appropriations bill. Get left out of the resolution and you're going to be working a lot harder over the next few months.

You're also going to have to suspend your skepticism to trust me on two other counts. One is that both the House and Senate Budget committee versions of the resolution offer hope for beefed-up funding for a variety of state programs. The House proposal would provide $22 billion more for domestic spending than President Bush called for in the budget he sent to Congress last month. The Senate blueprint would exceed the president's domestic spending proposal by $18 billion. A lot of this extra money would go to critical state-federal programs such as children's health, child support enforcement, infrastructure, education and energy.

You don't even have to trust me very much to figure out that these congressional proposals almost certainly will set-up a confrontation with the White House on the budget over the next weeks and months. The president's budget director, Jim Nussle, has already sent a letter to the Budget committees reiterating "that appropriations bills that exceed the president's reasonable and responsible spending levels will be met with a veto." North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad, chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded with a threat of his own. If President Bush wants to be "relevant" in his last year in office, Senator Conrad told the Washington Post, then he will cooperate. Otherwise, "clearly Congress could just wait him out."

Do you get the feeling you might be reading more about this in The Reflecting Pool? Think of it as the blind leading the blind.

Governors Mad as Hell
The nation's governors were in our nation's capital last week for the mid-winter meeting of the National Governors Association. For much of this decade, NGA's effectiveness in working with Congress and the administration has been stymied by partisan disagreements among governors. Many Republican governors were close to President Bush and were committed to his domestic agenda. Democrat governors were, well, just the opposite. That made it hard for them to reach agreement within NGA on state-federal issues and for governors to lobby effectively together. All of that seems to have changed—at least to some extent—over the past year or two. There appears to be a bit more bi-partisanship within NGA. Governors appear to be able to coalesce around some key issues and to be united in their message to federal officials.

Remedial Civics?
The governors were angry about another Real ID issue, too. They were upset with the Department of Homeland Security and their own motor vehicle directors over an informal agreement DHS and the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators had over how to spend most of the very modest amount of money Congress has appropriated for Real ID. Congress specified that the money be given to states for implementation. DHS, AAMVA and several state motor vehicle directors, though, got together and agreed that the money would be given to a state, who would give it to AAMVA to develop one of the data bases needed to make Real ID work. Not a bad idea, except the governors don't like the fact that the money that was supposed to go to states would have gone, instead, to AAMVA—to build something that the federal government should have been doing anyway. They also were upset that their own motor vehicle directors hadn't consulted them about the arrangement.