Today in Washington D. C. - March 16, 2009

The Senate will reconvene at 2 pm today. The Senate will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to H.R. 146, a vehicle for replacing the public lands bill (S.22) that passed the Senate in January and was defeated in the House. At 5:30 pm, the Senate will vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to the new version of the bill. Last week, the lands bill failed to pass the House using special rules that would prevent Republicans from offering amendments. So, the Democrats decided to use in the Senate a lands bill the House previously passed as a vehicle to move it through the Senate again so that when it returns to the House, Republicans will be unable to offer amendments under the rules.

With a considerable number of Democrats (and most Republicans) expressing serious concerns over President Obama’s $3.55 trillion budget plan, the White House is apparently turning to Obama’s campaign apparatus to sell his massive spending plans, according to several news reports. Moderate Democrats have been some of the most vocal critics of the Obama budget, so it appears that his team will be unleashing the DNC and his campaign on his fellow party members. Both McClatchy and Reuters picked up on last week’s trend of centrist Democrats fretting that the budget spends too much, taxes too much, and borrows too much. And it’s continuing already this week. Democrat Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad said on MSNBC this morning, “We’re seeing the prospect of another doubling of debt, and that’s unsustainable. We’ve got to do a much better job of getting that long-term debt under control.”

In the face of congressional skepticism, The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza reports, “President Obama will kick off an all-out grass-roots effort today urging Congress to pass his $3.55 trillion budget, activating the extensive campaign apparatus he built during his successful 2008 candidacy for the first time since taking office. The campaign, which will be run under the aegis of the Democratic National Committee, will rely heavily on the 13 million-strong e-mail list put together during the campaign and now under the control of Organizing for America (OFA), a group overseen by the DNC. Aides familiar with the plan said it is an unprecedented attempt to transfer the grass-roots energy built during the presidential campaign into an effort to sway Congress.”

But when discussing the budget, it’s important to keep a basic fact in mind: the budget cannot be filibustered, and so requires only a majority vote to pass the Senate. With 58 Democrats in the Senate and 257 in the House, one would think there would be no problems passing a Democrat president’s budget. Yet the budget Obama is proposing features so much spending, taxing, and borrowing, it appears that he apparently needs to turn his campaign apparatus on members of his own party, simply to get 50 votes in the Senate.

Appearing on ABC’s ‘This Week with George Stephanopoulos’ yesterday, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out that the budget “will double the national debt in five years and triple the national debt in 10 years; it taxes too much, it spends too much, it borrows too much, as you indicated. . . . We have already authorized this year in the first 50 days of this administration, spending at the rate of $24 billion a day, or $1 billion an hour. Another way of looking at it, just putting it in context, this $1.2 trillion that we’ve spent in the first 50 days is more than the previous administration spent after 9/11 on Iraq, Afghanistan and the response to Katrina.”

This is all before considering a budget that would feature a $1.75 trillion deficit. Sen. Chuck Grassley, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said, Somebody has to pay — if not the middle class now, then later. Eventually the middle class gets hit.”

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