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House Passes Ryan-Murray By Sweeping Margins

Last night the House of Representatives passed the Ryan-Murray budget compromise, 332-94, in a most unexpected act of bipartisan productivity in this fractious year. The bill is by all accounts modest: Yuval Levin remarked, “what stands out most as a general matter about this proposed agreement is how very small it is—for good and bad,” […]
paul ryan

Last night the House of Representatives passed the Ryan-Murray budget compromise, 332-94, in a most unexpected act of bipartisan productivity in this fractious year. The bill is by all accounts modest: Yuval Levin remarked, “what stands out most as a general matter about this proposed agreement is how very small it is—for good and bad,” and Jim Antle noted, “It blows through the next two years’ budget caps, but the $45 billion spending increase is a drop in a $1.012 trillion bucket of federal discretionary spending.” It partially undoes the so-called “sequester,” an automatic across the board spending cut split between domestic and military spending over the next two years, mollifying many of the defense hawks who had decried a potential loss of military readiness. Perhaps most consequentially, the agreement would push back any future government shutdowns until after the 2014 elections.

Many conservatives are strongly opposed to the compromise, and are particularly leery of being railroaded into anything that could be considered tax hike-friendly. The new revenue in the deal comes in part from increased “user fees” on airline passengers, which Sean Davis over at The Federalist fairly persuasively describes as closer to an excise tax than the traditional understanding of a user fee. Paul Ryan strongly disagrees. For those determined to fight any new tax of any sort to the death, Ryan’s arguments probably won’t prevail, but Levin urges that they be understood in the context that “What the Democrats didn’t get is what they want and have insisted they would not do without: income tax increases.” In other words, divided government doesn’t pair well with absolutist positions, and a bare excise tax on plane tickets is a far cry from the trillions in new revenue from increased taxes that President Obama and Congressional Democrats were demanding back in the debt ceiling fight of 2011. Jonathan Strong reported a more troubling development to those conservatives, an obscure Senate procedural provision that may make it easier for Harry Reid to pass tax increases with a bare majority rather than the previously required 60-vote threshold.

Those eager to see military spending recede from its swollen post-9/11 levels will inevitably be disappointed, but they can take heart at how far their cause has come on the right from just a few years ago. Defense hawks have been demanding relief from full sequestration since it came into effect this spring, and Mitt Romney ran on a platform of increasing defense spending. Yet all they get is half off. As Kelley Vlahos detailed over Thanksgiving, the tightening of the spigots at the DoD has already started forcing turf battles and all the unseemly jostling that rises to the surface when appropriators take away the option to say “I’ll take two of everything.”


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