Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

The Policy Racket

Rep. Dean Heller says he won’t support budget deal

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Dean Heller

When the House of Representatives votes Thursday to approve a budget deal to fund the government through the rest of fiscal 2011, one Nevadan won’t be on board.

Rep. Dean Heller, who is running for the state’s Republican nomination for Senate in 2012, announced Tuesday he would be voting against the budget when it comes up for review.

“If we are going to turn our economy around and create jobs, our nation must get its fiscal house in order. After reviewing the final funding agreement, it just does not achieve this goal,” Heller said in announcing his decision by press release. “The budget agreement only equates to 2 percent in cuts for this fiscal year. It is time for the administration and Congress to do more to place our country on a sustainable fiscal path.”

That position puts him at odds not only with Democrats, but with the leadership of his own party.

House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid emerged from marathon rounds of negotiations until close to midnight Friday claiming they had found a mutually agreeable way forward.

"We have agreed to an historic amount of cuts for the remainder of this fiscal year,” Reid and Boehner wrote in a joint statement released when the deal was announced.

“We fought to keep government spending down, because it really will affect and help the environment for job creators in our country,” Boehner said in a separate statement.

“We didn’t do it at this late hour for drama. We did it because it’s been a very hard process to arrive at this point,” Reid said, thanking Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for their efforts. “This is historic what we’ve done. But we have a lot of work to do.”

The fact that a compromise had been reached was never a guarantee that the full Republican and Democratic contingents of Congress would fall in line and back a bill. Critics started emerging within minutes of the final deal being announced.

Heller wasn’t among them, but he hinted that his vote might not be there to count on.

“I am pleased that this short-term measure was made so our troops will continue to receive their pay checks,” Heller had said in a statement. “In the next few days I plan to closely examine budget deal.”

The deal is still expected to pass with bipartisan support, before the final short-term resolution expires Saturday morning just after midnight.

But Tea Party Republicans and staunchly liberal Democrats have already started to splinter from the pack, the first group claiming that the country’s largest-ever cuts don’t go deep enough, and the second group saying they go too far.

Heller hasn’t aligned himself outwardly with the Tea Party faction of the Republican party in the House; their declared adherents are mostly freshmen, as well as vocal senior members like Steve King of Iowa and rumored presidential candidate Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.

But his budget votes have been pretty well aligned with the Tea Party since he announced his 2012 Senate bid.

Heller declared his candidacy for the Senate eight days after current Sen. John Ensign announced his intention not to defend his seat.

That same day, the House voted to approve a three-week continuing resolution to give Boehner and Reid more time to hash out their differences over the budget. Heller voted no, along with 84 other Republicans, creating a gap that 104 Democrats helped to fill.

House Republicans are almost assuredly going to need the same sort of bipartisan support this time around to get the fiscal 2011 budget -- which is just the opening round of a battle that has yet to be waged over fiscal 2012 spending, or raising the debt limit -- across the final hurdle.

“It should be a bipartisan effort,” Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said of that scenario early Saturday morning. While she has not officially stated her position this week, she said over the weekend that absent any rude surprises in the final draft, she expected to vote for the bill -- as did Reid, Nevada Rep. Joe Heck and Ensign.

Heller’s breaking from the pack sets him apart politically, but it’s not clear how his principled move will play out down the line.

The other Democrats and Republicans from Nevada’s delegation seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief when a budget deal was reached late Friday night.

In the final days, each of them -- Berkley, Reid, Ensign and Heck -- had made a plea to the negotiators to move past a stalemate over riders, dropping them if necessary, to ensure that a budget would be cleared, arguing the alternative would be too damaging for Nevada.

“We certainly have so many people hurting in District 3, whether it’s foreclosure, unemployment, bankruptcies,” Heck said shortly after hearing the deal was struck Friday night. “So I’m glad those services will remain available for those folks.”

Polls, too, showed the public wanted to avoid a shutdown, by a margin of 2-to-1, according to a USA/Gallup poll released Tuesday.

CNN also released a poll showing 48 percent of voters thought that Democrats deserved more credit for averting a shutdown than Republicans, who only scored 35 of voters on the same question. Fifty-four percent of respondents also said they approved of the President and the Democrats’ conduct in those negotiations, vs. 44 percent approving the Republicans’ stance.

A PPP poll also showed that coming off the budget experience, 46 percent of the country would vote Democrat, and 41 percent would vote Republican. But even more on point as far as the budget is concerned, the poll showed that 48 percent of voters thought the Republican party had an extremist agenda, vs. 39 percent assigning the same adjective to Democrats -- a sign that the Democrats’ talking points were having some effect.

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