House Republicans Stop Effort to Limit Tax Cuts By Alan Fram, Associated Press

The Republican-led House defeated a fresh Democratic effort yesterday to limit Congress’s ability to approve new tax cuts, averting an embarrassing setback to President Bush’s agenda of continued tax reductions.

By a near party-line 209 to 209 vote — one vote short of the majority Democrats needed to prevail — the House turned down the Democratic provision urging budget bargainers to reimpose rules requiring that tax cuts or benefit increases be paid for with other budget savings. …

Democrats said Republicans were simply defending their treasured tax cuts while denying the obvious — that both the spending and revenue sides of the budget must be constrained to trim the mammoth shortfalls of recent years.

”I think it’s a conscious failure to accept reality, or perhaps worse, an attempt to spin, to deceive,” said Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii).

Republicans argued the rules would make it harder for Congress to extend tax cuts that will begin expiring after this year….

Dodge as You Go (editorial)

In the 1990s, Republicans seemed to agree that budget discipline was good for the country. They supported a stricter version of this pay-as-you-go rule, they made sure it applied to the House as well as the Senate, and it did some good. But Republican leaders are no longer concerned about fiscal integrity. Making certain that tax cuts can be enacted and extended without any procedural hurdles has become the central — you might say the only — budgeting principle of the Bush administration and its congressional allies.

Thus yesterday’s scene of legislating-by-strong arm. In a familiar episode of rule-stretching and bullying, a vote scheduled for five minutes was stretched to nearly half an hour. At one point, 19 Republicans defied their leadership to support the motion. But eight eventually switched their votes, creating a 209 to 209 tie. That meant the motion failed — and at that point, the vote was hurriedly gaveled to a close. “A meaningless vote but an important principle,” said a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), explaining the need to make certain that tax cuts would be exempt from pay-as-you-go constraints.

Other principles used to carry some weight in the U.S. House of Representatives: allowing lawmakers to vote their consciences, not manipulating voting rules to get the desired result, and opposing a reckless amassing of budget deficits selfishly left for other generations. But that was under the leadership of other speakers, and other presidents.