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<p>GOP lawmakers and military groups have lined up against the bipartisan budget deal making its way through Congress because of a provision that would trim pay for young military retirees.</p> <p>In a joint statement last week, Sens. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said they cannot support the legislation because it “disproportionately and unfairly targets those who have put their lives on the line to defend our country.”</p>

Sequester We Hardly Knew Ye By Congressman Tom McClintock The great irony of the Republican decision to bust the budget sequester is that barely two months ago, congressional roles were reversed. The Democrats insisted on funding the government according to existing law. The Republicans sought one simple change: that the individual insurance mandate under Obamacare be delayed for one year. They were trying to spare the American people the Obamacare disaster that is now unfolding, but to no avail. The American people sided overwhelmingly with the Democrats on the principle that the government should be funded according to current law...

Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan tried to calm the burgeoning feud between Republican Party leadership and its conservative critics over the budget deal passed in the House this week, requesting that the Tea Party “keep these conversations within our family.” Ryan appeared on “Fox News’ Sunday” with Chris Wallace to discuss the budget deal he brokered with Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. The agreement, which passed the House on Thursday, scraps nearly one third of sequester cuts and replaces them with promised future reductions. Conservative groups largely came out against the deal, prompting an angry tirade from Speaker of the...

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.), the second-ranking Senate Democratic leader, said Sunday that Republicans jockeying for the White House in 2016 and Tea Party challengers in 2014 have imperiled the budget deal. Durbin estimated that Democrats will lose three members of their caucus on the vote, which means they’ll need at least eight Republicans to cross the aisle and vote with them. The challenge Democratic leaders face in trying to round up the vote has been compounded by the outspoken opposition to the deal from Republicans weighing presidential bids and a slew of Republican primary races in 2014. “A...

Senate Democrats are on the cusp of securing enough GOP votes to break a filibuster next week on the bipartisan budget, temporarily ending the fiscal crises that have dominated Washington for the past several years. With 53 Democrats and two independents expected to back the measure, four Republicans — John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Richard Burr of North Carolina — said that they would vote to cut off debate on the budget, putting proponents just one vote shy of advancing the measure to final passage. Several additional GOP senators signaled Friday that...

With the clock quickly winding down on the legislative year, Congress has cobbled together a budget deal, something they have failed to do since April 2009. The details have yet to be finalized, but many are praising it as a return to regular order, ending the budget brinksmanship that dominated Washington for most of Harry Reid's tenure as Senate Majority Leader. Unfortunately, the budget deal breaches the spending caps created under sequestration-the only measure of fiscal discipline that has made it through Congress in recent years-in exchange for promises of budget cuts down the road. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and...

Senate Republicans scrubbing the Ryan-Murray budget deal have come across a little-noticed provision that will limit the GOP’s ability to block tax increases in future years. The bill includes language from the Senate Democrats’ budget to void a budget “point of order” against replacing the sequester cuts with tax increases. The process is quite complicated, but in practice it grants Harry Reid the authority to send tax increases to the House with a bare majority, rather than the 60 vote threshold that would be required under the point of order. The provision has angered key Republican Senators. Reeling from Harry...

2013 has not been a pleasant year if you work for the federal government. You’ve been subject to pay freezes, furloughs and shutdowns. One of you got yelled at by a Tea Party Republican at the World War II memorial. And if Congress passes the budget deal announced Tuesday night by Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Patty Murray – a big if – you will get a final Christmas present: You’ll have to pay more into your pension, an effective wage cut that just adds to the $114 billion, with a “B,” federal employees have already given back to the...

There are two ways of looking at the deal announced Tuesday night by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray. Either the deal — which rolls back the 2011 sequestration budget ceiling by increasing federal spending from $967 billion to $1.012 trillion in 2014 — represents another cave by spineless congressional Republican leaders or a brainy, pragmatic decision to take the issue off the legislative calendar until after the 2014 election. Either way, it's indisputable that the same GOP leaders who in August said defending sequestration was far more important than defunding Obamacare are...

...These Republicans had just been briefed on a new, bipartisan budget blueprint that would establish long-term federal government spending caps. The plan, a product of months of negotiation between Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a Republican, and Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, lacks many priorities Republicans have fought for during the Obama era. ... Because the new budget deal sets spending levels until 2015, it eliminates the possibility of shutdown battles over the next few years, which serves as a welcomed relief to Democrats and Republicans alike. ... “Most major conservative groups have put out statements blasting this deal,” the...

The Democrats hated the sequester, and have been trying to bust it ever since it went into effect. Today, they succeeded. The Ryan/Murray deal pegs FY 2014 spending at $1.012 trillion, which Ryan’s press release described as “about halfway between the Senate budget level of $1.058 trillion and the House budget level of $967 billion.” What Ryan didn’t say is that $967 billion isn’t just the House proposal, it is the discretionary spending limit under current law. The sequester is now out the window. Republicans did get something in exchange for increasing spending: notably, federal employees will have to increase...

The actual text of the Ryan-Murray budget deal came out late last night, so it’s only now possible to really consider the particulars and see how it looks. It seems to me that the details look a fair bit better than the general outline that had been reported in the press over the past week or so, particularly on the question of whether the entitlement cuts that would replace some discretionary sequester cuts could be expected to actually materialize. As it stands, this strikes me as more or less a very small-scale version of the sort of thing that Republicans...

The House Budget Committee filed the text of the new Ryan-Murray budget deal before midnight on Tuesday and the Rules Committee announced an emergency meeting at 2 p.m. on Wednesday to prepare a House floor vote on the package. The text of the $85 billion deal is here. [77 page PDF] The deal sets spending levels for 2014 and 2015, allowing appropriators to create a fully detailed omnibus spending package before the government shutdown deadline of Jan. 15. The spending panel will also now have the chance to do all 12 individual appropriations bills for 2015 before the Oct. 1...

Conservative radio host Mark Levin hosted Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Tuesday to discuss the new budget deal announced by lawmakers. Levin wasn’t exactly impressed with the deal and he let Ryan know it, even calling the agreement “Mickey Mouse” more than once. Ryan first explained that the deal, titled “The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013,” replaces sequester cuts with savings from future cuts. He said he was happy with the plan because it prevents deep budget cuts to the Defense Department and the U.S. military. Mark Levin Challenges Paul Ryan on New Budget Deal in Contentious Interview “This prevents...

Talk show host Mark Levin told House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) that the budget deal announced today with Sen. Patti Murray (D-WA) was a "Mickey Mouse" deal, tinkering at the margins of the federal budget, undoing the sequester and exchanging immediate spending increases for future spending cuts. Ryan countered that "elections have consequences," and that many members of the Republican caucus were worried that the next tranche of sequester cuts would hit the military exclusively. He explained that there would be a net savings of $23 billion after $62 billion in new spending was offset by $85...

Congressional leaders are preparing to unveil a last-minute budget deal that could be quickly jammed through the House. It looks like a deal could be unveiled as late as Wednesday, just two days before the House is scheduled to recess for the rest of the year. Wednesday is the last day a bill can be filed in the House to allow a Friday vote without going around House rules. Releasing the bill that late in the week could be the best way to cut off a rebellion from the right, and conservatives on Monday were already expressing wariness. “I’m resigned...

There’s a saying in the sports world about how last-minute comebacks are examples of “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. I don’t like that phrase because it reminds me of the painful way my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were defeated a couple of weeks ago by Auburn. But I also don’t like the saying because it describes what Obama and other advocates of big government must be thinking now that Republicans apparently are about to do the opposite and “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” More specifically, the GOP appears willing to give away the sequester’s real and meaningful...

Don’t look now, but we are just 16 days away from the December 13 deadline for House and Senate budget negotiators to reach an agreement on a 2014 budget and avoid another potential government shutdown. Okay, December 13 is less a deadline than a suggestion. The current continuing resolution (CR), the product of October’s government shutdown, doesn’t actually expire until January 15, giving Congress an additional month to come to an agreement. But the December 13 date is still important, because the House is scheduled to recess from the 13th until January 7, with the Senate getting back one day...

Federal workers look like they could be the big losers if House and Senate budget conferees reach a deal. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) are working behind closed doors to reach a deal that would replace some of the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester with other reductions. They are believed to be looking at hiking federal worker employee retirement contributions, which would effectively lower federal pay. The savings would be used to prevent sequester cuts to the Pentagon and non-defense discretionary spending. Unions representing workers are worried about the cuts already on the table....

WASHINGTON – The Department of Defense is seriously looking at eliminating all of the the military’s remaining commissaries as a budget-cutting measure, but the action, to begin in 2015, would cut one of the basic benefits allotted to military families. Since DOD efforts to shut down the 178 stores statewide and another 70 overseas require congressional approval, there promises to be stiff opposition among lawmakers who are reluctant to cut benefits for the military. There also is concern that elimination of the commissary benefit for service personnel who already receive comparatively lower pay when compared with civilian counterparts could negatively...