Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call - Chairwoman Patty Murray at a Senate Budget Committee markup of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for FY2014.
On one side of the Capitol, President Obama sought to convince House Republicans on Wednesday that he is serious about reining in the rising cost of federal health and retirement programs.
But on the other side of the Capitol, Senate Democrats rolled out a 10-year spending plan that sent a different message: Not so fast.
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While Democratic leaders are offering quiet support for Obama’s renewed campaign to strike a grand bargain with Republicans that would include cuts to Social Security and Medicare, a significant number of Democratic lawmakers are digging in their heels and vowing to protest any reduction in promised benefits.
That sentiment was on display Wednesday, as Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) announced a budget blueprint that proposes only minor trims to Medicare and Medicaid — the biggest drivers of government spending — and vows to make the cuts “without harming beneficiaries.”
Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats have declared their opposition to a proposal that has emerged as Obama’s biggest selling point to Republicans: his offer to apply a less-generous measure of inflation to Social Security, resulting in slightly smaller annual cost-of-living increases.
“I don’t want to break the bad news to you, but the president is not the only elected official in the United States,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a member of the Budget Committee, who pressed Murray to avoid any cuts to social programs in her spending plan. “Some of us believe very strongly that it would be absolutely wrong to cut Social Security benefits.”
Administration officials say Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) are on board with the president’s push for a grand bargain and are willing to rally their rank and file to support politically touchy changes to health and retirement programs so long as Republicans sign off on significant new tax increases.
Obama got few complaints about his deficit-reduction plan during a lunchtime meeting Tuesday with Senate Democrats, administration officials said. But 107 House Democrats — more than half the caucus — have signed a letter declaring their “vigorous opposition to cutting Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid benefits.” And the complaints are likely to grow louder as Republicans press Obama for more details about his proposals to charge wealthy seniors more for Medicare coverage and to implement the Social Security inflation change, known as the chained consumer price index, or chained CPI.
That process is just now getting underway. In his meeting Wednesday with GOP lawmakers, Obama again outlined the offer he made in December to House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and more recently to more than a dozen Senate Republicans.
That proposal would replace $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, known as the sequester, with $1.8 trillion in alternate policies over the next decade, including roughly $700 billion in fresh tax revenue. An additional $400 billion would come from reforms to Medicare, and $130 billion would come from applying the chained CPI to Social Security.
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