Yesterday Jon Stewart spent the day delivering expletive-laden rants against Republicans for blocking the PACT Act. But Republicans say they have good reason to block it until a teensy weensy little change is made. Who's right?
Fine. I'll start. What's this bill all about?
It creates $280 billion in new funding for veterans who have health problems because of exposure to toxic burn pits in Iraq. A few other kinds of environmental health problems are also included (Agent Orange, nuclear site cleanups, etc.).
Does anyone object to this?
No. Not enough to make a difference, anyway. It can pass Congress easily.
So what's the problem?
In addition to the $280 billion in new spending, the bill takes $400 billion in existing veterans spending and reallocates it from the discretionary budget to the mandatory budget. (Although keep in mind that these are ten-year numbers. The reallocation comes to about $40 billion per year.)
Huh?
The mandatory budget is for things that don't require annual approval by Congress. Social Security is an example. Congress doesn't have to fund Social Security every year. If you're entitled to payments, you get them.
The discretionary budget is the opposite. It's for things like defense spending, national parks, the FBI, and other routine parts of government. All of these things are budgeted by Congress every year.
So some veterans funding became mandatory and doesn't require annual approval. Who cares?
Sen. Pat Toomey cares. You see, the discretionary budget is subject to an overall spending limit that's agreed to each year before the individual committees start work on their pieces of the budget. Toomey figures that if $400 billion gets moved out of the discretionary budget, that leaves a big hole that can be filled without breaching the cap. And who knows what Democrats will fill that hole with?
But it's hard to see how that matters, since even without moving any money around Congress can set the cap to whatever it pleases. If Democrats wanted to spend a different amount of money they could just set the annual cap higher or lower in order to include more money or less, and nobody could stop them.
The most recent budget resolution was passed a few weeks ago. The House set the cap at $1.6 trillion for the upcoming fiscal year.
OK, but if that's the case then why did the Senate move that $400 billion around? Toomey says it wasn't in the House version of the bill, so it must have been added deliberately.
Well . . . getting extra space under the cap might not matter much in a general sense, but like I said, the budget cap for the next fiscal year has already been set and can't be changed. So the PACT Act probably would create a new funding hole of $40 billion for FY2023.
Have any Democrats offered an explanation for this?
Not that I can tell. Sen. Jon Tester, chair of the Veterans Affairs Committee, said this:
Toomey wants to take away the ability of appropriators to do their job. Every appropriator should be mad as hell about that … But I’m not gonna allow that to happen. If we can’t trust our own ability to appropriate, fund and defund that, what the hell have we turned into?
That's not exactly a ringing defense of the reallocation, is it? In fact, it seems like it sort of confirms Toomey's view that it allows Democratic committee chairs to casually "appropriate, fund and defund." What does Jon Stewart have to say?
He basically said that Toomey was a hypocrite because the federal budget contains plenty of other slush funds that he's never objected to.
Um, that sounds like Stewart is agreeing that the bill creates a big pile of funding authority with, as he says, "no guardrails"—i.e., a slush fund.
It kinda does, doesn't it?
How about Chuck Schumer? He's the Democratic majority leader. What's his take?
He's offered Toomey a vote on an amendment to remove the reallocation.
But he knows that would never pass, right? It requires 60 votes and that means Democrats have all the votes they need to kill it.
Yeah. He knows that.
So it sounds like Toomey just might have a point.
It does.
Hold on, though. My take on Stewart’s response was that it was *always* mandatory, or maybe “mandatory”, in that nobody was about to pull $400B from veterans spending, even if it were in the “discretionary” fund. Which sounds right to me, at least. And you’re not addressing what I hear (from Ds) is the *real* reason the Rs voted against: as retaliation for Ds pulling a fast one by pretending BBB was dead so they could pass CHIPS. What do you think of that possibility?
Good points.
Exactly right
Remember that this is the same group (Republicans) who blocked healthcare for 9/11 first responders for years. Those efforts and this latest one have nothing to do with whether Republicans support healthcare for vets or first responders. The votes were/are based on unrelated petty issues.
But all the same, the GQP remains the party of troop support. I mean, just look at the respect they showed Max bin Laden & Ho Chi Kerry when they had the opportunity to meet veterans in electoral politics. The usual rough & tumble of a campaign was softened to acknowledge their rivals's unquestionable patriotism. The only person who was given better treatment by GQP candidates was Crash Mc Cain, whose service record almost carried him over the top versus conscientious objector George W. Bush in 2000.
if only donald j. trump hadn't suffered from those extremely painful phantom bone spurs, his service record would have put cleland's, kerry's and mccain's to shame. another sgt. york or audie murphy at the very least.
Exactly.
We lost a good man not out there that day.
Wait, so the Democrats finagle some obscure reason that the Repubs should Vote Against America and they brought it? And now they’ve got Stewart yelling at them? Hahahahah.
The reason for the re-vote was to fix a "technical error", yet I can not find out what that "technical error" was.
It was a very minor tax break- literally one sentence in the original billl. House objected and removed it due to the Constitutional language on all revenue measures having to originate in the House.
thanks...
Not interested. War criminals deserve their fate.
Honestly, kind of surprised that Jon "Mess o' Potamia" Stewart's taek wasn't closer to this. Being a Gulf War Syndrome Truther would be copacetic with his sniggering response to Havana Syndrome (a CIA lie to make Russia look badder than they already do & utterly pointless) & his embrace of the Intentional People's Liberation Army Lableak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology theory of the Rona Plandemic.
Sounds like the Dems are finally getting the hang of this "politics" thing!
Pat Toomey & Jon Stewart in a pissing match, with Oranqe Qounty Roqqefeller Republiqan Qevin Drum bothsiding it?
There are no winners here.
At least Jon isn't the one bothsiding, this team.
The thing is, the so-called “slush fund” was in the bill that passed the Senate 84-14. The only change was removal of a very minor tax break. Also, it still takes 60 votes to pass appropriations bills in the Senate. So if Republicans were worried about spending an extra $40B, they could just withhold their votes and force Democrats to stick with the original budget. This excuse is just a weak cover story - the reality is that Republicans are throwing a hissy fit due to the Manchin deal, and that’s all there is to this.
👍👍👍👍👍
Moving $40 billion per year from the discretionary account to the mandatory account for overall VA spending is tantamount to creating a $40-billion annual “slush fund”? It would be helpful to have some idea of what the overall VA budget is, and how that budget breaks down between mandatory and discretionary. And does Congress have no oversight over how mandatory budget funding is spent? If the original 84-14 vote occurred before the Manchin IRA “deal” (paging Senator Sinema), then this does look more like retaliation than fiscal probity on the GOP’s part.
Quit blowing giant logic holes in Kevin’s conversation with himself.
It does this and takes away their stupid football they threaten vets with so they can get their other, unpopular, discretionary spending.
Yes, what's wrong with protecting this funding from being a political football every year? Just suppose (shudder) that R's gain control again. Why make it easy for them to use the Senate gauntlet again in order to likely slash funding?
I think Kevin is just trying to drum up controversy on a slow Sunday. He can't possibly believe his own "reasoning" (can he?)
Republicans were for the PACT Act w/ this budgetary trick included in it before they were against it.
Just saying.
Awwwww but you can’t expect them to actually read the bill. Especially when their bite is not based on what’s in the bill.
Toomey voted against it the first time around, so he is at least consistent. It is the 25 R who voted for it the first time and against it in the redo that are the villains. The things Toomey objects to where in the bill originally -- nothing was added and one small provision removed (hence the re-vote)
Toomey wanted to cap the fund, leave it as discretionary, and sunset it after 10 years. Mind you, this bill covers Vets still affected by Agent Orange from 50+ years ago. If it’s discretionary, they can use those funds for other purposes, not this year, of course, but maybe a few years down the road. If it’s mandatory, they can’t. Just like Social Security funds cannot be repurposed. So the discretionary budget might be $40 billion more this year if the moneys are mandatory. So what? Congress still needs to assign where that money will go to. And what Tester is saying is that they don’t have to assign it to anything. The entire discretionary budget that goes through appropriations in Congress every year can be called a “slush fund”.
Yeah, Kevin, you're getting played here, you still continue to take things Rs say at face value, 34 Rs voted for the "mandatory spending" language in the bill the first time around, it wasn't added later, they are lying.
They're pissed they got played on the Manchin-Schumer compromise, plain and simple
Republicans lying? Imagine that...
You're forgetting Kevin, like his hero Elizabeth Warren, was a dyed in the wool Republiqan well into middleage, & pretty much still is, much like Elizabeth Warren.
Wait, Liz Warren is too far to the right for your tastes? Why, because she hasn't come out in favor of abolishing private property? Seriously, what policy adjustments would she have to make to win your approval? From everything I can see she's an older, whiter version of AOC.
No, Elizabeth Warren is an IFD (Improvised Federalist Device) sent from the right to provoke chaos &, yes, disarray in the Democrat Party.
The Senate being what it is, this is almost certainly more about Toomey than about the bill.
Sort of Pat's "Last Hurrah" then?
Gotta prove his bona fides to movement national-cuckservatism to get that Heritage Foundation sinecure after the Senate & hopefully an ambassadorship in the De Santis-Gabbard New Founding Fatherhood regime.
Kevin is deliberately twisting what Stewart is saying. I thought better of him.
You thought better of Drum or Stewart?
Because you really shouldn't have.
If any of our CongressCritters wants to STAND upon their reputation as allocators and appropriators then let 'em
Record breaking debt, unfunded foreign wars and a multitude of other things that just boggle the mind - all done while enacting tax cuts????????
It's not a record thats good, for either party as appropriators
But to hold Veterans medical care hostage over semantics is beyond belief
Balance the budget with exceptions for national emergencies with no budgetary shenanigans
Bill Climpton balanced the budget, & look what that got algore.
Who TF cares? This bending over backwards to be fair to Republicans is counterproductive.
I'm with John Scalzi on this. If you want HBO and the only way to get it from your cable company is to also subscribe to Cinemax and you do so, then you are a Cinemax subscriber. The Republicans voted against those veteran benefits. That's all there is to it. They can make up all sorts of reasons. That's easy, and the Republicans are quite good at. If you listen to Republican political rhetoric, they are completely without freedom of action and only do what they do because of the evil Democrats.
If the Republicans voted against providing benefits for veterans exposed to certain toxic chemicals because they don't want Democrats to be able to do popular things that they might get credit for, then they have decided that preventing the Democrats from being able to do popular things that they might get credit for is more important than providing benefits for veterans exposed to toxic chemicals. If you don't want to subscribe to Cinemax, don't subscribe to Cinemax.
I remember when being for a bill before being against it was a mortal sin to GQPers.
!!
dear god! It's not just a conspiracy theory! It's a real diabolical plot!
Infection with toxoplasmosis causes people to become conservative, tribal and authoritarian,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14747049221112657
It's like the looking glass is a litter box and we're through it!
Catowners being GQP leaning would explain Kevin Drum leaving Mother Jones.
Ivana Trump's grave,
https://twitter.com/StevenBeschloss/status/1553783551018954754
Somebody offered it's likely not even her grave. She was cremated, so unless that spot is disinterred & her urn removed to prove she's there, it's likely a dummy plot to keep up the Bedminster as Cemetery tax evasion grift.
My parents were cremated and interred in the family plot, which, at least at the moment, is quite a lot nicer than Ivana's.
The unexpected thing is that the ashes aren't buried very deep, two feet at most.
So, you could just sneak in there with a trowel.
Don't give me any ideas for my next trip east.
Probably more like 18 inches, now that I'm thinking about it.
Oh, I just realized.
When somebody hooks the ball way off onto Ivana's grave a skeletal hand comes out and claws it back under the Earth.
Then you have to pay $20 to get it back.
Deatuh: the ultimate hazard.
Also: IT'S COME HOME.
& pretty sure Prince William declared prima nocte on Chloe Kelly after her second chance ganewinner & Chastainian jersey doffing celebration. In fact, isolated audio from the awards line will show Wills the White Supremacist told Kelly, "Meet me in my box after all this. You can strap one on & hit me doggystyle".
Looking back at this, I am pretty sure this offtopic post will lead to the blogmaster's royalist sister going on a warfooting to find out the chavvy punter who impugned the reputation of the good son of Diana, who is second in line to the throne.
I welcome Inkblot's Aunt trying to end me. Welcome it, in a way opposite to how Wills greeted the Black members of the England women's national team. (Though, if I am Nikita Parris, I am glad the clown princeling doesn't want me to pound him in the ass, sexually.)
If you're in Chicago for Lollapalooza don't look out the window or the cops will assume you're about to open fire and shoot you,
https://twitter.com/SteveSchmidtSES/status/1553601229988630528
Perry Ferrell will live to see another day.
Pingback: Who changed the PACT Act? – Kevin Drum
Pingback: But wait! It was the House that played PACT games, not the Senate – Kevin Drum
I spent some time looking up the bill that the Senate voted on the first time, prior to going to the House. As near as I can tell, I found it. It seemed pretty clear that the funding was proposed as mandatory, very specifically not discretionary.
Kevin, did you read the bill text that was voted on by the Senate, including the 25 yeas from the Republicans?