WASHINGTON — It’s not easy being a Blue Dog — a member of the group of fiscally conservative House Democrats that includes Rep. John Salazar — during an era of the biggest increase in government spending since World War II.
Republicans, without the votes to do anything much themselves, are begging the 37-member coalition to stick to its principles, but that would mean cutting the heart out of the first budget from its party’s popular president.
The Democrats’ progressive wing is demonizing group members as potential roadblocks to an ambitious agenda for change, launching a “Dog the Blue Dogs” campaign and running commercials in some members’ districts.
And today, the Blue Dogs will probably have to vote on a House budget resolution that encapsulates health care reform, expanded spending on education and a path to a new-energy economy, while creating more national debt over the next 10 years than the previous 43 presidents combined.
Salazar, of Manassa, said this week that he wasn’t pleased with the deficit projections in the new budget but gave no indication he planned to vote against the resolution, which will guide a lengthy budget process unfolding in various committees over the next several months but doesn’t itself have the force of law.
Salazar’s approach is largely consistent with other members of the group. They have made worried noises, but a majority are expected to vote for a plan that — even after some trimming in the House — would run an average deficit of $790 billion a year for the next five years.
Their stance led House Minority Leader John Boehner this week to rechristen the group the “lap dogs.”
“They should be appalled,” said Brian Riedl, a budget expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. “This new budget is an insult to every principle the Blue Dogs have been fighting for.”
Partly sour grapes
Those criticisms are partly sour grapes. Democratic unity has been shored up through a series of spending compromises that dashed Republican hopes to create an alliance around the deficit issue, which sometimes had reached an almost plaintive tone over the past two weeks.
“I want to ask my friends, the Blue Dog Democrats: Do you want your fingerprints on this massive and unprecedented growth in our national debt?” Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan pleaded during the House Budget Committee markup. “You hold the cards, you hold the votes that can make the difference in all this. You can stop this.”
Given the Democrats’ 256-178 edge over Republicans in the House, defections from all of the Blue Dogs would leave Republicans just two votes short of stopping President Barack Obama’s budget.
And just as conservative Republicans who voted for mammoth deficit spending under President George W. Bush found themselves squeezed by clashing political imperatives, Salazar and other Blue Dogs are re-examining what it means to be fiscally conservative in a time of devastating financial crisis and the public’s desire for bold leadership.
Hoping “it works”
“It would be nice if we had been handed an economy in great shape. But the fact is we have been handed one of the worst economies since the Great Depression,” Salazar said this week in his Washington office, where a giant elk head and pictures of the family’s San Luis Valley ranch adorn the walls. “And we can either sit on our laurels and do nothing, or we can do something and hope it works.”
Salazar and the others find themselves at the center of a fierce debate, squeezed between a White House arguing that expensive new initiatives are necessary in order to ward off an even larger fiscal disaster in the coming decades and Republicans countering that this is the worst possible time to burden the economy with massive new government debt.
James R. Horney, an expert at the liberal Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, said he believed the Blue Dogs were acting responsibly by at least being open to the premise that health care reform — though costly now — is the only way to bring future deficits under control.
For his part, Salazar dismissed many of the GOP criticisms as unfair, claiming that the Blue Dogs, in fact, got “90 percent” of what they had asked for in the budget debate.
He cited a deal to hold non-defense discretionary spending next year to inflation plus 1.9 percent. (Although in the arcane game that revolves around budget figures this time of year, that holds true only after what’s considered temporary or one-time expenditures are taken out, including the $4 billion cost of paying for the census.)
Salazar concedes that the long-term deficit projections are troubling, but he describes them as “just estimates as to where we are going to be.”
“I have to be optimistic that we will be better than that sometime in the next eight years,” he said.
But it’s also true that with a popular president calling for more spending and the Democratic leadership pressing hard for party unity, being a Blue Dog just isn’t what it used to be, experts say.
“We are going to have to make some tough choices,” Salazar said. “You can spend some money that will never have a return on your investment. And what I’m saying is that what we’re spending now will have a return on that investment, and I think sooner than later.
“But I think it’s irresponsible for us to just sit here and say, ‘No, no, no.’ I think we have to say, ‘Where can we make the most positive difference in America’s future?’ ”
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com
