Blue Dog Dems Aren't Roaming Free Anymore

During the Reagan administration, many of his successes in a Dem Congress were directly due to the votes his bills received from the so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats, conservative Dems who bucked their own party to vote with the president. It drove the Dem establishment nuts, as these guys refused to be bullied into voting with their party on every issue.

Today's Blue Dogs are a much meeker variety and apparently easier to bully, because despite their talk of wanting a conservative budget approach, they're voting in lock-step with their party masters. John Fund has more:

Much less attention has been paid to the role of the Blue Dog Democrats, who have voted in lockstep with the rest of their party to oppose all spending cuts. The Blue Dogs talk a great game. They properly excoriate the Bush administration's fiscal record and have proposed a 12-step plan to control spending, which includes such sensible ideas as honest budget accounting. Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee has bravely called for delaying or ending the new prescription drug entitlement.
What the Blue Dogs haven't done is provide votes for any slowdown in federal spending. They complain they haven't been consulted by GOP leaders, and there is some truth to that. But the unmistakable impression is that they are now putting short-term partisanship ahead of good policy by trying to make the House ungovernable. It's not that Blue Dogs haven't provided votes to pass bipartisan legislation in the past. When a bankruptcy reform bill came up this year, 73 Democrats voted in favor. Forty-two Democrats voted to repeal the estate tax permanently, and 50 Democrats backed class-action lawsuit reform. But on the budget? Nada, zip, not a one.

That is a far cry from 1997, when the House was even more closely divided and the last time Congress tried to pass a budget under the reconciliation process. At that time 51 Democrats voted for a budget that contained far deeper reductions in domestic spending. Twelve of those 51 were Blue Dogs who are still serving in the House.

Blue Dogs like California's Rep. Dennis Cardoza claim the times are different because the GOP budget blueprint will now actually increase the deficit. That's because Republicans plan to make some of President Bush's tax cuts permanent, thus expanding the deficit overall. But Republicans reply that separate votes are held on the budget cuts and tax policy. "There is no arguing that the reconciliation bill reduces the growth in federal spending by $50 billion," says Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. "That's an up-or-down vote no Democrat would vote in favor of." She also points out that the tax cuts on capital gains and dividends the Blue Dogs are balking at extending helped create three million new jobs in the past two years and helped bring in a revenue stream that has knocked $95 billion off of this year's anticipated deficit. By their actions, the Blue Dogs are unwilling to vote for spending restraint while at the same time they oppose growth-oriented tax cuts. That's a recipe for a much bigger deficit in the long run.

One reason for their reluctance to cross the aisle and back any GOP budget is party pressure. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, furious that Blue Dogs provided the critical votes that passed the Central American Free Trade Agreement earlier this year, has laid down the law on party discipline. While it has never been made explicit, House Democrats I spoke with are convinced they will lose committee assignments if they vote for a GOP-backed budget. How else to explain the complete unanimity of opposition from House Democrats?

Things have gotten so poisonous in Congress that to vote with the other party is nearly treated as treason, and without the cooperation of the conservative Dems, and the lost votes of the wishy-washy GOP members, it will be tough to pass any sort of budget cuts or sustain any tax cuts. I guess the budget will have to be completely out of control before anybody will act responsibly.