The Hill’s Midterm Poll: Likely voters throw a wrench into GOP budget plans

Republican voters want Congress to cut spending, but they are not
willing to slash expensive programs, presenting a conundrum for GOP
leaders next year.

The Hill 2010 Midterm Election Poll found that an overwhelming percentage of Republican voters want Congress to focus on spending cuts, even if it means bringing home less money to their state. But they don’t want this at the expense of big social programs or defense.
 
Seventy-one percent of likely Republican voters in 10 House battleground districts said Congress should cut spending, even if it means fewer projects and earmarks for their local areas. A majority of likely independent voters, 56 percent, think the same.
 
But the same poll found that Republicans and independents balk at the prospect of cutting programs that constitute a vastly larger portion of the federal budget.
 
{mosads}A majority of Republicans, 57 percent, as well as 65 percent of independents, say they are not willing to accept cuts to Social Security and Medicaid to trim the deficit.
 
Six in 10 Republicans and 53 percent of independents said they would not accept cuts to defense and homeland-security spending.

Meanwhile, 60 percent of Democratic voters said they wanted their lawmakers to bring home the benefits, while only 28 percent of Democrats wanted their lawmakers to cut spending.
 
The firm Penn Schoen Berland contacted 4,105 likely voters in 10 House battleground districts between Oct. 16 and 21. The survey had a margin of error of 1.5 percent for the aggregate sample.

Congressional earmarks totaled $11 billion for fiscal 2010, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That is less than 1 percent of the $1.4 trillion annual discretionary budget Congress controls. (It’s less than half a percent of the total $3.5 billion federal budget.)
 
Social Security spending, however, totals nearly $700 billion annually. Annual Medicare spending is about $500 billion, and annual federal Medicaid spending amounts to about $300 billion.
 
Defense spending totals about $700 billion a year, and non-defense homeland security spending is $43 billion.
 
Fiscal conservatives in Congress argue that lawmakers cannot be expected to make deep cuts to popular programs if they lack the discipline to cut their own pork projects.
 
“Doling out money for the teapot museum is incompatible with cutting deeply into popular programs,” said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a leading proponent of banning earmarks.
 
The prevailing sentiment among GOP voters and the expected election of a bloc of fiscal conservatives in the Senate — such as Mike Lee (Utah), Rand Paul (Ky.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Pat Toomey (Pa.) and Joe Miller (Alaska) — will put pressure on Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) to accept a ban on earmarks within the Republican Conference.
 
McConnell, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, has steadfastly defended Congress’s power to direct federal spending to address niche needs, but it will be tough for him to hold out much longer.
 
Senior Republican senators who served on the Appropriations panel and also defended the practice of earmarking funds for home-state projects will be out of Congress next year: Sens. Judd Gregg (N.H.), Bob Bennett (Utah), Kit Bond (Mo.), Sam Brownback (Kan.) and George Voinovich (Ohio).
 
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), another member of the Appropriations Committee, faces an uphill battle to defeat Miller in the general election.
 
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who has championed the candidacies of the incoming group of fiscal conservatives, will call a vote to implement a GOP conference-wide ban on earmarks after the election and predicts he has enough support to succeed.
 
“Americans don’t want to bankrupt our nation for a few pork projects,” DeMint said in a statement to The Hill. “That is why new Republican leaders from around the country are running and winning on a pledge to end the earmark favor factory.
 
“I will force a vote on a Republican earmark moratorium after the election, and I expect it to pass,” he added. “We’re never going to be able to focus on true national priorities like balancing the budget and reforming the tax code until we break Washington’s earmark addiction.”

McConnell will have the tough job of balancing divergent viewpoints in his conference.
 
“Mitch McConnell will have a pretty serious party-management problem on his hand,” said Steven Smith, a professor of political science at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies congressional politics. “He’s going to want to strike a balance in what will be a more conservative conference and at the same time prepare the Republicans for the next election, which I think will push him in a position of moderation.”

Twenty-five Republican senators — more than half the conference — voted in March to support a DeMint-sponsored amendment that would have imposed an earmark moratorium on the entire Senate for fiscal 2010 and 2011. Setting such a moratorium only within the GOP conference, however, has received less support in closed-door meetings.
 
House Republican leaders have voiced support for extending the moratorium they placed on earmarks within their own conference this year. If they capture control of the House, it’s likely they would impose a chamber-wide ban on earmarks.
 
House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) suggested in August that GOP leaders might allow earmarks that are determined to have “merit,” but he quickly recanted. Earlier this month, he called for an extension of the moratorium, and House Republican Leader John Boehner (Ohio) appears to support the position.
 
“Boehner has always had a personal ‘no-earmarks’ policy and led the fight for the moratorium,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel. “It’s pretty clear where he stands on this issue.”