WASHINGTON – As Congress returns to work this week, U.S. Rep. Norm Dicks offers a bold prediction: Even though a special supercommittee failed to prevent $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts in 2013, members of Congress will get the job done by the end of the year.
Dicks, a Belfair Democrat, said too much is at stake to let the automatic cuts go through, with states bracing to lose billions in federal aid, and military leaders lining up to oppose any automatically-triggered cuts.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen – I think that Congress will step in here,” said Dicks, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
Under a plan approved by Congress last year, the spending cuts will automatically take effect next year because the supercommittee could not come up with an alternative way to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion.
Like many Democrats last year, Dicks urged Congress to increase taxes, not just cut spending, to meet the goal.
With Congress at loggerheads, it won’t necessarily be easy to win approval for a new deficit-reduction plan. And President Barack Obama, eager to play the part of a budget-cutter as he seeks a second term, already has threatened to veto any plan that would stall the spending reductions, saying in November, “There will be no easy off-ramps on this one.”
As he gears up to begin his 36th year in the U.S. House, Dicks also makes an unorthodox pitch: Not only should Congress stop the automatic cuts, but members should start spending more money – despite the nation’s $15 trillion debt.
“Austerity isn’t going to get people back to work,” said the 71-year-old, who now ranks 10th in seniority among the 435 House members. “It’s going to increase unemployment, and it’s just so obvious.”
With the House controlled by Republicans, any plans for new spending would face an uphill fight. But Dicks has many allies in his bid to devise a new deficit-reduction plan as a way to block automatic spending cuts – a plan Dicks thinks should include new revenues.
Many members already have made similar promises to fight any automatic cuts, and it’s sure to become a familiar bipartisan refrain in the second session of the 112th Congress, which opened Tuesday.
Dicks noted that Democrats and Republicans in the House showed they can work together by passing 11 major appropriations bills late last year, while the media focused on the collapse of the supercommittee and the fight over whether to renew a Social Security payroll tax cut. He said he sometimes gets upset with media portrayals of Congress as dysfunctional when its positive work gets little publicity.
“This was kind of a landmark year,” Dicks said. “We did get that done, and that was difficult. … The Appropriations Committee is back in business.”
Congress created its supercommittee, led by Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington and Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, in August, asking it to develop a plan to trim the national deficit over the next 10 years.
The effort fell apart in late November, setting the stage for the automatic cuts. If Congress does not act, half of the cuts will come from military programs, and half will come from domestic spending programs.
The automatic cuts, which would take place under a process called sequestration, would translate to roughly an 8 percent across-the-board cut for nondefense discretionary spending. Education would be hard hit, losing more than 40,000 teachers and paraprofessionals, according to the National Education Association.
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