In a daring move, House Republicans are poised to unveil a budget resolution that keeps the two titans of U.S. debt—Social Security and Medicare—off the chopping block, as revealed by the architect of this audacious measure on Wednesday.
With the looming specter of fiscal decisions piling up ahead of the September 30 government shutdown deadline, House conservatives are turning up the heat on Speaker Kevin McCarthy. They’re urging him to swiftly bring forth a “balanced budget” to the House floor, a promise they claim he privately made back in January, sealing the deal for his speakership.
McCarthy’s strategic maneuver here is to sidestep any alterations to the nation’s two largest entitlement programs. By doing so, he can shield GOP lawmakers from potential political attacks by Democrats as he battles to maintain the House Republican majority in the critical 2024 election.
House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) tantalizingly hinted that the budget resolution is “coming soon,” and McCarthy is wholeheartedly committed to the cause. However, the Speaker had already thwarted Arrington’s ambitions earlier this spring, publicly dismissing the chairman in the lead-up to debt ceiling negotiations. This adds a layer of intrigue as conservatives fervently demand that McCarthy unveils the fiscal blueprint aimed at balancing the federal budget over a decade.
Arrington seized the moment during a closed-door meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday to make his compelling case for the budget resolution. While the quest for 218 votes to approve the measure on the floor is still underway, Arrington confidently claimed that he already has enough committee support for a markup.
In a political showdown of epic proportions, President Joe Biden and other top Democrats have dared House Republicans to lay out a budget resolution that vividly illustrates the drastic cuts required to zero out the deficit without resorting to tax increases. The stakes escalated even further after GOP lawmakers accused Biden of mendacity for asserting during his State of the Union address that “a lot of Republicans—their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare.”
Acknowledging the politically charged nature of these two safety net programs, Arrington boldly proclaimed that they would be left untouched in their long-term budget resolution.
Instead, House Republicans are planning to propose the creation of a bipartisan commission to fortify both programs, which are teetering on the precipice of insolvency, risking severe cuts to benefits for elderly Americans in about a decade.
With a dash of optimism in the air, Arrington believes in the potential for cross-party collaboration. He fondly recalled the bipartisan Social Security overhaul that unfolded 40 years ago when then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Speaker Tip O’Neill brokered a historic compromise in 1983.
Even without addressing the formidable duo of Medicare and Social Security, the House Republican budget resolution boldly aims to save a staggering $16 trillion over a decade, according to Arrington. This ambitious target takes into account the economic stimulus generated by fiscal policy changes and a substantial overhaul of other federal entitlement programs such as Medicaid and unemployment insurance. The annual federal spending approved by lawmakers would be capped at levels from two years prior, with a 1 percent annual increase thereafter.
While cognizant of the uphill battle they face with Democrats in control of the Senate and the White House, Arrington stressed the urgency of House Republicans uniting around a “fiscal framework for right-sizing the bureaucracy.” All this in the face of a burgeoning national debt that has now surged past the ominous threshold of $30 trillion.
In this high-stakes political drama, House Republicans are poised to make a resounding statement—a daring fiscal framework that’s as audacious as it is aspirational, all against the backdrop of a debt-riddled nation.
