In response to a query about getting minority House Democrats into a
coalition with disgruntled chamber Republicans known as the “fiscal hawks,”
Edwards opined that he thought the same grouping can be resurrected on issues
beyond the specifics of the fiscal year 2014 budget that the pairing had major
influence upon. This came after it was known there would be no unprecedented veto
override session where some
line item vetoes of that budget were by far the most publicized, because the
typical patterns of voting had been followed.
That is, since Gov. Bobby
Jindal became governor, every year most Democrats in the House have not
returned their ballots to indicate that an override session should happen. This
year, only two of the 38 returned ballots to indicate no session necessary came
from Democrats, down from six the previous
year. By contrast, each year a solid majority of Republicans have returned
ballots; last year 45 did so, while this year 35 (about three-fifths) did.
Democrats will emulate this trend for two reasons, because more are
invested in seeing larger government with more spending and vetoes get rid of
spending where they don’t care about spending perhaps as much as a million more
dollars of taxpayer money to have the session in order to try to override these,
and to try to sully Jindal by forcing a question on his vetoes, if not
overturning them. Just as our Savior
remarked about the poor, almost all Democrats wanting an override session
we shall always have with us with a Republican governor casting vetoes.
However, interestingly the drop in Republican requests to cancel is
almost entirely due to switches from last year from self-identified
“hawks,” almost all of whom last year voted to cancel. Ten of the 16 such
Republican House members did not send in a ballot this year. Yet this trend
should not be oversold, given that this year a great deal of attention was
placed upon vetoes that would have expanded spending in all but one instance spending
on services for the developmentally disabled and that some House members, safe
in the knowledge the Senate would send in more than enough ballots to cancel,
deferred to make themselves less likely to receive political upbraiding by
advocates for this spending.
Still, that “hawks” seemed disproportionately likely to join with
Democrats in the House does not mean there’s any kind of long-term hope for
this coalition. Keep in mind that Democrats wanted to use the hawks to expand
spending, and the hawks were looking for anybody that would allow them to strike
a symbolic blow that didn’t really change anything substantively by wringing
out the budget’s “one-time money” – a combination of recurring and nonrecurring
funds that does not initially come from general fund revenue. It just so
happens that these interests
converged this past session when the “hawks” ironically turned to a source
of one-time money, an amnesty on uncollected taxes, to allow Democrats to push
through a budget well in excess of what Jindal had proposed, even considering
the appearance of a surplus late in the session.
And that combination still might be good next year, for reliance on the
amnesty threatens an undercount of actual dollars that will throw
the budget out of balance. As a result, the Jindal Administration may want
substantial one-time money the “hawks” consider bad to replace the lack of
one-time money that received their blessing, which may trigger their jihad again.
Then again, this past session two pieces of legislation the group
endorsed came into law that may make them less willing future defectors to their
party and its ideology. One
deals with the ability to draw surplus monies from dedicated funds, which now
disallows drawing out more than the balance prior to predicted revenues for the
upcoming year; the other
makes a bookkeeping procedural change in the budgeting process in the
circumstance that funding for health care and higher education drops from the
prior year. The former addresses a situation that never has happened, and the
latter makes no substantive difference in budget production. Yet with these in
place, the “hawks” might be satisfied enough to declare victory and return to
the GOP fold.
For, despite the fact they supported an expansion of government opposed
by many others of their party after they initially called
for a large tax increase and got
a small one, the “hawks” do identify themselves as Republicans and
allegedly believe in the tenets of smaller, less intrusive government built
upon genuine needs served matched to appropriate funding. But they differ in
that they have gravitated towards a populist solution that puts style – a fatwa against what they define as
unclean kinds of one-time money, which has
nothing to do with budget stability – ahead of a principled approach that
concentrates on substance – actual reform of the state fiscal system, that may
draw too much money from the people, to ensure that genuine needs are funded in
accordance with their priority rankings.
In the final analysis, the “hawks” sending in ballots may have done so
simply because they thought the vetoed spending was not important enough to
restore given the cost of a session and relative to all other priorities. If
so, they are thinking more like their other partisans, two-thirds of whom voted
to cancel, and this casts doubt upon whether the 2013 coalition can be reconstructed.
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