While Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, said he was all for slowing federal spending, he has no appetite for the substantial cuts in farm programs proposed in President Obama’s new budget.
Representative Todd Akin, Republican of Missouri, issued a press release simultaneously lamenting the deficit spending outlined in the new budget and protesting cuts in Pentagon projects important to his state.
And Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a fiscal conservative and a senior Republican on the Budget Committee, vowed to resist reductions in space program spending that would flow back home.
The positions of these Republicans — and similar stances by dozens of other lawmakers of both parties — are a telling illustration of why it is so hard to control federal spending. Every federal program has a constituency, and even lawmakers who profess to be alarmed by rising deficits will go to the mat to preserve money that provides jobs and benefits to their constituents.
“I am not a hypocrite,” Mr. Sessions said in reconciling his fiscally conservative credentials with his outrage over the administration’s proposal to essentially end the human space flight program and allow private enterprise to take on some of the load — an approach that Republicans typically favor.
Mr. Sessions said money taken from NASA would not be saved but would instead be directed to other Obama administration priorities that he did not support. He said his preference would be to set an overall spending limit and allow Congress to determine what programs should get the money. “Then we can debate it,” Mr. Sessions said.
Others said that the annual tableau in which members of Congress criticize the spread of red ink even as they reassure voters back home of protection for popular subsidies and Pentagon projects exposed the high degree of cynicism and lack of conviction that colors the fight over Congressional spending.
“It shows that in Washington, you can be firm on your opinions; it is your principles you can be flexible on,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.
The Republican juggling act on spending comes after a legislative proposal for an independent commission to study ways to cut the deficit stalled in the Senate, partly because some Republicans who had originally backed the idea balked.
The reaction to the presidential budget is troubling to some determined spending foes. They see it as a sign that an independent commission may be the only route to reducing the deficit because lawmakers cannot see past their own interests and make the tough decisions.
“There are not enough statesmen who will stand up and say, cut it even when it is in my district,” said Representative Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who has crusaded against spending by both parties on pet projects known as earmarks.
It is not only Republicans who are trying to have it both ways. Conservative and moderate Democrats who have pushed against deficit spending also quickly protested the cuts in NASA, military and farm spending. Among them was Senator Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat who leads the Agriculture Committee ...
But Republicans have made attacks on Democratic spending, the annual federal deficit and the overall national debt a central element of their midterm election campaigns, leading to heightened scrutiny of their budget comments. Democrats have obliged, compiling what they see as hypocritical stances by top Republicans, and many others have sifted through the Republican record as well.
In their defense, Republicans say they welcome efforts to reduce spending. But they say the Obama proposals are misguided and put crucial programs on the chopping block in an effort to find support for less important initiatives favored by the White House, like climate change ...
Mr. Akin, whose press release attacked the budget both as threatening to “push our nation farther into the uncharted waters of historic debt” and as eliminating financing for the Boeing C-17 transport aircraft built partly in St. Louis, conceded that some could see a disconnect.
“There always appears to be,” said Mr. Akin, who said he tended to favor national security spending. “There are a whole lot of things that I would be happy to cut. Obviously what we argue about is what are the priorities, where should we be?”
Mr. Flake, the Arizona Republican, said lawmakers who railed against the deficit and backed local spending projects personified the traditional Washington struggle between national and parochial interests.
“That’s Congress,” he said. “You just have to hope that people move beyond it.”
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