The U.S. Congress: all skin, no skeleton

If you prize consistency, then you'll love those Congressional Democrats. Because once again they're up (or down, as it were) to their usual tricks of bold timidity.

Especially the Senate Budget Committee, which this week has engaged in a kind of thunderless rolling thunder -- proudly proclaiming its preservation of the president's budget priorities while, in effect, gutting them.

"His major objectives ... [aren't] just his agenda, that’s our agenda," said Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware. Chairman Kent Conrad has said much the same; in fact there's been smiling unity of support. Quite impressive.

Problem is, they've eviscerated Obama's energy proposal, left Pell Grants to the mercy of annual -- not guaranteed, long-term -- appropriations, and, perhaps most egregiously, on health care have provided, in the words of the Politico, "no specified down payment to match the $634 billion, 10-year number included in the president’s budget."

And for all of Conrad's hand-wringing over those worrisome deficits, his budget, as the New York Times reports, "makes provisions to keep alive ... some extension of estate tax relief, now slated to expire after 2010." Low-income college students from the Bronx are on their own, but God save dead multimillionaire North Dakota farmers.

All is far from lost, however; indeed the battle has yet been joined. As the Associated Press put it in two separate reports yesterday: "Congressional Democrats [have] unveiled budget blueprints that embrace his key priorities and point the way for major legislation this year on health care, energy and education," although "On larger issues ... [their] plans simply seek to punt difficult decisions into the future."

Punt? The -- our -- United States Congress? What a devilish characterization.

I do have one question for the Democratic budget hawks, though. From deeply furrowed brows and rubbery spines over borrowing, they're kicking the can to other committees, saying, essentially, Here, you want it? Then you find a way to pay for it. Yet do you boys -- you, our tenderly conscientious accountants -- feel the same way about defense spending as well as endless ground wars against ancient tactics? Whence the money for that? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Yet all the while Obama's budget is actually quite tame, relative, that is, to more ethereal but still socially just desires. What might some of mine be? I have not one inkling how this would be budget-scored, but worthy of at least some exploration would be the wholesale lifting of income caps on payroll taxes, while reducing low-income workers' contribution to just their employers' share.

Or perhaps slicing a third from DOD's budget, traditionally fattened by every bauble, bangle and bead that goes boom. Or a prohibition on all political contributions in excess of $100 (balanced by free radio/television time), which would instantly exterminate a whole lot of wasteful, special-interest humbug and skulduggery from the federal budget.

Hey, just thinking aloud, OK? And in accordance with that, how about for low-income parents with children on the honor roll a refundable $5,000 tax credit (that would gin up a trifle more family interest in homework and academic success), graciously paid for by the good generals at the dieting DOD.

I'd love to see the gaping, ashen faces of centrist-conservative Democrats with all that plunked down before them. But Obama, of course, is striving to achieve merely the realistically doable, as he should -- which, by the way, he promised for 18 months he'd do, which the electorate overwhelmingly voted for, and which the electorate still overwhelmingly supports.

Yesterday I ran across this, in the National Review Online, from the always amusing Jonah Goldberg; I now find I simply must share it: "I love how liberals -- who have been pushing to Europeanize American social policy for generations -- are suddenly aghast and contemptuous when conservatives complain that liberals want to Europeanize American social policy, just as the liberal effort starts to succeed."

I don't know about that on-the-cusp-of-success part yet, but where did Mr. Goldberg ever get the idea that Europeanized American social policy -- whose nomenclature, incidentally, I, for one, have no problem with -- requires any aggressive resistance from conservatives, as in, his conservatives? Because we'll always have bluish Congressional Democrats to do the work for them. Or try, at least.