The Senate and House passed the tax cut deal, sending it to President Obama for signature. The House also passed a repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a stand-alone measure, which also now has enough support for passage in the Senate. Cloture votes on it and the DREAM Act (which is expected to fail) will be held Saturday with a final vote on passage Sunday. Republicans killed an omnibus spending bill, so short-term one will be put it its place to avert a government shutdown. The START nuclear treaty survived a vote to open it for debate and it looks like there may be the 67 votes required for passage if they can get to it. Senate Majority Leader is threatening to keep the Senate in session through January 4th when the new Congress is sworn in, with Republicans hilariously attacking him as anti-Christian for making them work on Christmas.

UPDATE: This morning, a cloture vote on the DREAM Act failed but cloture was invoked on repealing DADT. A final vote on passage will take place later today.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, the 2nd highest ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, is giving some straight talk (that will likely garner him much criticism in an election year from both parties) on the need to raise taxes – and not just on the rich - to lower the deficit:

Tax cuts that benefit the middle class should not be “totally sacrosanct” as policymakers try to plug the nation’s yawning budget gap, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said Monday, acknowledging that it would be difficult to reduce long-term deficits without breaking President Obama’s pledge to protect families earning less than $250,000 a year.

Hoyer, the second-ranking House Democrat, said in an interview that he expects Congress to extend middle-class tax cuts enacted during the Bush administration that are set to expire at the end of this year. But he said the extension should not be permanent. Hoyer said he plans to call for a “serious discussion” about the affordability of the tax breaks.

“We’re lying to ourselves and our children if we say we can maintain our current levels of entitlement spending, defense spending and taxation without bankrupting our country,” Hoyer says in remarks released in advance of a Tuesday speech sponsored by Third Way, a Democratic think tank.

Currently, those “fiscally conservative” Republicans want to extend all the Bush tax cuts (which primarily benefitted the wealthiest Americans) at a cost of $3 trillion over the next decade, whereas the Obama administration only wants to extend the cuts for those that make less than $250,000 a year. But that would still add at least $1.4 trillion to the deficit by 2020. Now it’s primarily the passage of those tax cuts and the Republicans’ refusal to pay for the Medicare prescription drug program and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when they were in charge that have lead us to the deficit crisis we now face. Unfortunately, it’s politically difficult to reverse them for the middle class, especially when people are still tightening their belts in a troubled economy. But at some point we all have to be willing to pay for the things we need in this country.

There’s simply no way to balance the budget through spending cuts alone, no matter what Republicans say (and their own recent proposed cuts amount to less than %1 of the budget). Lest Republicans think that Democrats are completely unwilling to reduce spending though, Hoyer also targets defense spending (which the GOP is generally unwilling to touch despite the fact that, next to entitlements, it’s the biggest federal expense):

Hoyer also indicated he plans to support an effort by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to eliminate wasteful spending at the Pentagon. “Any conversation about the deficit that leaves out defense spending is seriously flawed before it begins,” he says in the speech.

Hoyer also says House leaders are preparing a one-year budget resolution that would cut 2011 spending deeper than Senate Democrats have proposed and would reaffirm that the House will vote on any deficit-reduction plan that wins approval from the bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama. Sounds like a start, but this worries me:

The overarching point in Hoyer’s remarks is the need for a bipartisan plan that includes spending cuts and tax increases, in the tradition of deficit-reduction deals cut under former presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Drafting such a plan would require a reexamination of tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, Hoyer says — cuts that benefited most taxpayers.

Given how successful recent “bipartisan” efforts have been, how likely is it that Republicans will go along with this, particularly if they win control of the House? If Hoyer is serious about this, he needs to make sure Democrats take the oppurtunity to limit the extension of those tax cuts now. No matter what the political risk, the risk to our country’s fiscal future in not taking action is much greater.

From the LA Times:

President Bush plans to ask lawmakers next week to approve another massive spending measure — totaling nearly $200 billion — to fund the war through next year, Pentagon officials said.

If Bush’s spending request is approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war…

The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $147.5 billion for 2008, but Pentagon officials now say that and $47 billion more will be required. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and other officials are to formally present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday.

The funding request means that war costs are projected to grow even as the number of deployed combat troops begins a gradual decline starting in December. Spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is to rise from $173 billion this year to about $195 billion in fiscal 2008, which begins Oct. 1.

When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses are added, the war in Iraq currently costs taxpayers about $12 billion a month, said Winslow T. Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.

“Everybody predicts declines, but they haven’t occurred, and 2008 will be higher than 2007,” Wheeler said. “It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive. Everyone says we are going to turn the corner here, but the corner has not been turned.”

In 2004, the two conflicts together cost $94 billion; in 2005, they cost $108 billion; in 2006, $122 billion.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are financed through a single administration request to Congress, and their costs are combined in the legislation.

The new spending request is likely to push the cumulative cost of the war in Iraq alone through 2008 past the $600-billion mark — more than the Korean War and nearly as much as the Vietnam War, based on estimates by government budget officials.

WWII only cost us $296 billion. The war in Iraq has cost over $450 billion to date and most estimates put it at topping $1 trillion when all is said and done! Think of all the things we could have better spent that money on. We at least could have cut the $2 trillion in Bush tax cuts (which, along with the war, contributed to the $3 trillion increase in our national debt during his administration) in half, but that’d be asking too much from his wealthy, pro-war constituency.

Now, not all of the funds being requested are war-related, and now that we are talking about another $200 billion instead of $100 billion some are hoping the Democratic Congress will slim it down. Fred Kaplan at Slate is practically begging for them to ask the tough questions on Pentagon spending. I have my doubts, but apparently Senator Robert Byrd (who chairs the Appropriations Committee) is going to make an announcement on the subject tomorrow.

Of course, I’d like to see them hold up this money altogether until President Bush agrees to a timetable to bring our troops home. But I guess that’s too much too ask.

Today, Chairman John Conyers announced that the House Judiciary Committee will vote Wednesday on contempt citations for White House chief of staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet E. Miers, both of whom refused congressional demands for information on the dismissals after President Bush invoked executive privilege. This will almost certainly provoke a constitutional showdown if the citations are agreed to, as we have detailed.

Under a measure approved by voice vote in the House, federal candidate’s spouses would be barred from being paid by the candidate’s campaign or leadership political action committee. The ban would also apply to companies or firms in which the spouse was an officer or director. Furthermore, the measure would require disclosure of payments from campaigns of PACs to other immediate members of a candidate’s family.

Also, the Senate is moving toward swift passage of a five-year re-authorization of the primary law governing federal aid for higher education. A final vote should happen tomorrow. The Higher Education Act re-authorization bill has not yet moved in the House, but will, of course.

House Democrats plan a $50 billion expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which covers about 6 million children from low-income families not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. The House Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee are both expected to vote on their bill this week, according to Congressional Quarterly. Bush has already threatened to veto a $35 billion expansion approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week. The full Senate is expected to vote on that measure before starting its August recess.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have asked for a meeting with President Bush to see if they can work out an agreement on spending bills for the fiscal year that begins in 10 weeks, according to the New York Times. The Senate, which has not passed any of the 12 bills, plans to begin considering the first one, for the Department of Homeland Security tomorrow. The House has passed 8 of the 12 regular appropriations bills for 2008, and Mr. Bush threatened to veto 5 of them, including the HUD bill the House took up today. However, substantial numbers of Republicans have joined Democrats in passing the appropriations bills approved by the House: “One of the largest spending bills, for the Departments of Labor, Education and Health and Human Services, was approved last week in the House by a vote of 276 to 140, with 53 Republicans joining 223 Democrats in defying the president’s veto threat. A separate bill providing money for energy and water projects, including the Army Corps of Engineers, was passed with a veto-proof majority, 312 to 112.” Another report indicates GOP support for sustaining spending vetoes by President Bush is weakening.

The Washington Post reports that “Democrats are preparing legislation that would significantly expand federal aid to the most obvious victims of the global economy: workers whose jobs move offshore or are lost to foreign imports.” In a Senate bill under consideration, “computer programmers, call-center staffers and other service-sector workers who make up the vast majority of the nation’s workforce would for the first time be eligible for a generous package of income, health and retraining benefits currently reserved for manufacturing workers who lose their jobs to international trade.” A similar bill is nearing completion in the House, and Democrats hope to approve the expansion before the program expires Sept. 30. Trade Adjustment Assistance typically gets strong bipartisan support, but “rancorous politics have developed around broader trade issues, threatening the proposed expansion and, potentially, the program’s survival.”

Finally, Speaker Pelosi is looking for the House to chip away at President Bush’s Iraq policy with incremental measures now that a withdrawal deadline like that approved by the House has stalled in the Senate. For instance, they are looking at a bill sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee that would effectively extend a ban on permanent U.S. bases in Iraq. This “would do little or nothing to force the president’s hand. But it would buy time to build support for another redeployment proposal by Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha, D-Pa., to be offered on the floor as an amendment to the fiscal 2008 Defense appropriations bill.” Consideration of a proposal to de-authorize the war also appears to have dropped for the time being until the Senate takes action on it.

President Bush and Congressional Republicans have made it a point to attack appropriations attached to the supplemental war spending bill unrelated to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan as “wasteful, pork-barrel projects” (including recovery aid for Hurricane Katrina, wildfires, and the E. Coli scare) and have even accused Democrats of attempting to “buy votes.” Of course, they did the same thing on every other supplemental bill when they were in charge:

…such spending has been part of Iraq funding bills since the war began, sometimes inserted by the president himself, sometimes added by lawmakers with bipartisan aplomb. A few of the items may have weighed on the votes for spending bills that have now topped half a trillion dollars, but, in almost all cases over the past four years, special-interest funding provisions have been the fruits of congressional opportunism by well-placed senators or House members grabbing what they could for their constituents on the one bill that had to be passed quickly.

“Frankly, I don’t see a lot of vote-buying here. And if that was what they were after in some cases, it didn’t seem to work,” said Scott Lilly, who was a longtime senior House Appropriations Committee aide and is now at the liberal-leaning Center for American Progress.

The president’s own request last year for emergency war spending included $20 billion for Gulf Coast hurricane recovery, $2.3 billion for bird flu preparations, and $2 billion to fortify the border with Mexico and pay for his effort to send National Guardsmen to the southern frontier.

In fact, Republicans loaded the 2006 bill with $176 million to rebuild an Armed Forces retirement home in Mississippi that critics called “absurdly overpriced,” $500 million for agriculture relief, an extra $1 billion for community-development block grants, and $118 million for reviving the Gulf Coast fishing industry. Wait, there’s more:

The 2005 emergency war-spending bill included $70 million for aid to Ukraine and other former Soviet states; $12.3 million for the Architect of the Capitol, in part to build an off-site delivery facility for the Capitol police; $24 million for the Forest Service to repair flood and landslide damage; and $104 million for watershed protection — the lion’s share meant for repairing the damage to waterways in Washington County, Utah, at the request of the state’s Republican senators.

Honestly, I wish that no unrelated appropriations were included in the latest bill, but it’s entirely hypocritical for Republicans to deride Democrats over money for “peanut storage” when they did the same thing when they were in charge. And it’s not as if President Bush would veto the bill solely over domestic spending anyway. If the bill didn’t include a provision for withdrawal, would he really be talking about how much unrelated funding is in it? Of course not, as the article points out, he’s even asked himself for such funding to be included in the past.

Furthermore, there’s no evidence that these provisions were included in any attempt to “buy votes.” As the article notes, the $3.4 billion in agriculture spending in the House bill had been worked out by farm-state lawmakers long before Democratic leaders settled on the Iraq troop-pullout language. So while it might be fair to criticize Democrats for “business as usual,” it is not fair to accuse them of vote-buying – especially when you did the very same thing just last year.