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In these dire fiscal times, when even the sacred programs are no longer sacred, Republican leaders have still been able to identify a few that they think deserve more money.

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NIKKI KAHN/ THE WASHINGTON POST – House Speaker John Boehner’s (Ohio) actions renew a fight he lost two years ago, when opponents killed a voucher program over concerns that it robbed resources from public schools.

Security for congressmen is slated for a boost, after the Tucson shootings. Aid to Israel would grow. Veterans would get more money for their health care.

And then there’s a little-known program, which gives money to disadvantaged District students to attend private schools, that would get an additional $2.3 million — thanks largely to one powerful patron, House Speaker John A. Boehner .

In his opening gambit as the House’s top leader, Boehner has put his name and new-found clout behind a pair of efforts to give poor students a chance to attend private schools and, in the process, boost the city’s struggling Catholic schools.

In addition to the extra $2.3 million in the House-passed spending bill for 2011, Boehner has also submitted a bill that would authorize an additional $20 million per year over the next five years. That bill, the only one that bears Boehner’s name this year, was approved by a House committee last week.

The speaker’s actions renew a fight he lost two years ago, when opponents killed a voucher program over concerns that it robbed resources from public schools. On Monday, after President Obama renewed his push for education reform at an Arlington County middle school, House Republicans linked the president’s success on his goals to his willingness to embrace Boehner’s.

City leaders remain divided on the issue, and some resent the speaker’s efforts, saying they are just the latest unwanted example of Republican lawmakers using the District as a testing ground for their pet policy experiments.

At a House hearing this month, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton said that if Republicans were really concerned about improving education in the District they would devote more funding to public alternatives, such as charter schools.

“The inescapable conclusion is that the Republicans believe they can indulge their personal and ideological preferences with impunity here in the District,” Norton said.

Congressional Democrats and D.C. officials have long accused Republicans on the Hill of imposing their own agendas on the District. In 1998, for instance, District residents voted to allow medical marijuana use, but congressional Republicans quickly put a stop to it. City officials were finally able to go forward with the idea a dozen years later, after Democrats had taken control of Congress.

The GOP also forbade the District from using its own money to run needle-exchange programs for drug addicts and provide abortions for low-income women. Those prohibitions were lifted by Democrats in 2009, but House Republicans are trying to reinstate the bans.

Boehner argues that his plan would create opportunities, rather than restrictions, for city residents. He wants local students to have the same chance he did: to follow a Catholic school path that he credits with helping him rise from the working-class suburbs of Cincinnati to the most powerful man in Congress.

“I just think it’s horrendous that you’ve got one of the worst school districts in the country right here in the District of Columbia,” Boehner said in a late January interview in his Capitol office, adding: “We’ve cut a lot of money out of the budget over the last month. We’ve got a lot more we’re going to cut. But I think we can afford to do this.”

Boehner’s closest allies on the Hill said the issue will serve as an early test of his relationship with the Obama White House.

“This is very, very important to him,” said Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.). “So the White House would be wise to take that under consideration.”

Boehner said that Obama’s willingness to compromise on the D.C. measure would foster goodwill, and perhaps smooth the path for Obama’s ambitious school reform agenda, which includes revising the No Child Left Behind law.

“Of course, it would,” Boehner said. “It’s human nature. He’s got things that are important to him; I’ve got things that are important to me.”

Before he became speaker, Boehner, 61, was a regular at Catholic schools in the District, visiting more than a dozen and serving several times as a “mystery reader” in classrooms.

“It’s just Boehner and the kids,” said Elizabeth Ross, director of development for the Consortium of Catholic Academies, who was present for the visits.

At January’s State of the Union address, Boehner devoted his entire suite in the gallery above the House floor to students, parents and teachers from District Catholic schools. The next day, he joined Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) to introduce their bill renewing the voucher program.

Students who were already getting scholarships two years ago continue to receive money, and the program has benefited about 3,000 students over the past seven years, giving them up to $7,500 a year.

Boehner “has been the one person that we could always depend on,” said Virginia Walden Ford, executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice, who was a guest at the State of the Union.

While his legislative work on school choice traces back 25 years to his tenure in the Ohio state House of Representative, his first exposure was more personal.

When Boehner attended Archbishop Moeller High School in Cincinnati, his parents paid half the tuition and the local Catholic parish paid the other half.

The second oldest of 12 children, Boehner said he paid for several of his younger brothers to attend Moeller — and that experience taught him a lesson he later incorporated into his thinking about school policy.

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Think of Washington’s initial 2011 budget fights as spring training — for a season about to open in a hailstorm.

Twice, Congress and the Obama White House have agreed on temporary spending bills that trim spending and keep the government open. Last week’s version averted a shutdown, at least until April 8.

But the pace of play is accelerating, under deteriorating conditions. And practices so far have produced little evidence of confidence-building.

Republican and Democratic negotiators bought time by cutting the easiest $10 billion, from discredited projects and programs. Closing the remaining $50 billion gap for the last half of this fiscal year will require steeper reductions from a small slice of the budget.

“There needs to be a global solution,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, one of a half-dozen senators from both parties seeking a long-term fix. Meantime, he said, “There’s growing frustration with this inability to predict how long the government is going to stay open.”

Yet a comprehensive fix means two teams with weak batting averages must hit a series of 100 mile-per-hour fastballs.

For most Republicans, “global” means cutting not just discretionary spending, but also the enormous “entitlements” of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Representative Paul D. Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee, promises his forthcoming 2012 blueprint will take that risky step.

For most Democrats, “global” means collecting additional taxes, as well. That step, under discussion by Mr. Warner’s “Gang of Six,” is also risky.

So is the prospect that the United States might shake investor confidence by defaulting on its obligations. That could happen if Congress fails to raise the federal debt limit once the current ceiling is reached sometime this spring.

Leading Republicans say they will raise it only if Democrats accept more spending reductions. As if the showdown needed any more complications, the military confrontation with Libya throws a curve at the possibility of cuts to the Pentagon budget.

In other words, the game will not get easier after Opening Day.

Thinking Long Term

One reason: some on both sides feel they are losing.

Conservative Republicans think that slow-motion, piecemeal spending cuts have undercut momentum from their election triumph last November. By defying their leaders and opposing last week’s stopgap “continuing resolution,” 54 House Republicans signaled that unease.

Liberal Democrats consider spending cuts economically counterproductive amid high unemployment, and see further reductions as threats to cherished priorities. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, sought to draw a line by vowing, “I will not support tinkering with Social Security.”

Steve Bell, a former Senate Republican budget aide now at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said “the reason I am pessimistic is that the scar tissue” from the from stopgap spending battle could affect negotiations over 2012 and beyond.

A longer-term negotiation is what Mr. Warner and five colleagues, from both parties, are conducting. The White House is encouraging their effort from afar as a potential way out if negotiations falter on short-term spending and the debt limit.

The six senators are using recommendations from President Obama’s deficit-reduction commission as a template. Neither the president nor Republican leaders has embraced those recommendations, however.

“Nobody ever won the office pool by betting on the success of bipartisanship,” said Bruce Reed, who assisted the deficit-reduction commission and is now chief of staff to Vice  President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “But the Gang of Six is bringing Republicans and Democrats together, the way Washington should work.”

Possible Compromise

Prospects for compromise appeared to brighten last week when 64 senators, 32 from each party, urged Mr. Obama to seek a “comprehensive” solution touching all three hot-buttons — discretionary spending, entitlements, and taxes.

But the path from hortatory letter to long-term deal is steep. Newly empowered House Republicans would have to accept more taxes ; Senate Democrats, fighting to keep their majority in 2012, would have to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Referring to the Gang of Six, Robert Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said, “The probability that their fruit will ripen to an eatable state is very low.”

A least-common-denominator outcome might yield targets for limiting spending and deficits as a proportion of the economy. As with the 1980s-era “Gramm-Rudman” efforts, it could include enforcement mechanisms to require later policy choices for meeting those targets.

But even that possible fallback has not eased fears of stalemate. The Federal Reserve chairman,
Ben S. Bernanke, has warned that tying a debt-limit increase to a long-term budget deal would risk default and fresh financial “chaos” as the nation tries to leave the 2008 crisis behind.

“The idea that this time some folks want to start the fire. . .” Mr. Warner said, his words trailing off. “You just have to hope cooler heads will prevail.”

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President Obama combined two of his passions – basketball and politics –by playing host to a dozen members of Congress at the White House on Wednesday night to watch the televised contest between the Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Bobcats.

The attendees, according to a list from the White House, were all from Illinois and North Carolina. They included just two Republicans; the White House did not say how many Republicans were invited but declined.

But if the group’s partisan split skewed Democratic, especially counting the First Fan, the dozen lawmakers seemed evenly split between Bulls and Bobcats fans. Also attending were the mayor of Charlotte, Anthony Foxx, and a council member, James Mitchell.

Attendees were to include both senators from Illinois – Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democratic leader, and Mark Steven Kirk, the Republican who last year won the seat that Mr. Obama used to hold. But of North Carolina’s two senators, Kay Hagan, a Democrat, was listed but the Republican, Richard M. Burr, was not.

The nine House members included four Democrats from Chicago – Representatives Danny Davis, Jesse Jackson Jr., Luis Gutierrez and Jan Schakowsky; four Democrats from North Carolina — G.K. Butterfield, Larry Kissell, David Price and Mel Watt – and one Republican from North Carolina, Sue Myrick.

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They held their tongues overnight, but Republican Congressional leaders on Friday ripped the initial Democratic offer in new budget negotiations, with Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky calling the bid of another $6.5 billion in cuts “unserious.”

Jonathan Ernst/Getty Images Senator Mitch McConnell, left, and House Speaker John A. Boehner both voiced their dissatisfaction on Friday with the Democrats’ budget offer.

“The Democrats’ whole approach is to see what they can get away with, rather than to actually do something about the debt and jobs crisis Americans want us to address,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, said on the chamber floor.

House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio was equally tough on the proposal Democrats put forward in a negotiating session on Thursday.

“Yesterday, the White House and Congressional Democrats finally announced their position,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement released Friday morning. “Unfortunately, it is little more than the status quo, and the status quo is indefensible and unacceptable.”

In Thursday’s meeting with top Congressional leaders and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., lawmakers and administration officials struck some kind of gentleman’s agreement that they would not say anything about the talks, leaving Mr. Biden the honor of issuing a brief and bland statement.

“We had a good meeting, and the conversation will continue,” he said. But that clock on niceties seemed to have run out in less than 24 hours.

The Democratic proposal would cut another $6.5 billion from current spending on top of $4 billion already agreed to by Congress and President Obama, giving Democrats about $10.5 billion in spending reductions compared to $61 billion already approved by the House.

In an effort to push the House and Senate toward one another, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, plans to allow votes next week on both the House bill and a Democratic alternative in an effort to gauge the level support – or lack thereof – for either plan. Congress has until March 18 to reach a deal.

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Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will convene a meeting of Congressional leaders of both parties in the Capitol in Thursday afternoon in an effort to find a way out of a spending dispute that has the entire government operating under a stop-gap budget.

The White House announced that what could be the first of several sessions would be held at 4 p.m. Also taking part from the Obama administration will be the White House chief of staff, William M. Daley, and Jacob Lew, the budget director. President Obama called for the negotiations on Wednesday.

When they first heard of the planned talks, Republicans were unenthusiastic since Democrats had not yet made public their own plan for spending cuts and the House had approved $61 billion in reductions. But Republicans said they would take part. They continued to press on Thursday for a Democratic proposal.

“Republicans are happy to go,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said. “But putting a meeting on the schedule doesn’t change the fact that neither the White House nor a single Democrat in Congress has proposed a plan that would allow the government to remain open and that would respond to the voters by reining in spending. All we get is talk.”

The current interim spending bill passed by the Senate and signed by the president Wednesday expires March 18, giving Congress and the administration two weeks to strike a deal to fund the government through Sept. 30, pass another short-term measure or see parts of the government shut down.

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House Republicans are expected to move Friday to assert themselves as defenders of the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages. Last month, the Obama administration said it had decided the law was unconstitutional, and had directed the Justice Department to stop defending it in court.

While Republican rebukes to Mr. Obama’s decision were largely muted, Speaker John Boehner has said that the Republican-controlled House would likely make a move to defend the law.

In an television interview Wednesday night, Mr. Boehner called the President’s decision “outrageous”. He added: “It’s the law of the land. It’s the job of the Justice Department to defend the work of our government. And I just think it’s outrageous. We’re looking at our options, what’s available to us to intervene. The short – the long and the short of this is that we are going to intervene. The question is how do we do it.”

Under federal law, whenever the executive branch declines to defend a statute it believes is unconstitutional, the Attorney General must inform Congress of that decision, which he has in this case, and lawmakers must then determine whether to appoint their own lawyer to defend the statute in court.

This decision can be done through a resolution, or via the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, made up of the three majority leaders and two most senior minority members in the House; the majority can then instruct the House General Counsel, on behalf of the House, to seek to intervene
.
Neal Devins, a professor of law at William and Mary Law School, said that such disputes between the legislative and executive branches tend to center around the separation of powers, so the case around the marriage act is unusual. “The House can appear as an amicus or ask the court to appoint it as a party in the case,” he said.

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