Negotiators get to work on supplemental spending bill

Democratic leaders hope to complete work this week on a supplemental spending bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other military and domestic priorities.

Staffs of the House and Senate appropriations committees are meeting this week to reconcile differences between a $96.7 billion House version of the bill and a $91.3 billion Senate-passed measure, a Democratic aide said.

Before leaving for the Memorial Day recess, the Senate named its entire Appropriations Committee to a conference committee, and the House is expected to name its negotiators this week.

Among the major differences is whether to include $5 billion to boost lending at the International Monetary Fund.

The IMF funding is a priority for President Obama, who committed to the funds at April's G-20 meeting in London. He said it is part of a multinational effort to increase the financial security of the IMF in the face of the global recession.

While the Senate included the funding in its package, the House did not fund the initiative in its bill.

The IMF funding issue poses a dilemma for House Democratic leaders because they need Republican support to offset opposition from antiwar Democrats. But if conferees include the IMF funding, it will likely jeopardize GOP support.

During floor debate last month, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, said the IMF funding "should be debated on its own merits, not as part of a troop-funding bill."

J.D. Foster, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and senior Office of Management and Budget official under former President George W. Bush, said last week that proponents of the IMF funding "have to say exactly what is it that this money is going to do that can't be done otherwise at this time. The center of the global financial crisis is not an inability of emerging market countries to borrow money. To this point, the case has not been made."

In the Senate, Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., offered an amendment to cut the funding from the supplemental, but it failed, 64-30.

Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry, D-Mass., argued that the funding would serve as a backstop for emerging market nations and buyers of U.S.-produced goods.

"We've got a lot of people in America whose jobs depend on their ability to export goods," Kerry said. "And the fact is, if those emerging markets start to fade, not only do we lose the economic side of those markets, but we also run the risk that governments fail."

One Democratic observer believes party members can win support for the IMF money by getting assurances that other countries do their fair share.

"I think the House, in part, is looking for assurances that the entire burden of stimulating the global economy is not going to fall on the United States," said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic clerk and staff director of the House Appropriations Committee, and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "I don't [think] that this supplemental will get to the president's desk with the IMF money in it unless those assurances are given."

Lilly didn't know what those assurances would look like.

"That is something the White House and the governments in Europe that want to see the money are going to have to take up with the conferees," Lilly said.

Other differences conferees must resolve include billions in military equipment added to the House bill, such as $2.2 billion for eight C-17 cargo planes and $904 million for 11 C-130 transport aircraft. The Senate bill does not fund either aircraft.