John Boehner wanted to cut VA bill that just passed House

For veterans bill, Republicans put budget ax aside
By ANDREW TAYLOR (AP)

WASHINGTON — House Republicans who have spent months demanding spending cuts blanched Wednesday at their first opportunity to actually make them, instead joining Democrats in treating a bill to pay for veterans programs in 2011 as politically sacrosanct in an election year.

The veterans measure is the first of a dozen spending bills for the upcoming 2011 budget year to come up for a vote. Democrats, meanwhile, were doing some ducking and weaving of their own to avoid time-consuming floor debates and politically difficult votes on other measures.

It's of little surprise that Democrats picked the Veterans Affairs bill as the first in the appropriations pile to bring to a vote. It passed by a 411-6 vote.

Only a handful of others are likely to get as far before the November election, even though all 12 are supposed to pass both the House and Senate and be signed by the president before Oct. 1. Last year at this time, the House had passed all 12 bills.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, offered the only amendments to cut the veterans bill but withdrew them as soon as Democrats started making political hay out of them.

Boehner wanted to cut the Veterans Affairs Department's rapidly growing policy office as well as its congressional lobbying operation and skim $45 million from the VA's $3.3 billion request for computer systems, which the agency itself admits was too high.
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