Bush Will Reinstate Davis-Bacon; Foxx Is Frowning

El Presidente slipped it out quietly yesterday, sending forth his Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao to announce that the Davis-Bacon Act would be reinstated November 8th ... to pay "prevailing wages" to workers in the hurricane reconstruction zone.

Madame Virginia Foxx ain't happy 'bout that!

But this was apparently El Presidente's trade-off in trying to win "moderate" Republicans to vote for the slash-and-burn budget the House conservatives are cooking up, very much with Foxx's help. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce, on which Foxx sits, has worked up $18.1 billion (BILLION) in cuts to student aid, something the good Madame hasn't believed in since approximately the time she swept up the schoolhouse as a super-poor high school student. And what are the conservative Republicans (Foxx & Friends) calling this evisceration? "A Plan to Strengthen Higher Education," of course! The plan to strengthen higher education apparently includes, for Foxx & Friends, making it harder to low- and moderate-income families to send their kids to college.

The most conservative Republicans in the House (Foxx & Friends) are working busily on finding $50 billion they can cut from social programs like student aid and food stamps, combined with (you guessed it!) additional tax cuts for the very wealthy. And El Presidente himself (of the failure-to-ever-veto-a-single-spending-bill Bushes) was telling these mean cats to "push the envelope" on cuts.

"I have never felt that a budget going through the Congress of the United States is more disconnected from reality than this budget," said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the senior Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.