A budget stalemate and the hubris of freshman Tea Partiers

By Nicholas Wilbur 

It may have been obvious during the 2010 midterm campaign that the Tea Partiers were delusional, but nobody quite grasped the depth of their derangement until they rewrote a budget proposal last month that nearly doubled the amount of spending cuts originally sought by Republicans in the House, then spent the next two weeks calling on Democrats – without a hint of irony – to get serious about the nation's fiscal disorder. 

After an entire campaign dedicated to making promises about deflating the ballooning size of government, reining in Washington's excessive spending habits, and reducing the dangerously high annual deficit, the House Tea Party members put their money where their mouth was, so to speak. Except they didn't. 

While The Washington Post reported that the proposed $61 billion in spending cuts, if enacted into law, would represent "the largest rescission of federal funds since the conclusion of World War II," the proposal's effect on the deficit is akin to trying to drain the Atlantic by sticking a Slurpee straw into the Potomac. 

From a recent USA Today editorial: 

The $61 billion in spending cuts being sought by House Republicans, and being fiercely resisted by Democrats, represent just 3.7% of this year's deficit and 1.6% of total federal spending. That's not to say there shouldn't be cuts. You have to start somewhere to change attitudes. But any genuine effort to deal with the nation's exploding debt involves tackling benefit programs, reining in defense and security spending, and raising more tax revenue. 

Not only does the proposal fail the long-term litmus test by ignoring Social Security, Medicare, and defense funding – the cash-cow trifecta of federal outlays – it also fails to deliver even a short-term fix.

Run down the line of programs slated for defunding or underfunding and the same scenario emerges: these cuts, other than earning the nod from a handful of anti-ObamaCare, anti-government constituents, achieve almost nothing. (Eliminating funding for both Planned Parenthood and public broadcasting amounts to $790 million in savings, which, when translated into a percentage of the $3.7 trillion federal budget, represents a savings of two millionths of one percent.)

Beyond the dwarfish reach of the proposal, the $61 billion in cuts also happens to be an impossible request in a legislative branch that is only half-controlled by Republicans. 

No Democrat could survive the liberal revolt if they joined Republicans and voted to eliminate funding for health-care reform, Planned Parenthood, and public broadcasting; if they agreed to gut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency and eliminate the agency's role as an emissions regulator; or if they capitulated to Tea Party demands and ignored addressing the growing costs of entitlements and defense, which, combined, account for more than 60 percent of federal spending.

This is where the insanity is best showcased. The Democratic Party's vehement opposition to the bill was not classified or privileged information. Majority Leader Harry Reid came right out and called the bill "draconian" – essentially declaring it dead-on-arrival in the Senate after passing in the House along party lines. President Obama didn't even wait for House Republicans to approve the measure before threatening to veto the bill. To assume that the proposal had any chance of becoming law is to acknowledge that the Tea Party is indeed crazy.

But that isn't how politics works. Normally, they'd have used the proposed $61 billion in budget cuts as a benchmark. After a few days of railing Democrats in front of the cameras as tax-and-spend liberals, socialists, and clueless bleeding hearts, the Republican leadership would take over and start negotiating. That's the usual procedure. Announce your ideology-driven initiative, pressure the other party into joining the debate, then actually have a debate. After sanding off the sharp edges and eliminating the parts that both parties know will doom the bill to failure, lawmakers can then work out the finer details, the phrasing, the timeline for implementation, and then, eventually, pass a revised, responsible, and balanced piece of bipartisan legislation. 

Neither side will be fully satisfied, but the problem is addressed. That's the nature of the legislative beast. It's the beauty of democracy. And yes, it's a dirty business. Unless you actually are the messiah, as some apparently hoped of the president during his campaign three years ago, you don't escape the Capitol Hill negotiation mill without a few scars. President Obama learned this lesson with both health-care reform and tax cuts. Unlike Obama's case, however, the learning curve for the Tea Party will be sharp, painful, and fruitless. 

Perhaps the freshman lawmakers, lacking any hands-on experience with the process, thought it would turn out differently, that their bill would somehow survive the Senate, and that Obama might... I don't know, maybe faceplant from a dopamine overdose after laughing himself to death. If the bill were positioned on his desk at just the right angle, and if the pen in his ear made a mark on the signature line of the bill that the Supreme Court ruled was close enough to the left-handed president's chicken-scratch handwriting that it constituted a deliberate signature, then maybe it would be enacted into law. There's no other possible explanation for the Tea Party's ignorance in thinking that their proposals, unchanged, would go anywhere outside of the GOP-dominated House. 

The most appalling part of this Twilight Zone episode is that Republicans had two and a half weeks to work with Democrats on revising the most offensive portions of the bill, and instead of actually negotiating – the usual give-and-take of any bargaining process – Republicans used that time to bicker, accuse Democrats of obstruction, point fingers at the president for not solving everyone's problems, and generally abandon their roles as nationally elected leaders.

When the bill failed in the Senate, this was one response to the Democratic Party's refusal to accept the budget cuts: 

Paying lip service to the threat caused by the deficit is not a substitute for responsible leadership.

Those words came not from the fiery gut of a radical freshman Tea Partier. They came from the 25-year veteran lawmaker and current minority leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell. 

Of course, Democrats were no better. As a means of "compromise," they proposed cutting $6.5 billion, a figure that was so shallow Republicans didn't even bother wasting their breath to scoff at it. But one can't really fault Democrats for not initiating a deal. Cutting social programs wasn't their idea, for one. For two, assuming the stereotypes of the two parties are correct, Democrats wouldn't have proposed any sort of compromise whatsoever. They'd have countered the GOP's budget cut proposal with tax hikes. 

So, here we are nearly halfway through the fiscal year, staring once again down the barrel of a government shutdown, and despite having two months to figure out what is and isn't possible when it comes to reducing spending, our leaders are proving incapable of even beginning a real debate about effective but economically responsible budget cuts. 

We're back at square one, as they say, and it seems our national leaders are playing hopscotch in the quicksand.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.) 

Credits: Image 1, Image 2. 

The Haunting Specter

By Carl 

I need to digest some of what he said yesterday, but Arlen Specter left a flaming bag of poop on the Senate doorstep:

Partisanship, a quest for ideological purity, and the "abuse" of procedural rules have bled collegiality from the U.S. Senate and mired "the world's greatest deliberative body" in gridlock, Specter said.

This was not the usual flowery goodbye and trip down memory lane. 

There's some merit to his point of view, and Specter lays out his case like the prosecutor he was, but is it correct? Is too partisan a bad thing?

Forget the chicken-egg argument. It really doesn't matter who started the partisanship ball rolling. We can track echoes of it back to the McCarthy hearings, to Watergate, to any number of incidents that brought us incrementally to where we are.

Is the legislative process compromised when, well, there is no compromise?

My first observation is that Harry Reid finally seems to have grown a set. So much legislation has been passed in the last few weeks, it's hard to keep track of it all, including the showcase piece, the repeal of DADT. Why he squandered this forcefulness over the past two years will go down in history as one of the greatest blunders a Senate majority leader could ever make.

(Side note: Imagine if Hillary Clinton had not accepted the secretary of state post, instead focusing on rallying the troops for the 2006 election and then lobbying for the Senate majority leadership job...)

In the next Senate, Reid will have to contend with a Republican House that will have a large element of combativeness in its arsenal. Reid squeaked out a win this year against a nutcase who put her foot in her mouth more times than a yogi with a toe fetish. Reid's Senate may not be so lucky next time around if Reid doesn't carefully extract the good from his dilemma while shirking the bad off onto someone else.

A formidable job even for a deft politician with muscle. For Reid, a real challenge.

The twin questions of ideological purity and abuse of procedural rules seem to go hand in hand, in my opinion, and I delineate them differently from simple party line distinctions. Voting along party lines is expected, which is why I'm not sure the last Congress, or even the Congresses under Bush, were "too partisan."

The difference, noticeable over the past twenty years, but in particular a problem during the Clinton administration, has been the severe punishments proferred to a maverick. It has gone from shunnings over minor quibbles, to outright hostility. I've never seen so many incumbents face primary challenges in which fellow Senators and other national party figures have actively campaigned to remove a fellow party incumbent.

This, in my view, is unhealthy, and guess what? For every Lisa Murkowski in the Republican ranks, we have a Joe Lieberman in the Democratic camp. It's not a right-wing problem only. There's a bubbling undercurrent in this pressure cooker that threatens to explode the entire process, causing entropy at best and chaos at worst, but of much more impact will be the quiet before the storm. The attempt to keep a lid on it.

It started in the 1990s, of course, when the GOP leadership suddenly decided to put a thumb on the scale of negotiation and compromise, forcing their Senators to toe a party line first, and only clear compromises second. It was aided and abetted by the right wing blast fax/talk radio Golem, which spewed venom left and right... ok, mostly left... and forced legislators to either deal with the voters (and others outside their districts) or deal with the leadership. The only way to keep things quiet was to memorize talking points, spew them on cue, and vote Republican only.

That wasn't enough, even though Republicans were generally pretty successful with this strategy. As the Congress did nothing through the first Bush administration, and people watched their savings and jobs drift away on this tide or that, Democrats started to put together two and two and actually come up with five when it came to winning an election or two.

The clamps in the GOP tightened. In response, clamps were applied in the Democratic Party as well. The Fifty State Strategy of Howard Dean's DNC tenure really had two effects: it welcomed moderates and even conservatives while at the same time tried to get them to come to some consensus on issues so that Democrats could present a unified front on issues that people wouldn't be too embarassed by in Wyoming or Utah.

This pissed off everyone, from conservative Blue Dog Dems to us liberals.

In Congress, procedural rules became a weapon, rather than a tool. The use of the filibuster is the most notable, and both sides have gone to that trough healthily. I include, however, reconciliation votes in this. It was used to shove Bush's tax cuts down our throats, and some aspects of healthcare reform also utilized this. Here, a bill is deemed passed already for purposes of making cosmetic budgetary amendments to it, which only require a 51 vote majority and no filibusters allowed.

I'm sure in caucus, worse abuses of procedures occured.

Specter comes off as a bit of a whiner in his speech, but he does point out the signal changes in protocol and custom over the past thirty years, mourning the loss.

But things change, Arlen. One can't expect the world to freeze just because you're in the Senate. And one might point out that there were plenty of moments when you could have shown great courage, opting instead to hew to the party line.

But among his "why mes?" he has made several very cogent and valid points. Go read his speech.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Are we about to get DADT repeal?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Maybe. Yes, just maybe. There's no good reason to be optimistic, given how the Senate works, but, well, things are looking good.

Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown today voiced his support for a stand-alone repeal of the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, bringing the bill one vote over the 60-vote threshold that it will need to reach if and when the Senate votes on the measure in the coming weeks...

Brown's backing means that – on paper – supporters of the repeal have 61 senators in favor of the bill. On Wednesday Republicans Olympia Snowe of Maine and Lisa Murkowski both announced their support for the stand-alone repeal. The House passed the clean repeal on Wednesday and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has vowed to bring it to a vote in the Senate before the end of the year.

With the $1.1-trillion omnibus budget bill pushed aside (and off into the next Congress), mainly because Republicans (who had been involved in crafting it) were going to use it to paralyze the Senate (by requiring that it be read in its entirety, out loud by Senate clerks, all 1,924 pages of it), there would now appear to be enough time to get DADT repealed and perhaps also START ratified.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced late today that he would hold cloture votes (which effectively end any filibusters) on DADT and the DREAM Act (which is unlikely to pass) on Saturday. It looks like the Senate will vote on stand-alone DADT repeal before turning to the START treaty.

Credit where credit is due: Joe Lieberman has been a big supporter of DADT repeal and seems to be the one behind this legislative strategy:

I want to thank Senator Reid for his leadership in bringing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010" to the Senate floor for a vote. I am confident that we have more than 60 votes to end this law that discriminates against military service members based solely on their sexual orientation. Repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" will affirm the Senate's commitment to the civil rights of all Americans and also make our military even stronger.

Now it's just a matter of getting the necessary Republican votes: Brown, Snowe, and Murkowski, and maybe also Collins, Lugar, and Voinovich.

No, we're not there yet, but we're close -- and I honestly didn't think it would get done.

And think about it.

If DADT is repealed and START is ratified, wouldn't that be an incredible way for this Congress to bow out? DADT repeal in particular would be a major victory for the Democrats' progressive base (and of course also for civil rights), particularly at the end of a two-year run that was hardly all that positive for progressives. And START ratification would be a major victory for Obama's foreign policy agenda.

It would be hard to maintain any momentum heading into the next Congress, with Republicans taking over the House and the Democrats coming back to a smaller majority in the Senate, but two such victories in the wake of the midterms and the bleak post-election period would give us a good deal to cheer about as we head into 2011.

DeMint is DeCrazy

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He's one of the wingnuttiest Republican senators, which is saying something -- yes, he's Jim DeMint of South Carolina!

And he wants to paralyze the Senate, and prevent it from doing anything until next year, by forcing readings of the START arms-control bill and an omnibus spending bill. As The Hill explains, such a move "could eat up hours of the remaining lame-duck Congress, 12 for the former and 40 to 60 for the latter.

DeMint has backed off on START, meaning that the treaty could actually be ratified:

A procedural vote on the treaty Wednesday garnered 66 votes, a strong indicator that the treaty could pick up the 67 votes it needs for ratification.

Thirty-two Republicans voted against opening debate on the treaty and two senators, including Democrat Evan Bayh, were not present – putting Democrats in striking distance of securing the necessary votes. Still, a number of Republicans have called for more time to debate the measure, and may ultimately vote to block its ratification if they feel like they’re being steamrolled.

Well, no, Politico, they'll block ratification because the Republican Party is the Party of No, the party of extreme partisanism and absolute obstructionism, because they don't want Obama and the Democrats to have a victory on anything, no matter the cost to the country. (Oh, and of course, because many of them are against arms control generally, so much do they want to return to the glory days of the '50s, when white men ruled the world and children cowered under their desks.) Harry Reid could introduce legislation prescribing that all rich people be given daily rub-and-tugs and the Republicans would still think twice before signing on (and would, even then, claim it was their idea all along, which it probably was).

But DeMint isn't just an obstructionist. He's also crazy, in a Christianist sort of way:

We shouldn't be jamming a major arms control treaty up against Christmas; it's sacrilegious and disrespectful. What's going on here is just wrong. This is the most sacred holiday for Christians. They did the same thing last year -- they kept everybody here until [Christmas Eve] to force something down everybody's throat. I think Americans are sick of this.

No, Americans are sick of extreme partisanism and absolute obstructionism. Isn't that what we keep hearing from all those independent voters?

Regardless, there's nothing "sacrilegious and disrespectful" about legislating around Christmas. The business of government doesn't stop just because there's a major holiday coming up, and of course no one's talking about working on Christmas Day itself.

Arizona's Jon Kyl made comments similar to DeMint's, saying that Reid was "disrespecting one of the two holiest of holidays for Christians" -- the other presumably being Black Friday (when Christians shop like mad to prove just how predestined they are) or, for Catholics, St. Patrick's Day (when Christians drink like mad to prove just how devout they are) -- but Reid, to his credit, fired back:

As a Christian, no one has to remind me of the importance of Christmas for all of the Christian faith, for all their families, all across America. I don't need to hear the sanctimonious lectures of Sen. Kyl and [Sen. Jim] DeMint to remind me of what Christmas means. Where were their concerns about Christmas [when they were posing] filibuster after filibuster of every piece of legislation during this entire Congress? 

Where were they? Being the good Republicans they are, obstructing everything for partisan gain.

But DeMint is a man of hypocrisy, not principle:

I have no problem working every day until Christmas and beyond to stop this rampage of spending and bad policy, what I object to is Democrats trying to rush through an agenda voters rejected and hoping that Americans are too busy with the holidays to notice.

See, it has nothing to do with Christmas, which is just an excuse. It's okay, apparently, to be a Republican around Christmas, just not a Democrat. (Really? Voters rejected the START treaty last month? Huh.)

If the situation were reversed, do you really think DeMint would call Republican efforts "sacrilegious and disrespectful? Of course not. He'd be trying to ram all manner of Republican shit down Americans' throats. He's just that sort of guy.