Dispatch from the TEAlamo
by digby
Dave Weigel reports from the TEAlamo, where a few hearty Tea Partiers make the case thatthey really won:
Human beings have been putting their best spin on defeats since the invention of “winning” and “losing.” Obviously, the many Republicans who don’t want to trash their colleagues on the record are going to look for the Alamo underneath the rubble of this loss. But this shutdown had meant a lot to the party. Only a few dozen current members of the GOP conference had endured the last shutdown in 1995–1996. Those who hadn’t—and some of those who had—have insisted for years that it was not truly a defeat for the party. In his 1998 memoir, Newt Gingrich blamed the media for making that shutdown a “story of Republican heartlessness.” By 2010, when he reminisced about the shutdown, Gingrich argued that its real lesson was that his GOP had held onto the House in 1996 and balanced the budget—and that if the GOP shut down the government to stop Obamacare, the country would rally to the cause.
As dealmania spread across the Capitol on Wednesday, this spin remained battered but alive. “I haven’t been home now for close to a month, and so it’s not an easy venture all the way across the board,” said Arizona Rep. Matt Salmon, a class of 1994 Republican who returned to Congress this year after a decade in retirement. “As we saw last time, in 1996, we had the last government shutdown, 20-some days, and just a couple of years later we did the unimaginable: We balanced the budget for the first time in 40 years. We got through some of the most meaningful welfare reform that this country never believed was possible. I think part of it is that when both sides see that you’re actually willing to stand and fight on principle, it changes the dynamic. It’s not evident right now, but I think it will be.”
They really do sound pathetic. And they sounded pathetic in 1995 when I heard all this claptrap the first time. The shine was permanently off Gingrich who was threatened by a coup within a couple of years and ended up resigning after they lost seats in 1998. But … they also turned the entire government into a sexy soap opera for over a year (with the giddy help of the Village press corps) culminating in a presidential impeachment they knew was doomed to fail but proceeded to do it anyway. And then they stole the next election. So much for lessons learned.
It’s tempting to think they’ve been vanquished for good this time, that they’ll settle down now and behave like responsible adults charged with governing the most powerful nation on earth. But I’m afraid that’s just not who they are. Barring a legitimate crisis, President Obama’s second term is very likely to be a series of brutal confrontations with the Republicans over … something. It may not be the budget — perhaps they did get their hair singed on that. After all, all they really have to do is hold the line on sequestration and they’ll have successfully crippled the economy and caused untold amounts of suffering among the American people (which they’ll probably blame on Obamacare, so it’s a two-fer.) If they do nothing but name post-offices for the next three years, their job is done.
In any case, as I wrote yesterday, as long as the Democrats keep putting the “entitlements” on offer, the activist left must remain on alert. Assuming that nobody really means it or the right will never accept it is foolish. It’s right there in the president’s current budget, ripe for the picking:
The president proposes repealing the automatic cuts of sequestration and instead pursuing other deficit-reduction measures, meaning that discretionary spending – both military and domestic – would receive fewer cuts than if sequestration remained in place in 2014. The budget would reduce agriculture subsidies and prevent individuals from receiving unemployment and disability payments simultaneously, among other cuts. The use of chained CPI in Social Security and elsewhere in the budget would reduce deficits by $230 billion over a decade. And the budget includes $392 billion in savings from Medicare and other health programs, in part by raising Medicare premiums for wealthy retirees and negotiating for lower prescription drug prices.
Recall that Social Security is not included in the budget so there is no reason it should be included in any deficit reduction package. One must suspect that this is being done at least partially to obscure the fact that the Chained-CPI is a tax increase on working and middle class workers. Interestingly, Republicans have a way around that:
Conservative groups are warning lawmakers they have “strong concerns” that a proposal to slow the rate of inflation for government programs could result in tax increases. .. “We are not opposed to chained CPI under any circumstances,” the groups wrote in a letter to lawmakers dated Monday. “In the context of bracket-flattening tax reform which is revenue-neutral or a net tax cut, chained CPI may be an acceptable component. But as a standalone tax measure, chained CPI is a $100 billion tax increase in the first decade alone.”
“Bracket flattening” is a long-standing component of the president’s own tax reform proposals so they really aren’t very far apart on that. The GOP’s main objection is to the Buffet Rule and other proposals to raise revenue from the wealthy. Naturally.
The next few weeks are going to be about how to “replace” the slash and burn sequester cuts with something less immediately brutal. (I haven’t heard a peep about repealing it, which should be the rallying cry of the left.) Reports are that the Republicans hate it as much as the Democrats so there is incentive on both sides to find a better way. But keep in mind that even though the president has held fast on his pledge to “ask the wealthy to pay a little bit more as part of a balanced approach”, both sides remain committed to deficit reduction whether they are able to lift the budget caps a little bit or not. So the question is really about where these cuts will fall not whether these cuts will fall. You can certainly see the incentive to push the pain into the future in the form of “entitlement cuts” that will hit long after most of these people will have moved on to their comfortable K-Street sinecures.
The American people got their government open again, avoided default and lived to fight another day on entitlement cuts. This is a good day. But the battle isn’t over until the Democrats stop buying into the deficit obsession and fool themselves into thinking that if they can just “get that out of the way” they will be able to do all the things they’d really like to do. The last 20 years have proved that to be an absurd delusion that has brought us to the point at which a Democratic President has repeatedly offered up the signature achievement of the Democratic Party — and the only thing standing between some of the most vulnerable citizens in our nation and indecent poverty — as a form of human sacrifice. Until that proposal comes off the Democratic agenda permanently, the fight must go on.
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