“Both Sides Are Not To Be Blamed”: John Boehner Will Accept Only A 100%-0% “Compromise” Deal
President Obama met with congressional leaders from both parties and both chambers at the White House this morning about the latest in a series of self-inflicted, easily-avoided wounds. There were no realistic hopes that the policymakers would somehow reach an agreement to replace the sequestration cuts, and expectations were met: the group spoke for about an hour and then quit, resolving nothing.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) left the meeting and spoke for about a minute to reporters without taking questions. For those who can’t watch clips online, he argued:
“Let’s make it clear, the president got his tax hike on January 1st. The discussion about revenue, in my view, is over. It’s about taking on the spending problem here in Washington.”
I’m trying to think of a way to explain this in a way Boehner will understand. As the Speaker sees it, the very idea of a balanced compromise is ridiculous — a compromise would necessarily include revenue, Democrats already got new revenue, so it’s outrageous for anyone to even raise the possibility.
Let’s put this as plainly as possible: in the summer of 2011, both sides accepted a debt-reduction deal that cut spending by over $1.2 trillion without any additional revenue — a win for Republicans. In late 2012, both sides accepted another deal that raised about $600 billion in revenue without any additional cuts — a win for Democrats.
Now it’s time to add another piece to the puzzle, and the Speaker of the House only remembers part of the very recent past.
This sentence…
“Let’s make it clear, the president got his tax hike on January 1st. The discussion about revenue, in my view, is over.”
…makes exactly as much sense as this sentence:
“Let’s make it clear, Republicans got their spending cuts in 2011. The discussion about spending cuts, in my view, is over.”
Substantively, there is no difference between the two arguments. Both represent extremes. Except right now, Republicans think the first sentence makes perfect sense and no one is even bothering with the second sentence.
Indeed, if Boehner were to accept Obama’s compromise, Boehner would still come out on top since the spending-cut totals would still easily outweigh the revenue totals. The president’s offer, at face value, is already a win for the GOP.
But Republicans won’t accept a win; they’ll accept a rout. According to Boehner, the only available solution to a problem he helped create is one in which his side gets 100% of what it wants, predicated on the assumption that the massive spending cuts agreed to in 2011 have escaped Republicans’ memories altogether.
At this point, most Americans want a compromise. Most Democrats want and have already proposed a compromise. But Boehner wants everyone to know there will be no compromise, and there’s nothing the president can say or do to change his mind.
I’ll now look forward to pundits everywhere telling me how “both sides” are to blame.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 1, 2013
“Co-Opted By The Extremists”: John Boehner And The GOP Choose The Tea Party Over The Middle Class
The Republicans, now led from behind by House Speaker John Boehner, are painting themselves into a tiny corner. Boehner may have secured his job as speaker but he has categorically rejected any hope of a grand bargain, thereby leading his party in a rejection of America’s middle class. Unless he can be persuaded by Republican senators and a few dozen of his House colleagues to accept a balanced deal with the president and the Democrats he will severely harm his party by appealing only to the Tea Party.
Leaving the White House after the meeting with the president, Speaker Boehner dug in his heels against the closing of any tax loopholes or raising any revenue. Hasn’t he learned anything since the election?
Look at what has happened to the Republicans. Democrats have a 22 point advantage (according to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) on who would look out for the middle class, the largest margin in 20 years. The same poll found that 36 percent of the public viewed the Republicans favorably in October of 2012, only 29 percent view them favorably today—a remarkable drop in just four months.
And there are very good reasons why House Republicans, who really are the current face of the party, are tanking. They are completely out of touch with the American people on the critical issues. Putting aside votes on the Violence Against Women Act or relief for Hurricane Sandy or averting the “fiscal cliff” or even gay rights, choice, and immigration, they are digging a huge hole for themselves on economic issues.
Right now, 76 percent of Americans want a balanced approach to cutting the deficit, only 19 percent support the Republican position of “cuts only.” By over 2 to 1, voters think the sequester is a bad idea. If the House Republicans and John Boehner continue down their radical path of refusing to negotiate, threatening government shutdowns, and not raising the debt limit, their public standing will continue to erode.
According to a National Journal survey, four-fifths of Americans want to completely exempt Social Security and Medicare from any deficit reduction.
With entitlements making up two-thirds of the budget and growing, it doesn’t take Willie Sutton to figure out that’s where the money is! In order to get Democrats to take on entitlements and the political heat that would bring, the Republicans need to acknowledge that the wealthy must pay their fair share, that hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners shouldn’t be getting more tax breaks. Real tax reform means that we have a fairer and more equitable system. That really is only common sense.
But right now, if Boehner continues to march in lock step with his right flank, there will be no grand bargain, there will be no tax reform, there will be no stabilizing of future budgets. Boehner caved during the last grand bargain negotiations in 2011, according to this week’s New Yorker, because Eric Cantor and the Tea Party forced him to pull out of the deal.
Now, he refuses to negotiate, to work across the aisle, to even work with Senate Republicans. This is not the mark of a leader but someone who has been co-opted by the extremists in his party.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, March 1, 2013
“No Good Choices”: Sequestration Is Here And Danger Lies Ahead
At midnight, $85 billion in federal budget funds will be sequestered (that is, held back) by the Treasury Department, with the potential to cause real pain for the economy and many Americans if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree to some sort of solution. (For an explainer about how this all came about, see here.)
The two sides are, naturally, quite far apart. The White House has offered a sequester replacement plan that it touts as “balanced” and thus ostensibly palatable to Republicans, though the administration is actually selling itself short: the plan should be quite appealing to the GOP exactly because it is unbalanced. The plan offers $930 billion in budget cuts with only $680 billion in revenue ($100 billion of which comes from Chained CPI, anathema to most progressives).
Republicans, meanwhile, want a sequester solution with no new revenue whatsoever—“The revenue issue is now closed,” House Speaker John Boehner said on Thursday—and many Republicans would like the sequester cuts rejiggered to spare defense spending and hit domestic and entitlement programs even harder.
So both sides are now playing the blame game, hoping that the public will get seriously angry about the disruptions caused by the sequester and blame the other side, thus bringing them to the table ready to give concessions.
There is substantial reason to be optimistic that Obama has the upper hand and will “win” this battle. The public appears to be on his side, and serious fractures within the GOP may soon emerge—defense hawks who cannot abide the Pentagon cuts much longer, and rationalists within the party who think the brand is being irreparably damaged.
But for progressives, is it really a win for Obama’s preferred approach to prevail? The emerging consensus is ‘no.’ Some of the cuts Obama offers are plain bad, like his offer to “reform” federal retirement programs and save $35 billion, which means in essence to take $35 billion from the pensions of public workers. Many cuts are inoffensive, and some are good cuts: like reducing certain agricultural subsidies and reducing Medicare payments to big drug companies.
The revenue would mainly be taken from the wealthy via capping deductions and closing loopholes that benefit top earners. But there’s that Chained CPI bit (or “superlative CPI,” as the White House refers to it) that really troubles progressives—and should. It represents a tangible cut to the safety net: seniors already living on $1,200 per month would see $1,000 less per year under the new formula. Disabled veterans would lose $1,400 per year, and middle-class taxes would be hiked on top of it. (The increased tax revenue is, I suppose, why the White House has classified Chained CPI as new revenue, but on the benefit side of Social Security and other programs, this is clearly a cut.)
Cutting entitlements for any reason is a no-go for many Democrats in Congress, especially when coupled with nearly a trillion dollars in budget cuts. That’s what would happen if Obama’s plan wins, and it’s what worries liberals. “There’s a broader concern about the fact that entitlements may get ensnared when we go to an alternative fix, [that] they won’t escape,” Representative Jerry Nadler told BuzzFeed.
The AFL-CIO issued a statement this week that didn’t back Obama’s “balanced” approach, but called for the sequester to be straight-up repealed. “There’s no need to replace the sequester in full or in part. We don’t need it. Republicans are saying we need to address the source of the problem as leverage to get entitlement cuts,” it read. The Congressional Progressive Caucus has also called for sequestration to be completely repealed.
That’s the best-case solution for progressives. (Realistically speaking, of course. The actual best-case solution is the comprehensive plan released by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.) But Boehner probably won’t be able to sell a full repeal of spending cuts in exchange for exactly nothing to his rambunctious hard-core caucus in the House. There might not be any deal to be had here.
In that case, sequestration stays in place. That’s definitely worse than repealing it, but is it really worse than Obama’s grand bargain? Under sequestration half of the cuts come from defense spending; Medicare is protected except for a 2 percent cut to doctor reimbursements, and Social Security, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food stamp programs are protected entirely.
The other domestic cuts are no doubt painful and bad policy, but progressives have a tough choice in weighing that against what Obama’s proposing. And this of course assumes Obama gets everything he wants, which will not happen. Whatever bargain Congress and Obama strike out, if they manage to get something done, will almost certainly be worse.
There are real dangers to enacting some kind of bargain with Republicans to end the sequester—clearly on policy, but also on the politics, even though the administration seems to think otherwise. If White House aides truly believe that achieving a “grand bargain” that includes chained CPI will yield some sort of political victory, they ought to pay closer attention to the blame game now happening around the sequester.
One of Bob Woodward’s central claims, and the one that spurred the now-infamous pushback from the White House, is that Obama’s team came up with the sequester. This has been relentlessly pushed by Republicans (who invented a corny #Obamaquester hashtag) and by far too many mainstream media journalists.
This is plainly ridiculous—Obama wanted a clean debt-ceiling hike in 2011, and Republicans denied it and forced a showdown. Republicans were not enticed by what the White House offered to end the standoff and demanded some kind of guarantee of budget reductions, and at that point an administration official proposed sequestration as a tool. To strip that final piece of the timeline of all preceding context, and say that somehow Obama wanted the sequester, is exactly backwards—but it’s what is happening.
This is identical to what would likely happen to Chained CPI. Sure, this whole showdown was created by Republicans. And everyone understands the GOP to be the party that wants to cut “entitlement” programs. But Republicans have very deftly avoided proposing specific cuts to Social Security or Medicare in this debate; only Obama has with his Chained CPI proposal. Does anybody really think that two years from now, Republicans wouldn’t pull the exact same parsing of history as they did with the sequester, and blame Obama for cutting Social Security, which an overwhelming amount of Americans oppose? (Remember too that this is exactly what the Romney-Ryan ticket did with the $700 million in Medicare cuts included in the Affordable Care Act.)
In short, the sequester is a disaster, but a potentially worse disaster may lie ahead. There are no good choices here, only less-bad ones, and progressives should be wary about confusing political victory with a policy victory.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, March 1, 2013
“The Hostage Takers”: Blame Eric Cantor And Paul Ryan For The Sequester
John Boehner’s laughably weak leadership as House Majority Leader surely must be seen as being partly to blame for the sequester — the Tea Party caucus in Congress clearly has a tight leash on the Speaker.
But at least Boehner tried for a “Grand Bargain” with President Obama in 2011, only to be reined in by Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan, according to a recent interview Cantor conducted with The New Yorker‘s Washington correspondent, Ryan Lizza. Cantor admitted that there was a final meeting with Boehner, Ryan and himself where Boehner wanted to accept the president’s $1.2 trillion offer, but was talked out of it by Cantor and Ryan.
“The reason why we said no in that meeting, ‘don’t do this deal,’ was because what that deal was, was basically going along with this sense that you had to increase taxes, you had to give on the question of middle-class tax cuts prior to the election,” said Cantor. “And you knew that they had said they weren’t giving in on health care.”
So basically, this was about the 2012 election. Cantor and Ryan wanted to let the voters decide on taxes and health care instead of preempting it with the Obama-Boehner Grand Bargain. Then in November, the American public overwhelmingly voted for President Obama and his balanced approach to deficit reduction and growing the economy through a mix of spending cuts, tax revenues and closing corporate loopholes — a result that has been confirmed in repeated polls. The American people also doubled down on Obamacare by re-electing the president.
Cantor concluded the interview with Lizza with this telling remark: “That’s why we said, ‘Let’s just get what we can now, abide by our commitment of dollar-for-dollar, and we’ll have it out, as the president said, on these two issues in the election”.
The failure of the Grand Bargain resulted in the Budget Control Act of 2011, which included the automatic budget sequestration.
So it is now clear that Cantor and Ryan killed the Grand Bargain, leading to the sequester and the onset of European-style austerity and possibly another recession, and their basis for that was their supreme confidence that they would win the election. What is unclear is why, after their ideas were thoroughly rejected, they are defying the will of the American people and a popular president by refusing to compromise.
Could it be that they wanted this all along? Here is what Ryan said after the law putting the sequester in place was passed in August, 2011:
“What conservatives like me have been fighting for, for years, are statutory caps on spending, legal caps in law that says government agencies cannot spend over a set amount of money. And if they breach that amount across the board, sequester comes in to cut that spending, and you can’t turn that off without a supermajority vote. We got that in law. That is here.”
By: Josh Marks, March 1, 2013, The National Memo
“So Much For Economic Uncertainty”: Republicans Have Decided To Govern Through Series Of Self Imposed Crises
In 2009 and 2010, the single most common Republican talking point on economic policy included the word “uncertainty.” I did a search of House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) site for the phrase “economic uncertainty” and found over 500 results, which shows, at a minimum, real message discipline.
The argument was never especially compelling from a substantive perspective. For Boehner and his party, President Obama was causing excessive “uncertainty” — through regulations, through the threat of tax increases, etc. — that held the recovery back. Investors were reluctant to invest, businesses were reluctant to hire, traders were reluctant to trade, all because the White House was creating conditions that made it hard for the private sector to plan ahead.
It was a dumb talking point borne of necessity — Republicans struggled to think of a way to blame Obama for a crisis that began long before the president took office — but the GOP stuck to it.
That is, Republican used to stick to it. Mysteriously, early in 2011, the “economic uncertainty” pitch slowly faded away without explanation. I have a hunch we know why: Republicans decided to govern through a series of self-imposed crises that have created more deliberate economic uncertainty than any conditions seen in the United States in recent memory.
E.J. Dionne Jr. had a great column on the larger pattern today.
Ever since they took control of the House of Representatives in 2011, Republicans have made journeys to the fiscal brink as commonplace as summertime visits to the beach or the ballpark. The country has been put through a series of destructive showdowns over budget issues we once resolved through the normal give-and-take of negotiations. […]
The nation is exhausted with fake crises that voters thought they ended with their verdict in the last election. Those responsible for the Washington horror show should be held accountable. And only one party is using shutdowns, cliffs and debt ceilings as routine political weapons.
Quite right. Looking back over the last two years — in fact, it’s closer to 22 months — Republicans have made three shutdown threats, forced two debt-ceiling standoffs, pushed the country towards a fiscal cliff, refused to compromise on a sequester, and have lined up even more related fiscal fights in the months ahead.
So, here’s the question for GOP leaders: where did your concern about “economic uncertainty” go? Here’s the follow-up: do you think a never-ending series of hostage standoffs inspire investors, reassure “job creators,” and improve consumer confidence?
Or is it more likely Republicans are doing the very thing they said they opposed in 2010?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 28, 2013
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