This little blurb from Politico made me laugh:
While the 54 Republicans who voted against the most recent stopgap spending bill didn’t derail the legislation, some GOP lawmakers are becoming increasingly wary of a faction that rejects substantial spending cuts because they want deeper ones or the inclusion of divisive social policy riders.
Many of the critics are close to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who struggles more each day to keep his majority unified as a three-month spending showdown threatens to spill into April. The House passed $6 billion of spending cuts Tuesday, to bring the total cut to $10 billion.
“Yep, it is surprising,” Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson said of the difficulty convincing hard-liners that the leadership is cutting large amounts of spending. “I mean, this is three weeks; we’re cutting $6 billion. You know? It is surprising. This is the only time in my life where I can cut $6 billion in a three-week period and be called a liberal.”
Yeah, because Idaho is known for sending liberals to Congress. But, seriously, what can you do but laugh? In any case, I’d consider it a bad thing if there were no Republicans left to stand around pointing at their colleagues and saying, “Those people are nuts.”
If you understand what budget authority and appropriations are all about in the reality of government agencies you will be doubly convinced the Republicans are nuts.
Before allowing the cuts to go forward, President Obama likely had agency heads (and thus their staffs) map out the implications of cuts that size and figure out how to minimize the impact on program delivery. For example, a lot of defense contractors also contract with domestic agencies. A cut to EPA could be met in part by canceling of new IT work, for which someone like Lockheed Martin might be a prime contractor and smaller IT contracting firms (even Manpower Technical) might be subcontractors. So cuts to federal domestic budgets come back to bite Republican constituencies as well. (I use IT work as an example because it is a bastion of employees who are libertarian, even Randian in their political views.) An old IT colleague of mine has been ranting about the unreasonable demands that public employees have been making in Wisconsin. Yet, he is employed directly (not as a contractor) by a major state university here in NC that lacks collective bargaining rights.
I don’t believe in the 11-dimensional chess slander, but I am getting the distinct impression that the Republicans are beginning to think they have been suckered by Obama’s willingness to compromise. It allowed them to run the Overton window so far nutty that when Republicans actually had power and began to act, the blowback was almost immediate. The fact that they are beginning to pull back is distressing for anyone who wanted to see their absolute collapse as a result of their hubris. But one can still hope it is one of those Wile E. Coyote moments of awareness.
I don’t believe in the 11-dimensional chess slander, but I am getting the distinct impression that the Republicans are beginning to think they have been suckered by Obama’s willingness to compromise.
That’s all well and good at a federal level, but it has hurt big time at the state level, as we can all see.
The rope-a-dope strategy doesn’t really make sense. Not when you consider the abject fear the administration has in its reelection campaign, as it reads and watches every square inch of footage and print of the 1980 and 1984 elections over and over again trying to make sense of it all. And that’s without legitimate competition.
I think they genuinely believed that they were a transformational force the likes of which this country has rarely seen, and the implacability of a chaotic world has deeply humbled and humiliated them.
Do they go into 2013 stronger than where they were in 2009? No, right? Probably not. They will never get a better Senate, and the Senate will never voluntarily kill its own institutional primacy.
So what’s left to accomplish in the big picture arena, legislatively, for the next six years? Compromise. Only compromise. Even with those who would do no such thing. So they’re doing the best they can, trying to get Republicans to turn back towards something resembling irresponsible governance, instead of outright plutocratic treason. And that involves staying quiet in the beginning. The name of the game is rehabilitation, not obliteration. As much as they brag about being pragmatists, they’re stone cold ideologues for the two party system.
Because the admin genuinely believes that the debt issue has to be slowed down. I don’t think we can call that an act. They believe it with full heart. That’s their (last) great domestic technocratic achievement. Not stopping global warming, or pulling people out of poverty, or growing wages, or dramatically reforming the systems of justice and opportunity in this country. Getting people ostensibly health insured, cleaning corporate finances, and fixing the nation’s balance sheet. Balance sheets. It’s clear now that that’s what they were about from the beginning. And they simply can’t do it alone.
I don’t think there’s a strategy. I just think the natural inclination to bipartisanship has inadvertently given the Republicans a Wile E. Coyote moment. My comment was not as much about the President as the situation the Republicans made for themselves.
What happens in 2012 is beyond the control of the parties. But it is likely that Obama will be re-elected. The big questions are in the Congress and the states. The support by rank-and-file union members for Republicans is rapidly eroding. The question is whether the equivalent of the farmer-labor coalition can be recreated and what candidates it supports in 2012.
What Obama seems very good at is giving the opposition enough rope to hang themselves.
Yelling about Republicans are doing this or that gets us nowhere. If Obama had done that, he would have given the Republicans a club to beat him with. Tax and spend Democrat, anyone?
All I can see is events. I have tried to infer from those a strategy, but if there is a strategy other than muddling through it escapes me. Likely the Republicans were going to have enough rope to hang themselves after their shellacking in 2008 anyway. I am just amazed at how rapidly they ran off the cliff in Congress and now in state legislatures.
there are no Liberal Republicans…just those who aren’t stark raving batshyt crazy.
EJ Dionne’s piece brings up a good piece the discussion seems to have forgotten