GAME OVER! REBOOBLICANS LOSE. DEFAULT AVOIDED, GOVT REOPENS

N.Y. TIMES

Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.  The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.  Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it.

The result of the impasse that threatened the nation’s credit rating was a near total defeat for Republican conservatives, who had engineered the budget impasse as a way to strip the new health care law of funding even as registration for benefits opened Oct. 1 or, failing that, to win delays in putting the program into place.

The shutdown sent Republican poll ratings plunging, cost the government billions of dollars and damaged the nation’s international credibility. Mr. Obama refused to compromise, leaving Republican leaders to beg him to talk, and to fulminate when he refused.

Under the agreement to reopen the government, the House and Senate are directed to hold talks and reach accord by Dec. 13 on a long-term blueprint for tax and spending policies over the next decade. Mr. Obama said consistently through the standoff that he was willing to have a wide-ranging budget negotiation once the government was reopened and the debt limit raised.


      

Mr. Boehner and his leadership team had long felt that they needed to allow their restive conference to pitch a battle over the president’s health care law, a fight that had been brewing almost since the law was passed in 2010. Now, they hope the fever has broken, and they can negotiate on issues where they think they have the upper hand, like spending cuts and changes to entitlement programs.       

 

 

But there were no guarantees that Congress would
not be at loggerheads again by mid-January, and there is deep skepticism in both parties that Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and Senator Patty Murray of Washington, who will lead the budget negotiations, can bridge the chasm between them.



 
 Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan (L) and Washington Democratic Sen. Patty Murray will co-chair a new joint budget committee conference charged with finding a budget and spending solution by Dec. 13

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who was instrumental in ending the crisis, stressed that under the deal he had negotiated with the majority leader, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the across-the-board budget cuts [the sequester cuts] extracted in the 2011 fiscal showdown remained in place over the objections of some Democrats, a slim reed that not even he claimed as a significant victory.

For Mr. Boehner, who had failed to unite his conference around a workable plan, Wednesday’s decision to take up the Senate bill proved surprisingly free of conflict. Hard-line Republican lawmakers largely rallied around the speaker. Mr. Boehner, they said, ...his conference found itself divided among three conflicting factions: moderate Republicans who were simply eager to reopen the government; those who opposed a provision that would have made members of Congress, White House officials and their staffs ineligible for government contributions to their health insurance on the new exchanges; and conservatives who felt the proposal did not go far enough in dismantling the health care law.

Conservatives in the House also remained skeptical that they would gain the upper hand in the near future. [They] said that with the president still unwilling to negotiate in good faith, he thought it was unlikely that Republicans would extract many concessions in any upcoming conference over the budget between the House and the Senate.
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 An aide brings a cart stacked with pizza to the office of Speaker John Boehner


GREG SARGENT WASHINGTON POST

Dems [hope]that the closer to the 2014 elections we get, the harder it will be for Republicans to stage another debt ceiling hostage crisis.

Democrats don’t want such a crisis. They would prefer that Republicans simply agree to extend the debt limit cleanly. But by pushing this [early] into the 2014 election season, they are giving themselves a kind of insurance policy that guarantees that if Republicans do stage another debt limit crisis, Republicans will pay a serious political price for it.

On the one hand, you’d think that this arrangement simply guarantees that the debt limit will hang over the next talks, meaning it will give Republicans leverage. ... But Democrats ...believe Republicans will have capitulated on the debt limit twice in a row — this time, and earlier this year — and that the political fallout from the current crisis has been so bad for Republicans that party establishment types will be eager to avoid the same thing happening again [in] 2014.

It’s true that those who will try to force another debt ceiling crisis are Tea Party conservatives who don’t much care about the overall political health of the GOP. But as this Democratic aide explains to me, this is precisely the point: More pressure from the right for yet another debt limit crisis close to the election will be even worse for the GOP, because it could again divide the party and potentially force 2014 GOP candidates (particularly those involved in primaries) to adopt an extreme position, damaging them for general elections.

“The effect of this fight has been to destroy the Republican brand and put their 2014 candidates behind the eight ball,” the aide tells me. “We are not trying to bait them into another fight. We’d rather put it past the election. But it’s really up to them. If they want to recommit political suicide  [eight] months before an election, that’s going to be their choice. We’re going to make sure that if this happens it has real consequences for them.”

And so, Dems are hoping that Republican leaders will have even more of an incentive next time to squash any demands from the right for another default hostage crisis. In this scenario, Dems effectively  neutralize the debt limit over the long term, in exchange for accepting sequester level spending into December (only one month longer than under a “clean CR,” which Dems were already prepared to accept). If that worked, it wouldn’t be a bad outcome. Or, if the debt limit isn’t neutralized and Republicans do stage another hostage crisis, the GOP again would devolve into chaos, again underscoring the party’s addiction to destructive, intransigent, crisis-to-crisis governing with only months before Election Day 2014.

That’s the idea, anyway.

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WASHINGTON POST

....despite what most see as a debacle for Republicans, a core group of conservatives insisted Tuesday that they are winning their battle to force concessions from Democrats on fiscal issues.

The president, they say, has been forced into a negotiation, even though he has said he will cede nothing in exchange for opening the government and raising the debt ceiling. The nation’s attention has been focused on problems with the health-care law. And, they say, making Boehner move to the right is itself a victory.

Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.) said conservatives have succeeded in exposing problems with the health-care law.
“Oh my gosh, we’ve lit up Obama­care for the whole nation,” he said, describing what his wing of the party had won in the shutdown. “Look, the rollout was atrocious, this is a fundamentally flawed plan, and we have made it crystal-clear to the American public that we stand with them on Obamacare.”

That attitude illustrated a split within the GOP that has only grown more profound in the days since the shutdown started: Hard-liners are sure that their position is gaining strength, while moderates and a number of Republican leaders counter that the party has experienced an epic collapse.
“We didn’t get anything. This has been a total waste of time,” said Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), one of the most consistent critics of his party’s most conservative members.




MICHAEL TOMASKY DAILY BEAST

This is a sad and sickening spectacle,...Today, we have a clavern of sociopaths who know nothing of honor, and we have no easy way to stop them. Except at the ballot box. Except that they’ve rigged that, too, with their House districts. They’ve rigged the whole game so that they light the match and then point at President Obama and shout: “Look! Fire!”
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This is the worst it’s ever been in modern America. But it is going to get worse. They aren’t going to stop hating Obama and Obamacare. They aren’t suddenly going to decide to make their peace with him or it. They sure aren’t going to decide that gee, using default as leverage is naughty. A big chunk of them want the United States to default on Obama’s watch, so they can then blame him for what they themselves caused, say, “The black guy wrecked the economy. Couldn’t you have predicted it?” New horrors await us that you and I, being normal people, can’t begin to dream up. But rest assured, they will.

Almost Half of Americans Say Budget Cuts Will Hurt Economy

N.Y. TIMES

Nearly half of Americans agree with the Obama administration’s contention that the economy will be hurt by the spending cuts prompted by the sequestration, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

About one-third said the automatic cuts to military and domestic programs that went into effect because President Obama and Republicans in Congress could not agree on a budget plan would have no effect on the economy one way or the other. Just 1 in 10 said the automatic cuts would help the economy.

In his news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Obama said that his administration’s disaster warnings about the economic effects of the automatic spending cuts were not overblown: “It’s slowed our growth, it’s resulting in people being thrown out of work, and it’s hurting folks all across the country.”

The poll results showed that the sentiment that the cuts will hurt the economy was shared by Republicans, Democrats and independents alike.

DEPRESSING SCENARIO FOR REBOOBLICANS

WASHINGTON POST Greg Sargent

...Democrats will proceed in the sequester battle,...to wait Republicans out in hopes that they’ll cave in the end. Democrats are hoping that the sequester deepens the divide between defense hawks and spending hawks in a way that makes the GOP position untenable over time.
As Brian Beutler explains:

The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.
So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. ...[Or so we hope.]
 

 I’d only add that Democrats have literally no incentive to do anything other than follow this course. After all, there’s no reason for them to agree to any package of cuts to replace the sequester, since no package of cuts is preferable to them. What’s more, the current public opinion environment favors Democrats on not one, but on two levels. The public overwhelmingly favors the Democrats’ approach to bringing down the deficit — through a mix of spending cuts and new taxes on the wealthy — so Dems are already favored to win the basic policy argument that will unfold and be dramatized for voters throughout the month of March. Democrats will be arguing that we should replace the cuts with something voters actually want. Republicans can only continue to argue for more spending cuts to replace the sequester — which will only deepen the public’s identification of Republicans as the party of the sequester cuts in the first place.

More broadly, this will unfold in an environment in which general opinion about Obama is far more favorable than it is about Republicans. The [most recent]  Pew poll ... finds that an astonishing 62 percent of Americans think the GOP is out of touch with the American people, versus only 46 percent who think that about Dems — a 16 point gap.

It remains unclear how many Republican officials will break with the leadership in the spending/defense divide. Justin Green makes the case that this divide is overstated and that the spending hawks have broad dominance within the GOP. That said, defense hawks like Lindsey Graham and John McCain have now signaled an openness to new revenues. If they mount a very public campaign (including the Sunday shows) to pressure their leadership to accept new revenues, it’s conceivable that divide could deepen....

Ultimately, what will be decisive is how public opinion plays out through March. The current environment suggests Republicans have a lot more work to do to shift the basic dynamic in their favor than Dems do.

SEQUESTER CUTS BEGIN.....Really.

You get the feeling they wanted this to happen: President Obama formally ordered the sweeping budget cuts known as the “sequester” into effect late Friday night after a final attempt to find common ground between the two parties failed. The $85 billion in cuts to government spending will hit everything from medicare to the defense budget, and could send the country into a second recession. The cuts go into effect because Obama and Republican leadership couldn’t reach an agreement to stop them: Obama insisted on higher tax revenues, while the GOP refused to accept even slight tax increases. The same old story, this time without a last-second happy ending. -

Suppose They Sequestered Govt Services and No One Cared

The Political Fix  Sean Sullivan and Aaron Blake

In Washington, Republicans and Democrats have been at loggerheads over how best to avert sequestration. In the rest of the country, a remarkably high percentage of Americans take a different view: Bring it on.

Thirty-seven percent of Americans said they would tell their member of Congress to let the deep federal spending cuts known as sequestration go into effect as scheduled, according to a Gallup poll released on Wednesday, while nearly one in five had no opinion. A plurality (45 percent) said they would like to see Congress pass a measure to avert the cuts, but that’s hardly a decisive figure that reflects the alarm bells the Obama administration has been sounding the last couple of weeks.

What gives? For starters, many Americans simply haven’t tuned into the debate over the deep cuts set to hit the federal government on Friday. In the Gallup poll, 38 percent said they were not following the story too closely or at all closely. An even higher percentage of Americans — 48 percent — said the same thing in a Washington Post-Pew poll released earlier this week. It’s hard to strongly oppose cuts you don’t really know that much about.
In an effort to ratchet up pressure on congressional Republicans to agree to Democratic calls for a mixture of new tax revenue and alternate spending cuts as a means of avoiding the sequester, the Obama administration has launched a full-scale effort to warn the public of the dire consequences of inaction. The more Americans know about sequestration, the thinking goes, the greater pressure they will exert on their representative to act to avert it.
The Gallup poll backs this notion up. Among those following the issue very or somewhat closely, 50 percent want to see it averted. Among those following it less closely, that number drops to 39 percent. (Of course, this could be a self-selecting sample; if you think the cuts are going to be bad, you are more likely to pay close attention.)

The reality is that, with just a day left until the cuts begin kicking in, that message that the sequester is a true emergency simply hasn’t sunk in for most Americans. Further complicating the administration’s pitch is that fact that the cuts affect different communities in strikingly different ways. What is dire in some places is a non-issue in others.
It may seem like a head-scratcher that Congress and the White House are mere hours away from letting the cuts — which were designed to be so undesirable that they virtually guaranteed an alternate agreement — from happening. But the reality is that public pressure simply hasn’t reached the point that inaction is not an option. If it had, it’s possible that things would be different right now.



Washington Post Karen Tumulty and Lyndsey Layton,

Despite the reams of fact sheets the White House has been putting out, no one really knows how bad things are likely to get — including Republicans who have criticized the president for exaggerating the effects.
Simple arithmetic can show the impact on some programs — the checks the federal government sends to unemployed people will be smaller, for instance.
But many of the reductions, such as those in education spending, will not be felt for months in most school systems, which gives individual districts some time to make adjustments and allow­ances for the lost funds.
That means the administration’s dire projection that “as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs” is guesswork at best; most school districts will not start sending out layoff notices for the next school year until around May.
State and local governments could also shift money around to blunt the impact on some popular programs such as Meals on Wheels, which delivers food to homebound elderly people and is funded with flexible federal grant money.
And some of the scariest scenarios — say, concerns that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which stands to lose more than $300 million, will not have the resources it needs to spot and contain the next deadly disease outbreak — are by their nature impossible to quantify.

While the country has lived through five temporary government shutdowns since 1981, “we actually haven’t had something quite like this before,” said David Kamin, formerly special assistant to the president for economic policy in the Obama White House and now a New York University law professor. “We’ve never had an across-the-board cut of this magnitude applied.”
What is not new, however, is the impulse of officials to resort to melodrama when they are faced with budget cuts. Getting people’s attention has been a challenge in the case of the sequester. In the latest Washington Post-Pew Research Center survey, only one in four said they were closely following news about the automatic spending cuts.



NY TIMES

For weeks, President Obama has barnstormed the country, warning of the dire consequences of the cuts to military readiness, educators, air travel and first responders even as the White House acknowledges that some of the disruptions will take weeks to emerge.

The reverse side has gone unmentioned: Some of the most liberal members of Congress see the cuts as a rare opportunity to whittle down Pentagon spending. The poor are already shielded from the worst of the cuts, and the process could take pressure off the Democratic Party, at least in the short run, to tamper with Social Security and Medicare.

At the same time, the president gets some relief from the constant drumbeat of budget news to focus on his top policy priorities: immigration and gun control.

And Republicans, while denouncing the level of military cuts and the ham-handedness of the budget scythe, finally see the government shrinking in real dollars.

False equivalence pundits are part of the problem

“Are you willing to have teachers laid off, or kids not have access to Head Start, or deeper cuts in student loan programs just because you want to protect a special tax interest loophole that the vast majority of Americans don’t benefit from? That’s the choice. That’s the question.” (KEVIN LAMARQUE/REUTERS)

WASHINGTON POST Greg Sargent

The battle over the sequester has sparked a corollary argument over the proper role of pundits in assigning blame in political standoffs of this type. A number of us have argued that the facts plainly reveal that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and Democrats for the current crisis. The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset.
Analysts reluctant to embrace this conclusion — an affliction I’ve called the “centrist dodge” — have adopted several techniques. One is to pretend Dems haven’t offered any compromise solution, when in fact they have. A second is to argue that, okay, Dems have offered a compromise while Republicans haven’t, but Dems haven’t gone far enough towards the middle ground, so both sides are still to blame for the impasse. (The problem with this dodge is that it fails to acknowledge that Republicans themselves have openly stated that there is no distance to which Dems could go to win GOP cooperation, short of giving them everything they want.)

We’re now seeing a third technique appear: Acknowledge that Republicans are the uncompromising party, but assert that it’s ultimately on the President to figure out a way to either force Republicans to drop their intransigence or to otherwise “lead” them out if it.
Case in point: David Brooks. Last week Brooks was widely criticized for a “pox on both house” column in which he based his entire argument on the falsehood that Obama has no plan. Brooks repented for his error, and today he offers a good faith effort to describe what he’d like Obama to do to change things. It boils down to this:

My dream Obama wouldn’t be just one gladiator in the zero-sum budget wars. He’d transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the prescriptions Brooks offers would really change the current dynamic, but at bottom, the suggestion that it’s all on the president to figure out a way to persuade Republicans to drop their intransigence is still a dodge. The idea that the President can necessarily bend Congress to his will is indeed a “dream.” It doesn’t reckon with the most fundamental question at the heart of all of this: What if there is nothing whatsoever that can be done by the president or anyone else to break the GOP out of its no-compromising stance? This isn’t an unreasonable reading of the situation; it’s what Republicans themselves have confirmed, publicly and on the record — they will not concede a penny in new revenues, no matter what. And if this is the case — if the fundamental problem is that Republicans really do prefer the sequester to any compromise — isn’t it incumbent on commentators to explain this clearly and forthrightly to their readers?

As Josh Marshall puts it:

Over the last few days, as it’s become increasingly clear that the sequester cuts probably really will happen, the big name pundits are coming forward and complaining that President Obama needs to step forward and ‘exercise leadership’ and solve the problem.
It’s all similar to what we saw in the fiscal cliff negotiations. Official Washington is accustomed to having a Democratic safety net — not cash transfers for those who fall through the cracks of the market economy — but that Democrats will come in and solve crises created by GOP government by crisis. When the Democrats or the Democrats’ party leader — in this case, the President — won’t do that, everyone freaks out.

The argument now is basically that the president is the father who must make his problem children behave. Only this is worse than just a dodge. Lots and lots of people are going to get hurt by the sequester. Anyone who helps deflect blame from Republicans — in the full knowledge that they are the primary obstacle to the compromise we need to prevent serious damage from being done to the country — is unwittingly helping to enable their intransigence.



* GOP won’t accept any compromise solution: Last night, Lindsey Graham [above] turned heads when he said on CNN that he’s willing to accept $600 billion in new revenues along with spending cuts to avert the sequester. This perfectly illustrates what I noted above: After all, no GOP leaders agree with Graham; meanwhile, Democratic leaders do agree with Graham that a mix is the best way to go.

* Another poll finds GOP will take blame for sequester: A new Post poll finds that 45 percent of Americans will blame Congressional Republicans if and when the sequester hits, versus only 32 percent who will blame Obama. Strikingly, 52 percent of moderates will blame Republicans; only 24 percent will blame Obama.

A lot of this is probably driven by the fact that Obama’s general standing with the public is far better; the question is whether that dynamic will hold as the cuts kick in over time.

* Americans think sequester will damage economy, military: Also key from the new Post poll: 60 percent think it will have a “major effect” on the economy, and 62 percent think the effect will be “negative.” Fifty five percent say it will have a “major effect” on the military.

* Don’t bite on the GOP’s sequester ruse, Dems: As expected, Republicans are laying plans to “offer” a proposal to the administration that would allow agency heads to have discretion over where the sequester cuts are allotted. Senator Tim Kaine gets at the irony underlying this proposal:

“These guys bash the president nonstop.Then they are going to take the power of the purse and say, ‘We are so unable to do our job we are going to give you complete flexibility to do it’?”

As I’ve noted before, his alternative would transfer ownership of the cuts to Obama, and would create a false sense that they are not all that threatening, allowing Republicans to evade some political responsibility for them — even as it doesn’t do much of anything to mitigate the actual damage they would do.

* Yes, sequester would mean major cuts to government: Glenn Kessler explains why the claim that the sequester would cut “only” 2.5 percent out of the government, which is widely cited by Republicans, is completely misleading, and why the cuts will be far bigger in practice. While Kessler also finds that there are problems with the White House’s predictions of doom, it is overwhelmingly clear that the sequester has the potential to do deep and serious damage.



* Virginia residents increasingly anxious about sequester: The Post has a nicely reported piece digging into one Virginia community’s increasing anxiety about the coming cuts. This is only a glimpse of what may be to come when the cuts actually begin to make their impact felt. What this article really drives home is that, as much as people hate government in the abstract, when specific programs are threatened people suddenly love government spending.