While the members of the Congressional GOP continue to prostitute themselves to the ugliest and most greed driven elements of the party base by remaining insistent that taxes increases of any kind are off the table in any deal to avoid sequestration, they may in fact be playing directly into Barack Obama's strategy. Oh yes, the GOP mouth pieces are bleating and whining that sequestration was originally the White House's idea, but by refusing any deal involving even one dollar ($1) of tax increases - even by closing truly egregious tax loopholes - it is the GOP, not Obama, that looks irresponsible and responsible for sequestration if it takes place. It goes without saying as well, that it will be the GOP rather than Obama and the Democrats that will be the target of the public - and negatively impacted lobbying forces - wrath. A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the GOP's potential self-inflicted head wound if sequestration kicks in a little more than a week. Here are excerpts:
Let’s grant that this [that sequester was the Obama administration’s idea} is true. But it’s true only because the Republicans were holding a gun to the administration’s head—and besides, the Republicans immediately voted for it. In any case the important thing now is that outside of Fox News land, it’s an unimportant fact whose “idea” it was. The Republicans are partial owners of this idea, and as the party that now wants the cuts to kick in, they deserve to—and will—bear more responsibility for the negative impacts.
[T]hey [the GOP] almost crashed the economy. And they were also clearly the side pushing for drastic spending cuts. Let’s go back quickly over a partial 2011 timeline. In April, Obama spokesman Jay Carney said it was the president’s position that raising the debt limit “shouldn’t be held hostage to any other action.” On May 11, Austan Goolsbee, then Obama’s chief economic adviser, said that tying a debt-limit increase to spending cuts was “quite insane.”
On May 16, the United States went into technical default, but the Treasury Department was able to string things along a few more weeks. Tim Geithner made it clear that the real problem would hit August 1. A key moment, as Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress wrote in The Huffington Post, came on May 31. That’s when the GOP-run House voted on Obama’s request for a “clean” debt-limit increase. It failed, and all 236 Republicans voted no.
All this time, and right on up to August 1, Republicans were screaming for deep budget cuts, and the administration was saying no. But the Republicans had the leverage because it actually seemed plausible they were crazy enough to push the country into default.
So fine, the White House proposed it. It did so only after months of Republicans publicly demanding huge spending cuts and refusing to consider any revenues and acting as if they were prepared to send the nation into default over spending. In other words, this was the administration’s idea in much the way that it’s a parent’s “idea” to pay ransom to a person who has taken his child hostage. There was a gun to the White House’s head, which was the possibility of the country going into default.
[W]hen it was all put into legislation, it was the Republicans who passed the Budget Control Act of 2011 in the House, with 218 of them voting yes.. . . . Republicans agreed at the time that the sequestration trigger was a good thing—that it would force everyone to get together and agree to a path forward and a long-term budget deal.
But the majority of the people are onto them. And it sure isn’t going to be looking very responsible to people, as the March 1 sequestration deadline approaches, for Republicans to be going before the cameras and saying that the cuts are unfortunate but necessary medicine, or whatever formulation they come up with. They’ve wanted these spending reductions for two years. It hardly matters much who invented the mechanism for the cuts. What matters, as the Republicans will find out, is that the people don’t want them.
My former law school classmate and former Chairman of the GOP, Jim Gilmore sees that the GOP is heading to potential suicide as noted in a Daily Kos post. Here are highlights:
Republicans who think it's a brilliant political move to refuse to compromise on the sequester are nuts. Don't ask me, ask former Virginia governor and Republican National Committee chairman Jim Gilmore. He says:
“That’s the biggest problem with the Republicans” on Capitol Hill, Gilmore, a former Virginia governor, said this morning over coffee and a ham-and-egg biscuit in Alexandria. “They think spending is the most important thing. It’s not.”
He says he has urged GOP leaders to back down and compromise to prevent the so-called sequester spending cuts from going through – “I keep telling them, you’re going to lose this” – and he has strong words for congressional leaders’ focus on deficit reduction as their primary economy goal.
“Above all things,” he says, “they shouldn’t be talking about debt and deficits. Because the left’s got an answer for them.
That answer would be, raise taxes, which Gilmore says is the opposite of what the economy needs right now – and he’s quite critical of Democrats for pushing tax increases. But spending cuts won’t help the economy either, he says.
Personally, I hope the saboteurs in the GOP suffer fatal self-inflicted wounds. I also hope that Obama uses the pulpit of the presidency to remind the public that it is the members of the Congressional GOP who made sequestration happen if it indeed happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment