“We have certainly made it more difficult to stand firm going forward”
by digby
That's a funny line. Greg Sargent has the latest on the sequester drama and it's gallows humor at best:
In an interview this morning, Dem Rep. Chris Van Hollen — a top party strategist — was surprisingly frank in conceding that Dems had given away crucial leverage by agreeing to the FAA fix. But he said Dems could still make up some of that lost ground — and called on them not to agree to any more targeted sequester fixes.
“We have certainly made it more difficult to stand firm going forward,” Van Hollen told me. “But we’re going to have to reclaim some lost ground here. We cannot have a situation where people just cherry-pick the sequester.”
Van Hollen bluntly suggested that Dems — in agreeing to just a targeted FAA fix — had sent a message about Congress that it’s only responsive to powerful interests.
“If you do that, you’re attacking the symptoms rather than the underlying cause,” Van Hollen said. “When you do that, what happens is the most politically strong groups with the most lobbyists get relief, at the expense of everybody else. Meals on Wheels, or kids on Head Start, or grants on biomedical research — all of those get left behind.”
This is working out just great isn't it? Greg points to the next showdown over the debt ceiling, which the Teajadist Republicans are chomping at the bit to hold hostage to more human sacrifice, as a warning that the GOP leadership may not be interested in dealing on the sequester so they can show their sadistic troops that the poor and the vulnerable are already bleeding and suffering so there's no need to risk hurting anyone important by fiddling with the credit rating. If I had to guess right now, I'd say we'll end up doing both, but that's mainly because the Democrats are so incredibly inept they appear to have not thought of any strategy at all until it was too late.
Greg thinks it's worthwhile for the Democrats to at least pretend to stop giving away the store even though it won't make a difference because it will show the American people that some in the government are responsive to something other than the wealthy and well-connected. At this point it's hard to see how that happens. They'll agree to lift the sequester on all the items the Republicans have an interest in lifting them because they have an interest in lifting them too --- and always did. Democrats want to fund the government, even the stuff that Republicans like. The only items they ever really disagreed on were those items that affected the poor and the vulnerable, which Republicans don't care about. So that's what's going to get cut.
And if we're really lucky, we'll get a debt ceiling showdown that results in even more cuts. See, Republicans are always in favor of austerity --- it isn't just a fashion with them. As long as they can keep it rolling, they will. And as long as Democrats are strategic morons, they'll be able to.
Update: Jonathan Bernstein reports that the Republicans have a new ask for the debt ceiling now that it's apparent that they can't find enough Republicans to commit Seppuku by signing on to Social Security and medicare cuts, even if the President can deliver a whole herd of suicidal Democrats to get it done. So they have to come up with something to excuse their required obstructionism.Bernstein points out that they don't even have a tax reform plan ready to go and won't have one this year, and concludes that they are not in the business of extortion for extortion's sake.
I actually think this is a good sign. The cuts are biting and they know they can't ask for any more. The can't do the grand bargain because that hits right in the middle of their only growing demographic. So they have to make up something to ask for. And the Democrats should make up something to give them. "Tax reform" is filled with possibilities for meaningless "compromises." Let's hope they;re thinking ahead this time.
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