Quick, grab the can and toss it over your shoulder before it goes over the cliff
by digby
Ezra reports what he's hearing about a potential deal:
The outline of the emerging Senate deal is this: The government is funded until Jan. 15. The debt ceiling is lifted until Feb. 7. There are a handful of basically meaningless Affordable Care Act changes: Stronger income verification, which Republicans want, and a one-year delay on labor paying into state reinsurance pools, which Democrats want. Oh, and there's a bicameral budget committee that needs to report back by Dec. 13.
He says that because a government shut down deal expires just as a new round of sequestration cuts are scheduled to take place in January, the fight will now be about lifting sequestration:
That's what the Democrats want. It's also what some Republicans, including Rep. Paul Ryan and Grover Norquist want. But it's not been what the Ted Cruz wing of the Republican Party wants. The question now is how much pull they really have.
It's true that this shuts out the Ted Cruz wing. But is that what we are defining as a win now? Because Ted Cruz wasn't in congress the last time the GOP pulled this stunt, so I don't know that simply shutting down this Obamacare demand gets the job done. (Still, we live in hope...) In fact, it seems to me that by pushing the negotiations right up against the next round of sequester cuts, the Republicans will potentially have yet another hostage --- along with the threat of another government shutdown and another debt ceiling breach. What am I missing?
There is a chance that public opinion will chastise the GOP enough that they will behave less like animals and more like decent human beings in this next round. (Again, we live in hope.) But with alleged progressive Dick Durbin extolling the virtues of Simpson-Bowles on TV this week-end while Paul Ryan massages the wingnuts with Randian cant, I think we should be careful before declaring victory and assuming that the end game will be that the Republicans agree to lift sequestration, raise the debt limit and keep the government open. (Not that Ezra's saying that, mind you. He just says it won't be about repealing Obamacare and will be about sequestration, which may very well be true.)
Anyway, who knows if this is even possible? But virtually everyone on TV is saying pretty much the same thing and that Boehner and McConnell are strategizing together to get something along these lines done, presumably by Boehner agreeing to drop his self-imposed Hastert Rule and allow a vote. (One also assumes he feels he will keep his job by doing this ...)
Just for kicks, let's revisit what the GOP had on the agenda before the looney tunes decided to turn this into an Obamacare clown show this past summer:
On the next, upcoming debt-ceiling measure, Boehner promised it would “be tied to things that get us on the ten-year path to balance,” as South Carolina representative Mick Mulvaney put it at a “Conversations With Conservatives” event co-hosted by the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday.
The Ryan budget enacted by the House would balance in ten years and offers a sense of how ambitious this goal is. First, the budget assumes the repeal of much of Obamacare, which, it can safely be assumed, is something that President Obama would not sign into law. But it also includes significant entitlement reforms such as Medicare “premium support.”
And certainly, there are senior members of the Republican conference who are not anxious to tie the debt ceiling to such a bold plan. House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp has discussed tying the debt ceiling to a path for tax reform, for example. Is GOP leadership still on board with this plan?
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner, said “we have just begun the process of talking with members, and – more importantly – with the American people, about the best way to increase the debt limit consistent with the ‘Boehner Rule,’ which requires cuts or reforms greater than the increase.”
A source familiar with the deal said “the agreement was that it would include cuts or reforms that put us ‘on the path to balance’ in ten years. The bill wouldn’t necessarily have to achieve balance in ten years all by itself.”
The difference between achieving balance in ten years and putting the country on a “path to balance” in ten years seems semantic. Representative Steve Scalise, the Republican Study Committee chairman, offered more detail for the first time at the Heritage event, envisioning a kind of sliding scale by which the closer the deal gets to a ten-year balanced budget, the further into the future the debt ceiling will be extended.
“If you look at the budget, it’s a ten-year budget – if the president did everything in that budget, you could make the argument that would be a ten-year increase in the debt ceiling,” Scalise, who was in the room when the deal was struck with Boehner, said. ”If the president doesn’t do all of those things, as you work your way down, the amount of time that the debt ceiling is increased should be corresponding to the size and seriousness of the reforms that are ultimately are agreed to that get us to that ten-year balance,” he explained.
One wouldn't think they'd be this bold after the drop in popularity but then, they came up with this arrogant plan after losing an election. But if anything's changed from that strategy, you can probably see it in Ryan's more recent Grand Vision.
We have an opportunity here to pay down the national debt and jump-start the economy, if we start talking, and talking specifics, now. To break the deadlock, both sides should agree to common-sense reforms of the country's entitlement programs and tax code...
If Mr. Obama decides to talk, he'll find that we actually agree on some things. For example, most of us agree that gradual, structural reforms are better than sudden, arbitrary cuts. For my Democratic colleagues, the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act are a major concern. And the truth is, there's a better way to cut spending. We could provide relief from the discretionary spending levels in the Budget Control Act in exchange for structural reforms to entitlement programs.
Stay tuned...
Update: Brit Hume says that this proposed deal means that "nobody's caved and nobody's won." I dunno. That may be true when you're talking about the two parties' political establishments. But the Cruz wing has taken a hit. Whether it lessens their clout over time remains to be seen, but within the GOP they may be feared but they are also universally loathed. I'm not sure they care, though.
Update II: Robert Kuttner pens a "Dear GOP Colleague" letter.
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