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Jewish World Review April 12, 2011 / 8 Nissan, 5771 Boehner's remarkable triumph --- over grandstanding conservatives By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Shortly after concluding with House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, an agreement on funding the government through the 2011 fiscal year, which ends Sep. 30, President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev, preened before the news cameras.
President Obama hailed the deal, which averted a government shutdown, as "the biggest annual spending cut in history."
"This is historic, what we've done," agreed Sen. Reid.
When politicians speak of "budget cuts," they usually mean slowing the rate of growth of spending. This compromise actually reduces spending below 2010 levels. That hasn't happened since 1965.
In February, Sen. Reid said a GOP plan to cut $32 billion was "draconian" and "unworkable." Now he and the president are hailing a deal that cuts an additional $38.5 billion.
"Shorter Dems: these cuts we've been resisting and denouncing for months are historic and we're proud to be passing so many of them," summarized Ezra Klein, a liberal blogger for the Washington Post.
"Republicans succeeded in reducing discretionary spending to pre-Obama levels, and they lowered the baseline for next year's budget, which will result in hundreds of billions of dollars in savings over the next decade," said Peter Wehner, a former aide to President George W. Bush.
"I'm not sure I can think of an example of a party that leverage control of one House of Congress into significant policy movement in its direction on a high profile issue," noted an appalled Jonathan Chait in the liberal New Republic.
Mr. Boehner didn't take a victory lap -- perhaps because he knows what was won is but a skirmish in a long war. A trillion is a thousand times a billion. Trimming a few billion dollars from a budget that is $1.6 trillion in the red doesn't matter much.
So the budget deal is Champion Hill, not Gettysburg or Vicksburg. But the victory on the 2011 CR is important (as was the Union victory at Champion Hill on May 16, 1863) for how it prepares the battlefield for the struggles to come on raising the ceiling on the national debt and on the 2012 budget; for the effect it has on the morale of the combatants, and for what it tells us about the respective commanders.
Republicans won in part because Mr. Obama and Mr. Reid played their hands poorly. They failed to present an alternative to the budget for FY 2012 offered by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis, permitting the GOP to claim the mantle of seriousness in the budget debate, and to set the "narrative" for that debate.
But Republicans won mostly because of Mr. Boehner's skillful maneuvering. Believing Republicans would be blamed for it, as they were in 1995, Democrats originally looked forward to a government shutdown. To deepen the pain, President Obama even planned to stop paying our soldiers. (The troops were paid during the 1995 shutdown.)
Mr. Boehner outflanked them by having the House swiftly pass another short term CR and a bill funding the defense department for the rest of the fiscal year. If there were a government shutdown, Democrats would get most of the blame.
Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post's conservative blogger, is a former labor negotiator. She said Mr. Boehner used, brilliantly, the threat of defunding Planned Parenthood to bargain for larger spending cuts.
Republicans have controlled the House -- one half of one third of the government, as Mr. Boehner likes to point out -- for less than four months. But already we've moved from historic spending increases to historic spending cuts.
Mr. Boehner's triumph is all the more remarkable because he has to deal with a Fifth Column of conservatives who say the cuts Democrats agreed to aren't enough.
And, of course, they aren't. Though this year and next some compromises can be reached to slow our rush over the fiscal cliff, there will be no meaningful cuts in federal spending, nor defunding of liberal sacred kine, until there is a Republican president and a Republican Senate as well as a Republican House. The budget war will be settled by the 2012 election, not by the skirmishing beforehand.
The grandstanding conservatives know this. But their love of publicity is so great they'll jeopardize victory in 2012 for a little more attention now. Shame upon them.
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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.
© 2009, Jack Kelly |
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