From Wednesday night’s
Washington Post
webpage:
After weeks of arguing, Republicans and Democrats on
Capitol Hill began negotiations Wednesday on a possible budget
agreement that would slash federal spending by as much as $33
billion and avert a government shutdown.
“We’re all working off the same number now,” Vice
President Biden told reporters after meeting with Senate Democratic
leaders at the Capitol on Wednesday evening. “Obviously, there’s a
difference in the composition of that number — what’s included,
what’s not included. It’s going to be a thorough
negotiation.”
On Thursday, Speaker of the House John Boehner pushed back
against the Democrats’ (including the Post) attempt to
force a fait accompli down the GOP’s throat: “There’s no agreement
on numbers and nothing has been agreed to until everything has been
agreed to.”
There is some logic to the Democrats’ claim that by
agreeing to $33 billion in cuts for the rest of this fiscal year,
they are “meeting the Republicans half-way,” and part of the
electorate will certainly be inclined to find such an outcome an
example of politicians of both parties “working together to get
something done.”
But to use a current example for purposes of analogy, if
Moammar Gaddafi had said to the world, “Don’t attack me and I’ll
only kill half as many people in Benghazi as I had planned to,”
would that have been an acceptable outcome (to those people who
think that humanitarian justification is sufficient for U.S.
military involvement)?
Or, if President Obama said “If Republicans will stop
fighting me on Obamacare, I’ll agree to modify the law so only half
the states have to comply,” would the GOP go along?
The answer in the first case is a moral question. The
answer in the second example has elements of politics and morality.
In the current situation, the acceptability of a compromise also
has both moral and fiscal aspects, but depends primarily on whether
Republican politicians think they will be rewarded or punished. Are
they “getting something done” or are they “caving in”?
Unfortunately, the answer is unclear, or at least bipolar.
Many Republicans and perhaps more importantly many independent
voters will like the cooperation after years of intense
partisanship (which I don’t inherently object to). But the Tea
Party wing of the GOP which includes not only many activists but
also many Congressional freshmen will think of this in the same
terms as the examples above, namely that doing half of something
immoral and destructive is still doing something immoral and
destructive.
In nuts and bolts political tactics, this comes down to
the question of a government shutdown, to a game of chicken between
the two parties each wondering who’s afraid of a shutdown
more.
Unlike 1994-95, Republicans have a stronger hand to play
and a weaker opponent to play it against, not to mention a more
even-keeled Speaker of the House to manage the politics. No
doubt a government shutdown poses a large “binary” political risk,
meaning it’s likely to end up quite good or quite bad for either
party, but not likely to end up with little impact.
To be fair to John Boehner and friends, it is not obvious
that the potential risk of negotiating the nation’s way to a
federal government shutdown is a risk worth taking. It reminds me
of a question a friend of mine asks: If we were to flip a coin (and
you knew the coin was fair) with you losing your bet if it came up
heads but winning three times your bet if it came up tails, how
much would you bet? What if tails paid you ten times your bet?
There is no mathematically correct answer; it’s a question of risk
tolerance and risk-reward calculation. Indeed, some people would
bet nothing even with a 10:1 ratio.
Continuing with this metaphor, in a 10:1 scenario, I would
personally bet a lot of money, perhaps as much as I make in a year.
But there’s almost no way that the potential reward for the GOP,
even in winning the PR battle over a shutdown, is 10:1, and perhaps
not even 3:1. So, if you would bet $100 on a 10:1 payout potential,
what would you bet on a 2:1 payout potential? Maybe $10?
I believe this is where Boehner finds himself. He thinks
there’s at most a 2:1 payoff for going into a shutdown. At
most. Tea Party freshmen and activists think it’s 5:1 or 10:1
and want to place a big bet. On this specific point, Boehner is
right. The very loud Tea Party activists and freshmen, projecting
that everyone sees the world as they do, will think that a shutdown
will be a huge political victory. It won’t be, even though with
excellent management of the media — something the GOP has not been
good at since Reagan — it should be a modest victory.
Part of the political problem for Boehner going down the
compromise road is that if he loses a significant number of the
most fiscally conservative budget-cutting-minded members of his
caucus on a spending bill, the bill will require getting many
Democrats on board.
This risks making Boehner look like a RINO, something he
certainly doesn’t want and is not and would not be even if he went
down that path. Furthermore, as we know that Nancy Pelosi has
frequently been able to make individual Democrat congressmen make
votes that they did not want to make, it’s possible that Pelosi
will arm-twist wavering Democrats into not supporting a spending
bill that cuts spending substantially but not as much as the Tea
Party and conservative freshmen want. Pelosi’s motivation would be
to make Boehner and the GOP look bad, look unable to govern even
with a substantial majority, and to sow dissent within the ranks of
the Republican Party. The more you think about it, the more it
seems likely such a thing could happen.
If Boehner will not be able to pass a “compromise,” then
he should not even try. The downside from failing is large. Indeed
it’s the Democrats who have the 2:1 or 3:1 payoff from refusing to
compromise in this scenario.
So, considering these factors:
• The real risk that a compromise bill may not pass the
House,
• That a government shutdown, if plausibly caused by
Democrats refusing to cut federal spending, would likely benefit
not just the GOP but the nation itself, and
• That “compromise” on current levels of government
spending is immoral and destructive,
I believe that House and Senate Republicans should not
support only $33 billion in cuts in the remainder of this fiscal
year. I could live with a so-called compromise if it weren’t a
meeting-you-halfway compromise. In other words, if the original GOP
proposal were $61 billion in cuts, and with the understanding that
many House freshmen (and a few Senators) would prefer much larger
cuts than that, I could nevertheless live with a “compromise” of
$50 billion. $50 billion would be big enough that the GOP can claim
massive cuts and can show that their being in the majority has made
a difference. And it would be big enough that it would be hard for
the Democrats to claim a political victory of any importance.
Unfortunately, this very fact makes such a compromise that much
less likely.
There is no easy political way out of this financial mess.
But Republicans need to realize that the Democrats’ tactics are
based entirely on political optics, not on any actual desire to cut
spending or reach a compromise. With that in mind, a compromise of
about 50% of the originally demanded cuts is a political loser for
the GOP and a baby step toward fiscal sanity at a time when the
nation is, for perhaps the first time in history, ready for a giant
step.
