John Boehner is not Newt Gingrich. At the 11th hour, the speaker
of the House offered President Obama a deal that would fund the
federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year and avert a
government shutdown. Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
took Boehner’s final offer. The deadline was met just 90 minutes
before parts of the government were to be shuttered.
Both sides claimed victory as considerable segments of their
bases felt defeated. “This is historic, what we’ve done,” crowed
Reid. His Republican counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell, concurred: “We had an opportunity tonight to decide
whether we wanted to repeat history or make history.” Obama lauded
the bipartisan cooperation that made possible “the biggest annual
spending cut in history” and proclaimed, “Today we acted on behalf
of our children.”
Many of the activists who helped elect Obama felt differently.
“Now we’re going to see what $40 billion in cuts feels like,” one
posted on the social networking site Twitter. “The substance of
this deal is bad,”
complained the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. “But the
way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse.” Paul
Krugman agreed,
accusing Democrats of “celebrating defeat.”
Not all Tea Party conservatives are enamored of the deal either.
“[W]e’ve been asked to settle for $39 billion in cuts, even as we
continue to fund Planned Parenthood and the implementation of
ObamaCare,” lamented Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) in a statement
explaining her vote against the continuing resolution. She accused
many of her colleagues of “missing the mandate given us by the
voters last November.”
The lady has a point, said Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): “As I have
said before, there is not much of a difference between a $1.5
trillion deficit and a $1.6 trillion deficit — both will lead us
to a debt crisis that we may not recover from.” Paul is another
Republican no vote.
Under this deal, the deficit will actually be closer to $1.56
trillion and the cuts will amount to roughly $38.5 billion. During
the lame-duck session’s debate over extending the Bush tax cuts,
liberals assured us that tax increases of at least $70 billion a
year — an estimated price tag on letting the cuts lapse for
upper-income earners — would have no impact on a fragile economy.
Now these same liberals are warning us of the dire consequences of
an additional $5.5 billion in spending cuts in the context of a
$3.8 trillion budget and $15 trillion economy.
In truth, this deal will not by itself right the nation’s fiscal
course. And while the Republicans got their final number, $38.5
billion is a lot closer to the Democrats’ starting bid of $33
billion than the GOP’s $61 billion. (To say nothing of $100
billion.) The question is what comes next.
Democrats were prepared to lambaste Republicans for shutting
down the government over social issues, relying on the mainstream
media to portray Planned Parenthood as a totally harmless public
health organization with little connection to abortion. Howard Dean
told a panel assembled by National Journal that he
would be rooting for a shutdown if he was still chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, so confident was he that Republicans
would be doomed by their own overreach in a replay of the 1995
confrontation with Bill Clinton.
Social conservatives will instead have to settle for a doomed
stand-alone vote on Planned Parenthood funding in Harry Reid’s
Senate. There will be no government shutdown. John Boehner’s House
Republicans get to re-fight the battles of 1995-96 without the
political misstep that cost them the momentum on spending sixteen
years ago. Without the shutdown, it is possible the GOP would have
never embraced earmarks, crony capitalism, and compassionate
conservatism.
Yet for all its faults, the Gingrich Congress had real
accomplishments even after the shutdown. Among them were welfare
reform, a capital gains tax cut that helped ignite the biggest
economic boom since Ronald Reagan was in office, and a balanced
budget that their compassionate conservative heirs subsequently
flitted away. The big question is whether this budget deal is the
high watermark of the new Congress’s fiscal conservatism, the
absolute most that can ever be extracted from Obama and Reid, or
something that sets the table for future reform.
Paul Ryan’s budget presents the GOP
with a golden opportunity to start a needed debate: Do we want to
maintain our tax burden at its historic levels? Or do we want to
maintain our current spending commitments, even as demographic
changes make those commitments unaffordable at our present tax
burden? It is a question both Presidents Bush and Obama chose to
punt on, setting us on a path of unsustainable debt levels that
will sink our economy. What will it be?
We now know that Boehner is no Gingrich. We have yet to discover
whether that’s entirely a good thing or not.
