Embracing The Suck-Practical Pols and Purity Police
It was a week where crude worked.
John Boehner, the chain-smoking, dark-liquor sipping,
Tea-coddling Speaker of the House, decided to come out of his defensive crouch
and throw a haymaker or two. He weighed
in on the Paul Ryan-Patty Murray budget compromise and told his fellow Republican
House-mates to hold their nose and act like adults.
His counterpart, House Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi,
whipped her troops into line with the immortal phrase, “Embrace the Suck.”
The Ryan-Murray “suck” isn’t a great one. It is mostly small-bore deficit reduction,
with no new real revenues and no new serious spending cuts. All agree it is no
“Grand Bargain” especially since the pair had an agreement going in that
neither would have to give up their “core principles.”
So, what’s in the gift box handed to the Congress for
ratification? Its most prominent
features are replacing the sequester with more specific cuts and ending
extended unemployment benefits. Not a
lot of sizzle there.
Like any compromise, a lot of people are very unhappy. The more progressive side of the Democratic
caucus hates the unemployment insurance part (and the Christmas shopping season
allows plenty of Scrooge references.) And,
of course, because it doesn’t immediately eliminate all government spending except
for aid to parochial schools and the military, it doesn’t sufficiently feed the
TP-dragon.
But it’s a deal, in the sense that it funds the government
through the 2015 fiscal year, and, by doing so, gives more flexibility to deal
with the meat-cleaver impact of sequester.
It’s a budget, and spares us the comedic tragedy of another shutdown.
Or not. There are
several things the agreement doesn’t do, and perhaps most importantly, it
doesn’t deal with the debt-ceiling limit.
Ryan himself said on Sunday that the GOP will be looking to extract more
concessions in January. If the GOP does
play default games again, we will have a budget (possibly, more on that later) without
any money, and yet another round of extortion.
They figure (perhaps correctly, this time) that maybe the public will
support them in killing Obamacare and anything else on their wish list.
The problem for the GOP is that it places two things in
motion that may have unintended consequences.
The first is that with the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, the
President is in the doghouse and his party is seeing shadows behind every
shadow. That creates a wonderful electoral landscape for 2014 for Republicans—if
they don’t overplay their hand and remind people of exactly what they didn’t
like about the GOPs in the first place.
The second is a little more complex, and involves a serious
intra-party battle for control, complicated by nominating politics that may
spill out into public view in a way that is distinctly unflattering.
To oversimplify, think of the GOP being dominated by two
wings, the Practical Pols and the Purity Police.
Practical or Pure, with a very few exceptions, they are all
conservative. It’s just a matter of how
many times they have been distilled. And, they all want power. The difference is that the Practical Pols
understand that imposing one’s will on the electorate first requires convincing
them to put you in office. The Purity folk
dream the same dreams, only without the inconvenient electoral nuance. For them, the real enemy is the impure among
them. Hence, well-funded primary challenges.
One would think that a lesson might have been learned this
last Fall, when the Purity Police had the upper hand. They mounted a coordinated assault by special
interest groups such as Heritage Action, Club for Growth, the Koch Brother’s
Americans for Prosperity, Ted Cruz’s (supposedly unaffiliated) Senate
Conservatives Fund and the calculated outrage and goading by affiliated media
outlets. For weeks, everything froze.
But, to paraphrase Sarah Palin, that “closey-defaulty thing”
didn’t work out as well as they all expected.
People found that while everyone hates the government, it’s a very
selective hate—they only hate those parts they don’t want to use. And the public at large knew whom to
blame. They didn’t much like Obamacare,
but this one was on the GOP. Faced with
mounting anxiety and disgust, the GOP turned to shrewd, dour old Mitch
McConnell. The deal he cut in October allowed
enough people to retain their principles by flinging their hands up in the air
in dismay while voting “aye” at the same time.
Several needed to call for emergency chiropractic help.
Part of that McConnell-Reid deal was the Ryan/Murray-led
committee, and what Paul Ryan presented is what he was able to extract from
that set of negotiations. Not enough,
screamed the Purity Police. Marco Rubio,
desperately trying to regain his reputation after his immigration apostasy,
denounced it even before it released, earning a sharp rebuke from Ryan himself.
Armed with Ryan’s credibility, and his own growing piqué,
Boehner finally took a stand. He lashed
out at the Senate Conservatives Fund, Heritage Action, Club for Growth and
FreedomWorks for "misleading their followers” and said they lost all
credibility. He might very well have
been aided by Pelosi’s “suck” because what Nancy hates couldn’t have been all
that bad.
Amazingly enough, it worked.
The House approved the bill, 332 to 94, with both parties delivering
more than 160 votes. The “nays” were the oddest collection of votes imaginable,
with 32 liberal Democrats joining 62 of the most radical-right
Republicans. If I had to guess, that
much proximity will cause many of those to send their clothes out to the
dry-cleaner for fumigation.
The Senate proved to be a harder nut, for a reason that
wasn’t necessarily intuitive. There, the primary threats from the Purity Police
need to be taken seriously because Senate seats are more highly prized. To that end, John Cornyn (Texas) is being challenged
by the lunatic fringe Congressman Steve Stockman, and Pat Roberts of Kansas by
businessman Milton Wolf. Senators Cornyn
and Roberts are, respectively, the 2nd and 5th most
conservative in their chamber, which you might think would be enough. Other flaming
liberal GOP Senators being “primaried” include Roger Wicker of Mississippi and
Mitch McConnell. That makes all those
gentlemen sensitive to their right flank, whatever microscopic area that may
occupy. The same outside groups who
orchestrated the first fiasco doubled down on the pressure, directly calling
out the incumbents. That created a real
quandary in the minds of the Practicals.
The Senate didn’t want to not pass the bill, and take immediate
responsibility for another shutdown, but there was risk in supporting this one,
even though the GOP didn’t really give up anything they cared about.
Fortunately, Ryan had provided a Deus es machina. One of
the few actual deficit reducers in the agreement was a (previously GOP
supported) provision that will slow the growth of pension benefits to military
retirees under the age of 62. Veterans
and affiliated groups were furious, and this allowed the proper amount of
outrage to be emitted from the aggrieved defenders of our brave men and women. On cue, they took to every open mike they
could find and then headed for the hills, stopping only long enough to agree to
cloture on a possible filibuster. Then,
comfortable knowing that it would pass while they railed against it, all but
nine of them voted no.
The bill now goes to Mr. Obama, who will sign it. A two-year bill, can kicked down the road,
crisis averted? Not quite. While the deal sets parameters of spending,
it doesn’t actually say what each agency gets.
That gets resolved in committee, so there is still the possibility of
another government shut down if it can’t be resolved there. And there is still the little matter of the Ryan’s
threat on the debt ceiling. But that’s
well down the road—close to month from today.
Plenty of time, nothing to worry about.
Leads one to search for the proper slogan. A new era of cooperation! Responsible government
at its very finest! Lacks a certain frisson, I think we would all agree.
Embrace the suck? Now,
that has resonance.
Michael Liss (MM)
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