By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 14, 2013
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As the search for a way to end the partial federal shutdown and avoid a debt crisis shifted to the Senate, Democrats made plain that one of their top priorities was to diminish the next round of across-the-board spending cuts, known as the sequester, due to take effect early next year. Many Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), oppose retreating from those cuts. That set up a clash that seemed almost as intense as the one that caused budget talks between House Republicans and President Barack Obama to collapse Friday. "Total federal spending has now gone down for two years in a row -- the first time that's happened since the Korean War,'' Mr. McConnell said Sunday. With the additional sequestration cuts on tap for 2014, the budget limits have produced "the most significant spending reduction in modern history and Senate Republicans will not accept anything that undoes these cuts."So we've gone from Republicans demanding budget cuts to Democrats demanding spending increases. But wait. If that's not depressing enough, read on:
Senate Democrats have been strengthened by the sidelining, at least for now, of House conservatives, who dropped nearly all their major policy demands only to see Mr. Obama reject their proposal for ending the stalemate. With Senate leaders now negotiating, the fiscal battle focused for the first time in weeks on the budget itself, not on side issues that had dominated, such as the Republican demand that the 2010 health-care law be delayed or altered. Republicans who had opposed the GOP's "defund Obamacare'' strategy welcomed the return of interest to basic spending issues. "I think we have finally gotten to a really good place,'' said Sen.Bob Corker(R. Tenn.). "Now's the time for all of us to focus on the right page, the right paragraph to get this done.'' But the focus on spending brought the parties back to the impasse that has divided them for months: Whether or not they can agree to a broad deficit-reduction deal to replace the scheduled across-the-board spending cuts.So House Conservatives drop nearly all their major policy demands in order to try to get a deal, Obama still says no, and now Senate Republicans are happy because they're working with Reid on a new way to achieve "deficit-reduction" aside from budget cuts. And what do you suppose that might be? Of course. Higher taxes. This shutdown is working out great. And don't blame Ted Cruz. The Republicans can only achieve anything by refusing to sign onto Democrat spending bills that are necessary to fund the government. So they refused. The only alternative to that is pre-emptive capitulation. The problem here has been that the Republicans are not united about a) what they want; and b) the resolve to stand firm and fight. It's clear that most of them just want to get some sort of deal, any deal, that lets them save face a little while ending the shutdown and stopping the heat that's on them. That's not the fault of the rare Republican who wants to stand firm. It's the fault of the vast majority of them who will not. So now we've got Democrats making the demands, wanting more spending and more taxes, and from the sound of things they're going to get what they want. Terrific.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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