There seems to be a compulsion among “serious” people to believe that President Obama represents an extreme in the current “crisis,” which really isn’t all that bad. He doesn’t. If anything, in his eagerness to do Wall Street’s bidding, which is, fortunately, not quite the same thing as the Wall Street Journal’s bidding, the president is pretty much right of center. It’s just that the Republicans aren’t at the table at all. Basically, they’re in another world. The president wants to deal, but all they want to do is play video games.
Let’s recall that Ryan’s original budget called for no cuts at all, ever, to Social Security, and no cuts to Medicare benefits ever for anyone 55 or over, while at the same time counting on the Medicare savings envisioned by the Affordable Care Act. When Ryan became Mitt Romney’s running mate, the Medicare savings were discarded, and instead seniors were assured that there would be no cuts, ever, to their benefits—the same thing the Tea Party said while riding to victory in 2010. After the election, Ryan bragged about how seniors had supported the Romney-Ryan ticket. Then he put the ACA savings back in his brand new budget, and then (of course) also voted against the ACA. How many times are you going to eat that cake, Paulie?
Earlier this year, the Republicans in the House of Representatives approved the spending targets set by Ryan’s new budget—no cuts to entitlements, “restored” spending for defense, to make up for sequestered funds, and deep cuts in domestic discretionary spending. But when it came time to vote on actual appropriations bills to make those cuts, the House leadership didn’t even bring the bills to the floor, because they knew they couldn’t pass them. Which is the real reason we had the government shutdown in the first place.
Despite all their grand talk, the Tea Party does not want a grand bargain, because that would involve making actual cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and the geezer vote is their ace in the hole. What they really want to do is cut spending on the poor, and no one else. House Republicans did vote to split the old “farm” bill into two pieces, one for farm subsidies and one for Food Stamps, cutting Food Stamps by 10 percent while providing full funding for crop insurance subsidies for millionaires. And Ryan voted with them on this one.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has “promised” that there will be no more government shutdowns, though I don’t remember him being elected Speaker of the House, and I also notice that he didn’t quite promise not to threaten to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. I suspect that there will be a lot more sound and fury to come, signifying nothing, because that is the sum and substance of the Tea Party program.
