By George Will
Liberals constantly lecture, more in
theatrical sorrow than in actual anger, about their eagerness to compromise
with Republicans, just not with Republicans who are — liberal moderation
expresses itself immoderately — hostage-taking terroristic anarchistic jihadist
suicide bombers. But Maine’s Republican Sen. Susan Collins, the very model of
moderation, spoiled the Democrats’ piety charade by demonstrating its
insincerity when she suggested this compromise:
Republicans would support a continuing
resolution that funds the government for six months at the “sequester” levels
of the Budget Control Act of 2011, which was produced by that year’s
debt-ceiling negotiations. Republicans would also support raising the debt
ceiling to enable the government to borrow enough to finance the substantial
deficit spending involved in even sequester-level spending. (The sequester’s
supposed severity does not come close to balancing the budget.) Republicans
also would grant agencies greater flexibility in administering the sequester’s
cuts.
In exchange, Collins asked for only two
things. First, a mere delay, and for just two years, of Obamacare’s
medical-device tax, which is so “stupid” — Sen. Harry Reid’s characterization — that bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress
favor outright repeal. Second, enforcement of income-verification criteria for
those seeking Obamacare’s insurance subsidies — criteria the administration
wrote but waived.
Here Collins was asking not for
alteration of, but for enforcement of, Obamacare. Just as many Republicans
believe the Democrats’ primary goal regarding immigration reform is to turn as
many immigrants as possible into voters as quickly as possible, many
Republicans also believe the Democrats’ primary goal regarding Obamacare is to
turn as many people as possible into subsidy recipients as quickly as possible.
Hence Democrats’ aversion to income criteria to prevent fraud.
As of early Monday evening, Democrats had refused Collins’s bargain,
giving several reasons but really having only one important one: They loathe
the sequester, which prevents them from opening the spending spigot. Their
knees ache from genuflecting before the altar of a “clean” continuing
resolution and a “clean” debt-ceiling increase. They insist it is a sin against
good government to attach any conditions to either.
Suddenly, however, they decided that
conditions are imperative. They favored attaching to a government funding or
debt-ceiling measure a change in the Budget Control Act intended to weaken the
sequester.
Barack Obama, who says you did not see
and hear him draw a “red line” regarding Syrian chemical weapons
(“the world” drew it), insists: “The sequester is not something that I’ve
proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.” This neon fib, made during last year’s campaign,
matters because the sequester has become the main bone of contention in the
shutdown and debt-ceiling dramas.
According to Bob Woodward’s
meticulously reported book “The Price of Politics,” in the summer of 2011, with
Republicans refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless spending were cut an
equal amount, Obama and his principal economic advisers blundered
by not recognizing how the Republican Party has changed. Obama proposed that if
Republicans would not agree to tax increases as well as spending cuts, the
sequester would take half the cuts from defense. Republicans, Obama and his
aides thought, would flinch at this.
Now Obama knows how wrong he was.
Liberals, having long reviled Republicans as obsequious servants of big
business and the military, are living miserably with the sequester cuts because
Republicans now are resistant to business and military entreaties to open the
government and raise the debt ceiling without preconditions.
Early in the Cold War and in the Air
Force’s existence as an independent service, during fierce inter-service
competition for scarce resources, Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air
Command, was briefed by a junior officer who repeatedly referred to the Soviet
Union as “the enemy.” LeMay supposedly interrupted to say, “Young man, the
Soviet Union is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy.”
Those House Republicans who dislike the
Obama administration but detest Senate Republicans should understand how the moderate
Collins forced Democrats to drop their mask of moderation. And all House
Republicans should understand that the victory won in the summer of 2011 — the
sequester, achieved by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — still torments
Democrats.
As House Speaker John Boehner struggles
to manage his turbulent House caucus, he should remember Casey Stengel’s advice about managing a
baseball team: “Keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are
undecided.” No Republicans hate Boehner, but many are undecided about him
because they do not understand the hammer — the sequester — he wields.
No comments:
Post a Comment