President Obama says it. House Speaker John Boehner says it. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid says it. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says it. And each Sunday morning on the Beltway talk-show circuit, even those whose job it is to cover the circus say it.
Washington is broken! runs the cliche. If there is one thing that unites Tea Partying Republicans, ObamaCaring Democrats, soi-disant moderates and the permanent pundit class, it is this.
Now, it’s true enough that the men and women we send to Washington to manage the public purse aren’t doing what they ought. They spend more of our money than they should; they regulate us more than they should, and they refuse to address the real and growing threats to our future as they should — e.g., the unsustainable acceleration in entitlement spending.
But the idea that Washington is broken because some in Congress threatened to shut down the federal government and others called their bluff is absurd.
Our Constitution allocates to our representatives a great many powers, some of which they use regularly, some of which they resort to sparingly. In other words, while there are a great many things presidents and congressmen and senators can do, militating against doing them are the political consequences — principally, the reaction of the American people.
The New York Sun had this exactly right in an editorial that took on the president’s ridiculous claim this week that among the “obvious” responsibilities “the Constitution endows to Congress” is the obligation “to pass a budget.” The Constitution says no such thing. What we really have here, as the Sun points out, is a president saying Congress has an obligation to provide funds for what he wants to spend them on.
Republicans don’t wish to fund ObamaCare. The political bet they made — as proposed by Sen. Cruz — was that if House Republicans would force Senate Democrats choose between defunding ObamaCare and shutting down the government, at least five Democrats would turn because of the clear and unsubsiding unpopularity of ObamaCare.
It proved a bad bet. So Republicans are stuck with blame for shutting down government while making zero dent in ObamaCare.
Having made this stand and lost, the danger now is that some in the GOP ranks will sue for peace.
Why would they surrender? Take a look at the Google News section on the Republican Party and you’ll get a taste of the lopsided coverage they’re enduring: “The humiliated, bizarre Republican Party,” “GOP Extremists Defy Description,” “Republican Party Loses Even Fox News” and so on.
Again, even this doesn’t mean Washington is broken, much less the demise of the Republican Party. It doesn’t even mean that where we are today will be where we are a week from today.
It does mean that if Republicans hope to avoid a rout, they need to extract concessions from the president and the Democrats.
At the moment, the received wisdom is that there’s no way to get these concessions. Partly that’s because Democrats are in an exultant mood. The longer a shutdown goes, they believe, the more it hurts the other side.
But that, too, may not hold. Look at old Harry Reid, who got all testy and patriarchal when a CNN reporter asked him why he opposed a Republican bill that would fund the National Institutes of Health.
“If you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?” she asked. Reid’s response was to belittle her intelligence.
Are our elected representatives dysfunctional? Absolutely. But what we’re seeing today is no more dysfunctional today than it was when George Washington had to deal with a Continental Congress reneging on its promises over army pay and pensions.
We’ve been here many times before, and we’ll be here again.
In the meantime, expect House Republicans to continue to send difficult, targeted bills (e.g., funding for veterans, as Clinton agreed to in the 1995 shutdown) to the Senate. Meanwhile, Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan will be quietly reaching out to his Democratic counterparts in the Senate who realize it will be hard to keep painting Republicans as the intransigent party after a week or so of no negotiation from the White House and a dozen or so votes against reasonable funding bills. Truth is, Congress sometimes does its best work with a gun to its head.
Now that Republicans have a shutdown, the plan seems to be to tie the impasse on government funding to the debt ceiling in hopes of forcing a larger deal that could include real victories such as entitlement reform, approval for the Keystone Pipeline, and so on.
For the moment, President Obama and Sen. Reid are insisting they won’t budge an inch: not on the budget, not on the targeted bills the House is sending up, and especially not on negotiating these along with the debt ceiling.
Don’t bet on it