In 1985, then Sen. Warren Rudman mordantly described his new legislation for cutting the federal budget — across-the-board reductions — as “a bad idea whose time has come.”
The bad idea: Vitally important programs would take the same kind of hit as the feel-good or junk programs.
Obviously, that was lousy policy. But, Rudman and others reasoned at the time, wouldn’t the prospect of doing things in such a terrible fashion force legislators and the White House to do it more rationally?
Well, it didn’t work in the 1980s, when Rudman’s budget proposal (best known as Gramm-Rudman) became law. And here we are again. In 2013, automatic budget cuts are being imposed not because they are a good idea — but because they’re a terrible idea.
President Obama himself told us this. In October 2011, he said the sequester — the automatic budget cuts his own team designed — was a rotten idea even as he was making it part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for reductions in the deficit.
“There will be no easy off-ramps on this one,” the president declared. “We need to keep the pressure up to compromise, not turn off the pressure.”
Obama’s attitude here helps explain why the White House and its media spokespersons are so enraged by the consistent conservative invocation of Obama’s responsibility for the sequester. Since the president said it was bad news in the first place, how can he be blamed for it?
After all, everyone knows he doesn’t want to cut government programs — federal spending has gone up 20 percent on his watch — so it seems unjust to his partisans that the president should be held responsible when they get cut. It’s clear as a bell to them that the blame should attach to the Republicans who believe in slashing federal programs.
But seriously, folks: Has there ever been a time in history when a president proposed a policy he himself thought was wrongheaded and dangerous?
In the past, presidents have reluctantly acceded to policies enacted by a Congress with enough power to override a White House veto. But this was and is something else: The president himself sought the imposition of bad policy for the purpose of blackmailing himself and others into making better policy.
That’s ironic. And the thing is, the political system itself has no sense of irony. The political system is very literal. It can’t be expected to understand when a policy is intended to be sardonic — as Obama’s was.
The idea of “a policy so horrible that something will have to come and take its place” seems straight out of Otter’s playbook from “Animal House.” His immortal guidance: “This situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part.”
Look, it’s one thing to blame George W. Bush for making bad policy on Iraq (if you think Iraq was a terrible mistake). But nobody argues Bush thought going into Iraq was a terrible mistake in 2003; he thought the war was necessary and noble and would change the world for the better.
Obama thought the sequester had to be stopped. And then he made it law.
The president assumed that Republicans would refuse to allow such cuts to happen — that they’d strike a deal with him that would feature tax increases and much smaller budget cuts than the sequester itself provides — because they’d never allow the defense budget to be cut so irresponsibly.
This made and makes no political sense. For the thing is, Obama himself is willing to allow the cuts to happen if he can’t make a deal that better serves his goals.
And as for defense cuts, he’s the commander in chief. Are Republicans supposed to be more Catholic than the Vatican Conclave? Are they supposed to support tax hikes to defend the Pentagon budget when the man in charge of the Pentagon is the one whose own plan put the Pentagon budget at risk?
The peculiarity of the president’s position on the sequester is making it difficult to assess its possible political impact. Everyone has assumed Republicans will bear the onus for the sequester — but that doesn’t seem certain now that the sequester has actually begun.
Maybe it’s as simple as this: The GOP is at a low point in its popularity historically, and Congress (whose lower House the GOP controls) is even more unpopular. Republicans are already being blamed for everything. So if something requires new blame, that blame has nowhere to go but in Obama’s direction.
And deservedly so. The bad idea whose time has come has come around again — because in making policy, the president was just too cute by half.