The Senate yesterday followed the House of Representatives in approving a bipartisan budget deal that came about in a relative rush for Washington. The deal is very small beer in policy terms. Its passage is very big news in political terms.
It’s small beer because it does very little except on the margins (save ensuring that the defense budget isn’t simply hacked at willy-nilly, as it would’ve been otherwise).
It’s very big news because it completely alters the coming political dynamic in Washington for 2014. The conventional wisdom is that this change will benefit Republicans. Indeed, it may.
Republicans who like the deal say that by taking the shutdown off the table the party’s politicians can devote the year to the ObamaCare disaster — highlighting its problems, working to pass legislation to overhaul it, running hearings on it, doing everything to maintain the national focus on it. This way they can win the Senate back in 2014 and lay the groundwork for a Republican victory in 2016 on a platform of repealing it and replacing it.
Canny Republicans say the deal lifts the threat of any more government shutdowns. But for some in the party’s base, the kind of showdown melodrama typified by the government shutdown has become their favorite thing.
These showdowns are fund-raising bonanzas for groups that claim to speak for the party’s grassroots. And they’re highly dramatic confrontations that occur almost for the sake of confrontation itself. Once the standoff is on, they view any effort to resolve it as a capitulation.
They have some grounds for this view in recent history. In December 2010, with a New Year’s deadline looming, the president was forced to extend all the Bush tax cuts rather than cherry-picking the ones he wanted. That was humiliating for him and a triumph for conservatives.
Then, in the summer of 2011, came the crisis over raising the debt ceiling (a different issue but one that also leads to a time-specific showdown). When President Obama proposed a series of draconian automatic cuts called a “sequester,” the GOP called his bluff by accepting the deal; the president had believed the Right would not, because the sequester hit so hard at the defense budget.
For some on the Right, the sequester magically turned into the best policy move of the past 15 years — an effective budget freeze. The fact that it is indiscriminate and dangerous to the nation’s military readiness pales, in the view of sequester-lovers, to the simple fact that it seemed to tie Washington’s hands.
Indeed, the sequester’s effect has been dramatic. Because federal government spending held the line while the economy grew, the budget deficit was cut in half — though the overall national debt continues to grow.
Twice, then, Republicans got things they wanted out of these showdowns. But they got nothing out of the big one, the overall government shutdown in October, in part because the target was just too large: repealing ObamaCare.
Nonetheless, those who supported the shutdown have talked themselves into believing they “won” something — namely, a new public focus on ObamaCare, which was already the focus of discussion in Washington and was already on its own becoming the most dramatic policy problem for an administration in living memory.
So when you hear conservatives say they don’t like the budget deal, you have to understand they don’t want budget deals because they like these showdowns.
The problem is, everybody else seems to hate them. Showdown politics seems risky and irresponsible, it threatens the country’s good name in the markets and abroad and it introduces a note of uncertainty into every economic move inside the United States.
And this hurts everyone, as we know now — not just the Republicans but Obama and the Democrats as well. Obama’s inability to make a deal with the GOP loses him leadership points in the presidential game, and when he loses, the Democrats lose their standing as well.
So this budget deal may help him, too, even as it hurts him. The last thing he and his party need in 2014 is more reason for the public to question his competency as a leader when he already finds himself in such a crisis due to the botched ObamaCare rollout.
Even as he’s being beaten up next year over his legacy monstrosity, the president can always take a moment to look around and think: Could have been worse.