Years of sitting in a drawer have taken their toll on the medal, but I’m still proud to have it

Boy Scout Troop 166 met on Tuesday evenings at Monroe Junior High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and played a formative role in my childhood.  It was a very active troop, with monthly campouts and week-long, 50-mile hikes in the summers.  I was in the Raccoon Patrol, and I hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back out with the Scouts, twice.  I learned how to cook over a fire, how to tie knots, how to provide CPR, how to read a map and use a compass.  I learned about teamwork, and responsibility, and citizenship, and service.  I would not be the man I am today without Scouting, and I will treasure the experience as long as I live.

The man I am today also passionately believes that gay people should not be discriminated against in any way, and I’ve blogged about this many times.  I’ve written that same-sex marriage is a fundamental human rights issue, and the only acceptable outcome is full marriage equality.

I’m happy and relieved that the Boy Scouts voted today to allow openly gay boys to participate.  My joy is tempered by the fact that openly gay adults still are banned from Scout leadership.  It will take a few years — maybe even quite a few — but one day that barrier also will fall.  Today’s vote is the equivalent of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the military — not good enough, but a step in the right direction, and the best that could be accomplished at the time.

The Boy Scout Oath ends with a promise “to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.” I have no patience with the people who brandish “morally straight” as a reason to exclude gays — but there is some logic, of course, behind the ban on gay adults.  Very few adult men of any orientation would ever prey on underage children — but the number is not zero, and predators gravitate toward situations where potential victims are plentiful.  That’s why the Girl Scouts don’t send men to their campouts, and I have no quarrel with that.

The boys could learn something from the girls.  I was chatting the other day with a woman who is active in the New York City leadership of the Girl Scouts.  She told me that they have no prohibition against lesbian Scout leaders — just a common-sense understanding that any such leader should be paired with another adult woman during events or activities.  Surely any openly gay Scout leader of either gender would want such a chaperone for their own protection against false accusations.

In the category of simple answers to complicated questions, I offer the following:

Is this Obama’s Watergate?

Not even close.

Watergate started with an unambiguous crime — the break-in — and the president of the United States participated for many months in a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice in the cover-up.  Nearly 40 people went to prison because of Watergate.

The current IRS scandal started with behavior that was utterly inappropriate — using the awesome power of the IRS to subject Obama opponents to extraordinary levels of harassment.  But it’s not at all clear that any crime has been committed, and despite the overheated calls for jail time from Governor Bobby Jindahl and Speaker John Boehner, it’s likely that nobody will go to jail for the IRS misdeeds.

I admire Peggy Noonan, but she mars her otherwise excellent appraisal of the matter when she starts by saying “We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate.”  There are other candidates for the title of Worst Since Watergate, but for discussion purposes let’s stipulate that her statement is narrowly correct.  It’s still misleading.  It’s like saying the economic crisis that began in 2008 was “the worst downturn since the Great Depression.”  Even if that’s true — and again, other nominees are available — it’s inappropriate to make comparisons with the Depression, when unemployment reached 25%.

Is the IRS scandal, along with Benghazi revelations and the subpoenas of journalist phone records, going to damage the effectiveness of the administration in Obama’s second term?

Yes.

It’s four short months since Inauguration Day, and the second-term jinx has struck President Obama unusually early.  Iran-contra erupted two years into Ronald Reagan’s second term.    The Lewinsky scandal was first disclosed a full year into Clinton’s second term.  The Iraq War started before George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election, but at this point in his second term a majority of Americans still supported the war, and consistent majority opposition did not take hold until 2006.

This isn’t Watergate, but it’s not chopped liver.  The IRS story has legs.  Congressional hearings will continue for months.  We’ll hear more and more stories like that of Catherine Englebrecht, a small business owner turned Tea Party activist in Texas, who was harassed by not just the IRS but also by the FBI, BATF and OSHA after she formed a Tea Party-related non-profit.  Agree or disagree with her politics, but the story is appalling — and Democrats are going to realize that someday, another Republican administration will be in power.  Liberal icon Jon Stewart last week lashed out at President Obama as savagely as I’ve ever seen, mocking the president’s transparent posturing at a news conference and ridiculing his repeated claims over the years that he only learned about various controversies via the news media.

Who’s the biggest winner in the IRS scandal?

The Tea Party.

What better demonstration could there be about the dangers of excessive government power than a scandal in which the Tea Party, which advocates smaller government, is targeted improperly by some of the government’s most powerful agencies?

Tagged with: IRS • Obama

Much about the Boston Marathon bombing reeks of domestic terrorism — it happened on Income Tax Day, near the April 19 anniversary of Waco and Oklahoma City, and on the Patriot’s Day holiday weekend in Massachusetts.  Patriot’s Day is a symbolic two-fer — it commemorates the Battles of Lexington & Concord, which actually occurred on April 19, but the day is observed each year on the third Monday of April, which this year was April 15.  The location also evokes thoughts, fairly or otherwise, of the Boston Tea Party and the modern Taxed Enough Already party movement.

But wait!  The talking head on CNN just said that the use of pressure cookers in bomb-making is a signature of the Taliban!  A clue!  But it turns out the Taliban has published bomb-making instructions on the internet.  And the Google tells me that the al-Qaeda English-language Inspire magazine published a recipe on using pressure cookers to make bombs.  But another CNN talking head just said “a U.S. official” had said there was no evidence that this is al-Qaeda’s work (I can’t find a link).  OK, so maybe a hitherto unknown, independent Islamist terror group?

Wait, maybe it’s a government conspiracy, just like 9/11 was! At the very first press conference Monday afternoon, a man variously identified as “a heckler” and a “reporter” for the (conservative!) Infowars website, asked:

Questioner: “Why were loudspeakers telling people in the audience to be calm moments before the bomb went off?  Is this another false flag staged attack to take our civil liberties away while promoting Homeland Security, who are sticking their hands down our pants on the street?”

Gov. Duval: “No. Next question?”

Props to the Guv for handling it just right.  I would have said “Just shut up,” which would only have provided more ammunition.  (The transcription above is mine, based on video from the news conference.)  Props also to the California man who promptly registered BostonMarathonConspiracy.com,  “to keep some conspiracy kook from owning it.”

The first-best advice I saw on speculation came from Andrew McCarthy, former federal terrorism prosecutor and now a pundit for National Review (among others).  About 90 minutes after the blast, he wrote:

First, it is a mistake to get too far out in front of the initial reports, which are almost always wrong in some details — sometimes, in some major details. …

The recent history of terrorist attacks is that investigators figure out who is responsible within a very short period of time, both because of the high priority such investigations are given and the tendency of terrorists to signal their responsibility for what they’ve done (after all, the point of terrorism is to leave us intimidated by the terrorists, so they obviously feel the need to brag). We will know who did this soon. It is counterproductive to do much speculation.

Counterproductive, yes.  But how can we help ourselves?

Other musings

My reaction to the initial reports was blasé.  I saw a headline something like “At Least 6 Hurt in Boston Marathon Explosion,” and I shrugged and went back to what I was doing.  But I got sucked in pretty quickly.

Because of the backstory behind this blog’s name, my ears always perk up at any reference to the word “evil.”  I believe evil exists and it’s important to call it that.  President Bush — he of the “Axis of Evil” and of “We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name” — was very comfortable with the term.  Props to President Obama for not letting neocon cooties deter him.  After praising the reactions of first responders, both professional and amateur, Obama said “If you want to know who we are, what America is, how we respond to evil, that’s it: selflessly, compassionately, unafraid.”

OK, I could quibble with “unafraid,” I’d substitute “bravely,” a way one can act while being afraid.  But in the words of Jennifer Rubin, who is often a harsh Obama critic: “His job, before there are concrete answers, is to exude calm. He did that.”

Just so.

(Public domain photo via Wikipedia)

Tagged with: 07040

In this era of hyperpartisanship, I find myself fascinated by any issue that begins to cut across party lines.*

I largely ignored the Rand Paul drone-related filibuster when it happened, because it seemed quixotic and unserious.  I’m a critic of the president, but it had never occurred to me to worry that Obama might drone-bomb Jane Fonda.  I was mildly surprised when pundits began saying the filibuster had increased Paul’s stature in the Republican party.

But I only started focusing on the issue when a handful of (fairly) prominent Democrats began strongly challenging the Democratic president’s cloak of secrecy over the drone campaign. It had been a role-reversal debate, with Republicans seeking to limit a president’s war-making authority while Democrats largely remained silent.

A hat tip to Seth Mandel of Commentary, who linked to op-eds by former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman (headlined “Rand Paul is Right“) and former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta (“Obama Should Lift Secrecy on Drones“).   Harman starts with a too-categorical declaration:

Inside the United States, without exception, an American suspected of plotting a terror attack should never be targeted by an armed drone. Period.

Four short paragraphs later, Harman concedes there is an appropriate exception:

In the domestic context, drones should never be used against citizens unless there is an armed conflict on U.S. soil.

While Harman skips ahead to the policy outcome she favors, Podesta’s approach is more procedural, and to my mind more appropriate.

[T]he White House is still bobbing and weaving on whether to share with Congress the legal opinions and memorandums governing targeted killing, which include the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens without trial.

The Obama administration is wrong to withhold these documents from Congress and the American people. I say this as a former White House chief of staff who understands the instinct to keep sensitive information secret and out of public view. It is beyond dispute that some information must be closely held to protect national security and to engage in effective diplomacy, and that unauthorized disclosure can be extraordinarily harmful. But protecting technical means, human sources, operational details and intelligence methods cannot be an excuse for creating secret law to guide our institutions.

The drone controversy highlights once again the crucial differences between law enforcement and war.  Certainly the Osama bin Laden takedown could not have been accomplished by American law enforcement efforts, and the mission was surely “illegal,” at least from the Pakistani point of view. But it was the greatest positive accomplishment of the Obama presidency, and when America is at war, the commander in chief must have considerable latitude to take the battle to the enemy.

I have no qualms whatsoever about taking out Anwar al-Awlaki, a nominal American citizen and an influential enemy leader, with a drone strike in Yemen.  But the situation is completely different on U.S. soil, where a civilian SWAT team with a warrant can reasonably be expected to capture an enemy or kill him in the attempt.

By all means let’s have a public debate over drone policy, and I agree with Podesta that the president should be more forthcoming with Congress.  But it’s impractical to legislate based on extreme and hypothetical possibilities — and it’s dangerous to do so in the context of war.

Law enforcement generally should take the lead in anti-terrorism efforts within the United States, but there has to be room for exceptions. Certainly most people would have agreed on September 10 that it would be utterly wrong for the U.S. Air Force to shoot down a U.S. commercial airliner over U.S. soil.  But of course that order was given on September 11, and I’m not aware of any serious person in either party who thinks it was inappropriate.  Fortunately the patriots on Flight 93 made it unnecessary.

(Public domain photos of unmanned, missile-bearing MQ-9 Reaper and of Anwar al-Awlaki from Wikipedia)

* Just this morning CNN reports that conservative GOP Sen. Rob Portman has reversed his position and expressed support for same-sex marriage, his reconsideration prompted by his son coming out as gay. As a marriage equality advocate and a Republican I have mixed feelings about this.  It’s unfortunate that support from prominent Republicans seems to require gay offspring (cf. Cheney, Dick).  But as a practical matter, incremental Republican support is far more important to the cause than incremental Democratic support. So welcome, Senator Portman.

Tagged with: 07040

President Obama seems increasingly divorced from reality on the deficit. First there was his jaw-dropping statement to Speaker Boehner, during the fiscal cliff crisis, that “we don’t have a spending problem.” Now tonight he trots out the usual SOTU laundry list of new initiatives — some of them sensible enough. But he introduces them by saying “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.”

Excuse me? Props to the Republican National Committee for being out already with a video that includes tonight’s speech in a litany of video clips of Obama’s dime-saving promises, closing by pointing out that the national debt has increased by 58 trillion dimes since Obama took office.

The Obama-voting Web Goddess, who has to get up early tomorrow, bailed about 10 minutes into the speech, saying it wasn’t very interesting “now that he never has to run for office again.” I said “he’s acting like he never has to compromise with a Republican again, either.” She said “yes, that’s coming through.” Celebrate small victories…

I’m getting tired of Obama’s repeated references to “a balanced approach” to cutting the deficit. Here’s my idea of balance: the fiscal cliff deal imposed tax increases with no spending cuts. Now let’s balance that with a sequester deal of spending cuts with no tax increases.

There will be no sequester deal, of course. The Republicans cannot possibly surrender the only mechanism they have for forcing spending cuts, however clumsy those cuts may be, unless they and the Democrats can agree on alternate cuts of equal size. And there’s no chance of that in the next two weeks. Obama’s White House invented the sequester idea in the summer of 2011, and he and the Democrats have had a year and a half to propose alternate cuts. This president has no intention of cutting anything except defense.

One statement jumped out at me in his discussion of the need for changes to Medicare: “I am open to additional reforms from both parties, so long as they don’t violate the guarantee of a secure retirement.” Arrrgh! There is no guarantee of a secure retirement! There are entitlement programs in place that provide subsistence-level support, and even that isn’t guaranteed, because the programs are unsustainable. Anyone wanting “a secure retirement” is going to have to either inherit it or save for it.

After my negative feelings about much of the speech, I was surprised to find myself moved by Obama’s closing, when he offered up the examples of the brave police officer, the noble nurse and the 102-year-old woman who endured six hours in line on election night so she could cast her vote.

That’s just the way we’re made.

We may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms, and hold different views than the person beside us. But as Americans, we all share the same proud title:

We are citizens. It’s a word that doesn’t just describe our nationality or legal status. It describes the way we’re made. It describes what we believe. It captures the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others; and that well into our third century as a nation, it remains the task of us all, as citizens of these United States, to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.

Well put, Mr. President. (Yes, I know that by “certain obligations to one another” he means bigger government, but I don’t have to accept that premise.)

Man oh man, I loves me some Marco Rubio! An excerpt from the official Republican response:

Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.

But President Obama? He believes it’s the cause of our problems. That the economic downturn happened because our government didn’t tax enough, spend enough and control enough. And, therefore, as you heard tonight, his solution to virtually every problem we face is for Washington to tax more, borrow more and spend more.

Preach it, brother.

To end on a bipartisan note, I’ll paraphrase something David Gergen said on CNN: Who would have thought, as recently as a dozen years ago, that we would one day see a state of the union speech by a black president, followed by a response from a Hispanic senator?

Tagged with: Deficit • Fiscal Cliff • His and Her Candidates • Obama

Click to embiggen

In a post earlier this month, I referred to Obama as “the most divisive, hyper-partisan president since Nixon.”  I was prepared for push-back from Democrats contending that the second George Bush was more divisive.  The Iraq War certainly became divisive over time, but it started with broad bipartisan support.  Of Obama’s biggest initiatives, Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote, and “Porkulus” had only a handful.

Now the nice folks at Gallup have provided polling data documenting just how divisive Obama has been (hat tip: Peter Wehner).  Gallup headlines its article “Obama’s Fourth Year in Office Ties as Most Polarized Ever,” but to me, the most interesting data is in the chart reproduced above, showing the gap between Republican and Democratic approval rates averaged across the presidents’ entire incumbency.  Obama’s average gap thus far is 70 points, on pace to shatter G.W.Bush’s prior record of 61 points.  (Hm… 70 breaks a prior record of 61… where have I heard those numbers before?)  Interestingly, Nixon, who stands out in my mind as a divisive leader, came in only fifth in Gallup’s rankings.

Gallup emphasizes the negative trajectory:

The trend toward increasingly partisan evaluations of presidents over time is also evident in the fact that no president before Ronald Reagan had more than a 41-point party gap in approval ratings, but four of the last five presidents (the exception is George H.W. Bush) have had better-than 50-point divisions in approval ratings by party.

So should we let Obama off the hook because of the historical accident of our highly partisan times?  Naw.  In 2008, Obama held himself up as a post-partisan beacon. But from the very beginning of his presidency, he has seemed intent on creating friction rather than reducing it.  On his third day in office, he froze Republicans out of the Porkulus negotiations by telling them pointedly, “I won.”  He went on to champion a healthcare package that was rammed through Congress in strict party-line votes — including votes scheduled for the middle of the night in the rush to pass the bill before people realized what was in it.

Recently, of course, we’ve had the Fiscal Cliff end-zone dance.  That was followed by the inaugural address — a venue where presidents typically try to unite the country and soothe the passions stirred up by the recent campaign.  But in his second inaugural, Obama turned up the heat. Michael Gerson summarizes the stridency:

Those who oppose this agenda, in Obama’s view, are not a very admirable lot. They evidently don’t want our wives, mothers and daughters to “earn a living equal to their efforts.” They would cause some citizens “to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote.” They mistake “absolutism for principle” and “substitute spectacle for politics” and “treat name-calling as reasoned debate.” They would have people’s “twilight years . . . spent in poverty” and ensure that the parents of disabled children have “nowhere to turn.” They would reserve freedom “for the lucky” and believe that Medicare and Social Security “sap our initiative,” and they see this as “a nation of takers.” They “deny the overwhelming judgment of science” on climate change, don’t want love to be “equal” and apparently contemplate “perpetual war.”

The fruits of Obama’s antagonism will be harvested soon.  With the debt ceiling kicked down the road again, the stage is set, as Newt Gingrich described, for battles over the sequester and the continuing resolution.  The sequester’s draconian automatic spending cuts take effect March 1 unless Congress votes otherwise, and I expect House Republicans will be virtually unanimous in letting the cuts occur, unless they can win cuts of comparable size elsewhere from the Democrats.

I’m not a fan of Newt Gingrich, but despite his unappealing attributes, he is an intelligent and thoughtful man who understands how Washington works, and who sometimes has ideas worth hearing.

He believes strongly that the debt ceiling is the wrong fight for the GOP to use what little leverage it has to force spending cuts. On reflection, I think he’s right. The debt ceiling would be a much better battleground than the so-called “fiscal cliff,” but Gingrich argues persuasively that two other looming deadlines offer better options.

President Obama set the stage Saturday with his weekly radio address when he announced that he will insist on a clean debt ceiling. In doing so he actually outlined for Republicans the two fights they can win. …

He suggested that the time for Congress to draw the line on spending is before they “rack up the bills” — to paraphrase the president.

We have two immediate opportunities to heed the president’s words: the Sequester bill that is coming up in 60 days and the Continuing Resolution at the end of March.

There is an enormous difference between the Continuing Resolution, the Sequester bill and the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling involves the faith and credit of the United States. It can not be held hostage because the crisis impact of failing to pay the government’s debts would be immediate, worldwide, and shattering.

Every element of the business community and the news media will spend the next two months beating up Republicans if the debt ceiling is the focus of the conflict. This past weekend’s media focus is just a taste of what is coming.

If Republicans fall for the debt ceiling trap they will once again be isolated in a corner, identified as negative extremists, and ultimately forced to back down with maximum internal conflict and bitterness among conservatives and Republicans.

Will the House GOP heed the words of the former Speaker? Some of them certainly will vote against allowing the country to go further into debt. But for the reasons Gingrich states, I expect enough of them will step back from the brink (or they will “cave in,” if you prefer that metaphor) to pass a debt limit increase.

But there’s no guarantee.  Republicans who vote to raise the debt ceiling without getting spending cuts of an equal amount will face intense fire from their right, including the risk of facing a more conservative Republican in the next primary election.  As former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen wrote in the Washington Post:

If Republicans stick to their guns, come February, Obama will agree to deep spending cuts in exchange for a debt-limit increase. There is a reason why every significant debt-reduction bill in the past 27 years — starting with the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act in 1985 — was linked to a debt-limit increase: It’s the only thing that forces Washington to enact spending cuts. With a president in office who believes “we don’t have a spending problem,” it’s the only thing that can force them today.

If the magic-coin episode [the silly idea to mint a trillion-dollar coin - KP] teaches Republicans anything, it’s that Democrats know the president is cornered. So if Republicans blow this opportunity — if they buy Obama’s bluff and capitulate as they did on the fiscal cliff — they’ll need more than a magic coin to save their political hides.

Meanwhile Obama — the most divisive, hyper-partisan president since Nixon — continues to do everything he can to goad Republicans into reacting angrily.  During the fiscal cliff drama, he started his end zone dance before his team had even scored, in a graceless campaign-style rally on New Year’s Eve. He preemptively insisted he would not negotiate over the debt ceiling — apparently the legislative branch is simply supposed to do his bidding.  And in a hastily called news conference yesterday, he relentlessly used terms like “absurd” and “irresponsible” to describe the opposition:

Republicans in Congress have two choices here:  They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills; or they can act irresponsibly, and put America through another economic crisis.  But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.  The financial well-being of the American people is not leverage to be used.  The full faith and credit of the United States of America is not a bargaining chip.

And they better choose quickly, because time is running short.

Obama got away with ramming Obamacare down an unwilling America’s throat without a single Republican vote, while employing every legislative trick in the book in a race against time.  He paid for that by losing the House in the 2010 election, but won reelection for himself in 2012 — in part because Romneycare made his opponent uniquely unsuited to capitalize on the president’s Obamacare vulnerability.

Obama doesn’t know how to cooperate with Republicans, he only knows how to demonize them.  So far that’s been working for him.  Republicans need to choose their battles carefully.

(Gingrich photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

– George Bernard Shaw

A think tank called the Bipartisan Policy Center has been updating a thorough and dispassionate consideration of what exactly will happen if there is no deal to raise the debt ceiling.  The Center’s 48-page slide deck predicts that absent a debt ceiling increase the “X Date” — the first day that the Treasury will no longer have sufficient funds and daily income to pay all of its bills on time — will arrive between February 15 and March 1.  That’s five to seven weeks from now.

The potential consequences are scary stuff.  It’s never happened before, so there is no template.  The Treasury has two basic alternatives:  1) prioritize some payments and refrain from paying others; or 2) pay each day’s bills in full only after enough tax revenue has been collected to cover all of them.  By then, of course, the next day’s payments will already be late.

Regardless of what the Treasury does, it will at least arguably be breaking the law.  If it elects to pay certain bills in full and delay others, it will be picking winners and losers on a chaotic daily basis, as Congress and unions and suppliers and every imaginable interest group pursues every remedy available to them to get on the priority list.  BPC  quotes Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke as saying that going past the X Date “would no doubt have a very adverse effect very quickly on the recovery. I’m quite certain of that.”  Not to mention the stock market, and the country’s credit rating.  Also, are the Treasury’s information and processing systems sophisticated enough to thread all these needles day after day? In the face of all of this, I’m persuaded that I was far too dismissive of the potential effect of hitting the debt ceiling in 2011.

So why would House Republicans risk all that by refusing to raise the debt ceiling?  Because they believe they have no better option.

America is on an unsustainable financial path.  When a financial system is unsustainable, eventually it blows up in costly and chaotic ways.  Recall the bubble that burst in September 2008, when Lehman went bankrupt and Merrill Lynch sold itself over a weekend to Bank of America.  The longer the day of reckoning is postponed, the worse the carnage will be.

The 60-plus Representatives who self-identify as members of the Tea Part Caucus believe, correctly I think, that their constituents have sent them to Congress to reverse the growth of spending and taxation now, rather than let our children and grandchildren deal with a bigger mess later.

Don’t be taken in by arguments that the debt ceiling has nothing to do with future spending, only with past spending.   Capping the debt ceiling is analogous to when a credit card issuer refuses to make any further increases in a family’s credit limit. Whatever already has been paid is water under the bridge.  The family will have to prioritize what it pays going forward.  The difference with the debt ceiling, of course, is that the family’s financial fate will have very little impact on the overall economy.

Republicans were dealt a losing hand last month in the misnamed fiscal cliff crisis, where holding the line would have meant income tax increases for nearly all working Americans.  Digging in here is more easily defensible as a refusal to let the country go deeper into debt.  Yes it will hurt the economy, which is fragile just now.  But there will never be a convenient time to begin the necessary, wrenching, fundamental changes in the way America conducts its business.

In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove describes how House Republicans should approach the negotiations:

For their part, Republicans finally appear reasonably united around something practical and reasonable—the “Boehner Rule,” named after its author. It requires matching any debt increase dollar for dollar with spending cuts. Here, the GOP will likely find wide public support.

It’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

There was no way for Republicans to win the battle over the misnamed fiscal cliff, and they did not.  Their sole accomplishment was to move the threshold of the “millionaires and billionaires” tax from quarter-millionaires to nearly half-millionaires.  The cliff deal actually increases spending, and pushes a decision about spending cuts back by two months.  It’s like the dramatic scene at the end of a blockbuster movie — it sets up the sequel.  (Or maybe sets up the sequester.)

Obama campaigns for the fiscal cliff deal

In his unseemly end zone dance late on New Year’s Eve, President Obama declared “I will not have another debate with this Congress” about the debt ceiling.

Actually, Mr. President, you will.

Obama’s last public statement of 2012 was very carefully worded, and is worth unpacking in some detail. In full campaign mode, with the faces of supporters serving as a backdrop, Obama claimed credit for the tax agreement that will squeeze a few hundred billion dollars out of the “wealthiest” (actually, “highest-income”) Americans.  He then said:

Now, one last point I want to make — while I will negotiate over many things, I will not have another debate with this Congress over whether or not they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed.

Note that he never uses the term most familiar to the public: “debt ceiling.” More about that in a moment; for the time being, savor the artistry behind how he frames the conflict.

He won’t debate with Congress over whether “they should pay the bills that they’ve already racked up through the laws that they passed.”  Um, Mr. President? Somebody actually signed all those laws, and for the last four years it’s been you.  And Congress doesn’t pay the bills.  Your executive branch does.

Let me repeat: We can’t not pay bills that we’ve already incurred. If Congress refuses to give the United States government the ability to pay these bills on time, the consequences for the entire global economy would be catastrophic — far worse than the impact of a fiscal cliff.

Actually, you can “not pay bills” that have already been incurred — or rather, you can defer paying some of them.  Corporations and individuals do it all the time.  And yes, there will be consequences, some of them severe. In a June 2011 report released during the last debt ceiling crisis, the Bipartisan Policy Center helps demystify the debt ceiling by describing the difficult decisions that would have had to be made that August without a debt ceiling increase. One thing that will not happen the day after the debt ceiling is reached is a default on bond payments — there will be plenty of revenue to continuing paying ongoing debt obligations indefinitely.  Dramatic and disruptive cuts in government spending would occur elsewhere.

People will remember, back in 2011, the last time this course of action was threatened, our entire recovery was put at risk. Consumer confidence plunged. Business investment plunged. Growth dropped. We can’t go down that path again.

We’re already going down that path, Mr. President.  We’ve been on that path for decades.  Generations of politicians in both parties have made unkeepable promises.

At some point there is going to be a wrenching restructuring of government and the modern welfare state. The invaluable contribution of the Tea Party is to insist that we must begin that restructuring now, rather than leaving it as an even larger problem for our children and grandchildren.

The unique circumstances of the fiscal cliff left Republicans in the awkward position of arguably having to fight for a tax increase for everyone.  House Republicans, or at least enough of them, wisely backed down after letting the Senate do the dirty work of agreeing to a deal.

The optics are very different in the debt ceiling debate — starting with the names of the crises. “Fiscal cliff” sounds like a calamity, but “debt ceiling” can be championed as a prudent refusal to go further into debt.

Don’t be taken in by the inevitable claims that “to not raise the debt ceiling is akin to refusing to pay your credit card bill,” as Suze Orman stated in 2011.  Here’s my reaction at the time:

Nope.  It’s akin to making minimum monthly payments on the credit card, while applying for an increase in your credit limit.  Tea Party Republicans are saying, this is it — no more increases in credit limits, you’re too far in debt already.

In that post I also said:

All of this may sound like an argument against raising the debt ceiling — but in fact, I hope the ceiling gets raised, the sooner the better.  That’s because the stakes right now are higher than whether the arbitrary line in the sand gets drawn at $14.3 trillion or $16.7 trillion.  It would be very disruptive, in unpredictable ways, to bounce off an unmoving debt ceiling — and I fear the Republicans would get the blame for the disruption.

Let’s give Obama  the $2.4 trillion debt ceiling increase to get him past the election — that’s at least less than the $3.1 trillion debt increase that already has happened on his watch.  The GOP should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good — they’ve already succeeded in changing the context from “no” spending cuts to “how much” in spending cuts.  The single most important thing Republicans can do right now to improve the financial situation is to vote the most free-spending president in history out of office.

Well, the vote-him-out gambit didn’t work — but Obama’s re-election has also eliminated the most compelling political argument against holding the line on the debt ceiling. The House Republicans have control of the credit limit, and they should stand fast and refuse to increase it unless they can secure meaningful, unhypothetical spending cuts equal to a multiple of any increase.

Photo grabbed from government-made (and thereby public domain) White House video.

The Web Goddess works for the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, and for over a year has been supporting her boss, Bishop Mark Beckwith, in his work with the Newark Interfaith Coalition for Hope and Peace.  I first discussed this effort after an interfaith service on the 10th anniversary of September 11.

Yesterday Bishop Beckwith and his interfaith colleagues, Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz and Imam Deen Shareef, were guests on “Morning Joe” with Joe Scarborough on MSNBC.  Their measured and thoughtful discussion of the spiritual implications of the Newtown massacre was a sharp contrast to the preceding shoutfest about the fiscal cliff.

The complete segment can be found on the Morning Joe site, which also has a transcript and a nifty ability to create and embed a sub-clip.  For my Episcopal friends, if you can’t spare 8:44 to watch the whole thing, the 1:13 sub-clip below has Bishop Beckwith discussing fear and a culture of violence.

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Tagged with: Episcopalian Issues • Guns