budget deal

Washington Basks in Extremely Tiny Bipartisan Accomplishment by Jonathan Chait

So, for the most part, something White House aides hastily drew up in the summer of 2011 as a trigger has become, for the most part, settled policy. How did a result the administration would have dismissed as a worse-case scenario come to pass? The first reason is that the White House mistakenly took Republican denunciations of the long-term debt at face value. Since Republicans appeared desperate to cut retirement programs, Obama assumed they would trade some form of higher tax revenue to get it. But the GOP’s opposition to higher taxes in any form, even closing loopholes, has trumped its commitment to lower spending for more than three decades. 

Second, the administration failed to grasp that, alongside their aversion to higher taxes, conservatives had turned against policy-making itself. This is a transformation I failed to notice as well when I assumed in 2011 that the parties would find a way to muddle through and avoid the pain. The 2011 debt-ceiling agreement rested on the premise that, if the default was budget cuts deliberately designed to make both parties unhappy, both parties would cut some kind of deal. 

But the conservative movement opposes not just the substance of compromise but the process itself....

It is true that this deal, by itself, never balances the budget. But even if that’s your goal, why should that prevent you from supporting something? The normal standards of evaluating legislation – does this improve things relative to the status quo – have become completely alien on the right. Look at the way Barbara Mikulski, one of the most liberal senators, frames the deal: “I will have to take a $45 billion downgrade from the Senate number, but the House is coming up $45 billion, so I think that’s a rational compromise.” 

Halfway between what one party wants and what the other party wants is her definition of a fair bargain. Now look at how conservatives frame the same thing. Here’s a Heritage Foundation op-ed:

Under the deal, discretionary spending would rise to $1.012 trillion in 2014 and $1.014 trillion in 2015, a $63 billion total increase (though it does little to provide a real and sustained fix for President Obama's mismanagement of defense). This is a significant achievement for the president, who believes that government spending is a panacea to America's economic woes.

There’s no sense whatsoever that the other party, which controls one chamber of Congress and the White House, ought to have any say at all. “My party should get everything” is the presumed starting and ending point.