Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Republican Sequestration Plan

That's the title of this article in New York magazine by Jonathan Chait.  Briefly, Chait seems confused by the fact that the Republican House, under the crack leadership of Speaker Gerry Mander, is refusing to replace the sequestration process with a mixture of entitlement cuts and closed tax loopholes--in other words, two things they've previously gone on the record as favoring.  Consequently, Chait professes to be perplexed by this strategy, even to the point of wondering whether House Republicans even have a strategy for dealing with the sequester and its meat-axe consequences for public services.

Personally, I think they do have a strategy.  It's kind of a half-cocked one, but that's the only kind of strategy you can have when your party is composed of two factions that have been growing apart for decades:  religious zealots, and practical establishmentarians.

By religious zealots, I'm not necessarily talking about evangelical Christians.  I'm talking about what is truly the core constituency in the contemporary Republican Party--anti-tax zealots.  These are people who view any and all taxes not as Holmes' price for civilization, but as hobnail boots on the souls of free people--even when the taxes pay for services the zealots want.  Like the Terminator, they cannot be reasoned or bargained with, and they absolutely will not rest until all taxes are gone and every conceivable government function is provided by the public sector on a fee-for-service basis.

They are, in other words, the majority of House Republicans.  And they are the bane (the Boehner?) of Speaker Gerry Mander's existence.  Because Speaker Gerry Mander is basically an establishmentarian, one who lives to cut deals with the other side, not so much out of a deep-seated commitment to democracy as out of a burning desire to get through the back nine before cocktail hour.

The curse of the House Republican caucus (for them, as well as the rest of us) is that there are not enough establishmentarians to hold back the hordes of zealots and prevent them from shutting down not just the government, but political reason itself.  This, NOT President Obama, is the reason we have the sequester in the first place--and the reason the sequester threatens to throw our economy and our society in the dumpster.

With all of that as prologue, what's the strategy?

The only one possible in these circumstances.  It's to keep kicking the can down the road a few months.  Then a few months more of posturing.  Then a few months more of posturing.  Pretty soon, you get to the next election, and hope that the voters sort everything out in your favor.  It's a little like a basketball team with a late-game lead, dribbling and passing, hoping to run out the clock to victory.

There's just one problem with this strategy.  In the public's mind, it's Obama who has the lead.  And, if I were him, I'd push back and demand a budget framework for the remainder of his presidency.  Stop letting the idiots take the country hostage, and force them to swallow their idiocy.  If it finishes them off politically, who cares?  Certainly not me.  I'm sick to death of watching this wretched melodrama.

And I think everyone else is, too.

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