We actually understand a lot about the Sequester, the Shutdown and, most recently, the threat of default on the federal debt (“the Debt Ceiling”). These are sad – tragic by their effects – failures by our leaders to govern responsibly at the federal level.
The Sequester came about because of a political miscalculation by President Obama. It provides for “across-the-board” (arbitrary) cuts of the same percentage from every government program, without regard to importance or priority. The proposal was made to buy time; it was supposed to be so transparently wrong as to guarantee that congress would work out compromise alternative spending decisions in most categories across the entire federal budget. But guess what: the raw Sequester stuck. It would take a majority of Republicans in the house to pass any change in the Sequester law. The conservative wing (read “Tea Party”) controlled the agenda and there was no movement forthcoming to restore sequester cuts. For a catalogue of people damaged by the mindless cuts – including 57,000 Head Start students, thousands of food stamp recipients, hundreds of thousands of federal workers, scientific researchers and participants in countless scaled back programs – go here.
The Shutdown has been accurately characterized as “hostage taking”. The strategy was crafted and enabled by a handful of Tea Party Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives. The idea is to bypass the Constitutional model of developing legislation through negotiations in each house of the legislature and to replace it with a non-negotiable demand backed up by a threat to “shut down” the government. The precise mechanism for shutdown is by withholding passage of a Continuing Resolution needed to fund the government past the expiration date of authorized spending. The demand was to de-fund (kill) Obamacare. Other intended participants in the new negotiation model responded by not participating and the crisis unfolded. Like the Sequester, seemingly-acceptable collateral damage includes thousands who have been “furloughed” (laid-off indefinitely) and clients of hundreds of federal programs which are not currently staffed.
Of course those are only considerations of what happens to ordinary people. If you want to talk about some real damage, playing chicken with the Debt Ceiling goes to the heart of what really counts: the full faith and credit of the United States (or the comfort and security of the holders of US Treasury bonds) and the stability of markets. To be sure, those caught in this net include effectively everyone - not just bondholders or financial movers and shakers. Included are people with retirement accounts or home equity; or people who will lose their job as the recession re-ignites; or incalculable losses to everybody from inflation as the dollar exchange rates turn against us.
These are all predicted and well-understood effects of actions that have been taken deliberately. To cut to the chase, all of these turns of the screw have been engineered by Tea Party Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives. Speaking of hostage taking, House Speaker John Boehner has been totally Shanghaied by these members of his own party. He is trying an impossible balancing act of placating the radical end of his party while still acting as a credible agent and leader of that party. He can’t do both.
Who are these guys (with a gender-non-specific nod to Michelle Bachman) and why do they do what they do? The much-referenced Tea Party Republicans are actually Libertarians - whether self-identified or not. The central belief of Libertarianism is about the role of government - minimal and practically invisible. I’ve also read that Libertarians are not ready to compromise on principle for strategic reasons, and that they are indifferent to, if not outright hostile to, party politics. But their principles overlap enough with conservative Republican values that so-called Tea Party Republicans have made a home of convenience in the Republican party. There are forty or more Tea Party Republicans in the House and about six in the Senate. Of crucial importance is the fact that the Republicans in the House only have a majority if they have the support of their Tea Party members.
It would be a comfortable assumption to say that Tea Party Republicans are tools of monied interests - the Koch brothers or Rupert Murdoch come to mind. That’s probably not fair or accurate. They are just willing recipients of piles of cash for something that they’d do anyway. I’ve referenced the best illustration of Libertarian philosophy before in another context. Grover Norquist spoke of shrinking the government down to the size where “you could drown it in the bathtub” (see the cover of Mother Jones).
None of this gets the Republicans off the hook. It has been their choice to ally themselves with true wreckers.
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