Joe Klein thinks Obama was right to rule out the constitutional option:
If he had cited the 14th Amendment and simply ordered Treasury to pay the bills, he would have been impeached by the radical Republicans. This would have guaranteed that the next 16 months would have been overwhelmed by an even worse version of the silliness visited upon our nation by the poisonous Limbaugh-Tea Party nihilists.
Via the WaPo.
A bi-racial same-sex marriage is duly recorded in South Carolina's paper, The State.
Just as an example of leadership from Mitt: doesn't his refusal to take a position before the deal and subsequent endorsement of the most extreme Republican position afterward tell you a lot about what he'd be like as a president?
As for the facilitator of war crimes at the WaPo, this sentence could do with a little reworking, along the lines a reader suggests:
"That the Tea Party accomplished all this in just six months by holding a gun to the head of the global economy — at a time when the GOP controls one-half of one-third of the federal government — is remarkable."
Not that remarkable when you concede the premise. What this conflict proves is that the GOP cares far more about reducing government than reducing the debt.
“The recent developments in Syria have deepened our already existing concerns. The footage from yesterday’s events has horrified us. The use of heavy weapons in Hama against civilians has given me a deep shock. We cannot remain silent and accept a bloody atmosphere at the start of Ramadan, which is absolutely contrary to the spirit of Ramadan, a period when people expect peace to be secured and reforms to be carried out. It’s impossible to remain silent in the face of events visible to everyone. I urge the Syrian administration to stop violence against people and to carry out reforms to build the country’s future on the base of peace and stability,” – Turkish president, Abdullah Gül, today. Turkey is Syria’s biggest trade partner.
Dave Weigel throws outraged liberals a bone.
Eli Lake heralds a new era of Republican discourse:
New insurgents began to emerge within the party, and new ideas moved to the center of the debate. The result is not simply that Republican candidates are, on the whole, less inclined to support democratization and nation-building this time around. It’s that the very terms of the GOP foreign policy discussion have changed—or rather imploded entirely, leaving in their wake a difficult-to-parse ideological brew of policy disagreements and competing instincts.
Ackerman seconds Eli's analysis but cautions against drawing too many conclusions about staff choices now. To my mind, the real evidence lies in the budget deal. For the first time since Reagan, the Pentagon is being treated by the GOP as a huge government program to be cut along with everything else. That won't be the headline today; but in retrospect, it might be the most significant shift of the moment.
A video submitted to Powerline's contest which is giving "$100,000 to the Power Line reader who best dramatizes the national debt":
Were I in Congress, I’d vote against it. All that said, I think this is it, so we might as well get used to it. Just keep track of who on the right votes against it. They’ll be the real heroes. If we get lucky, it goes down and we fight on. Just don’t hold your breath on that one.
As discussed in here the last few days, this deal is clearly inadequate to our fiscal challenges. But liberals are screaming about it. I’m surprised Reid didn’t get more. Clearly, the bottom line the White House cared about most was putting another debt-limit fight beyond the election, and even that — depending on economic conditions — could be in doubt if he only gets $1.2 trillion in the second tranche.
Tea Partyers should recognize just how much Obama and the Democrats caved: $2 trillion in spending cuts. No tax increases. A new precedent that debt-limit hikes must be accompanied by equal or greater cuts in spending. And the potential for a balanced budget in 10 years. That the Tea Party accomplished all this in just six months — at a time when the GOP controls one-half of one-third of the federal government — is remarkable.
Conservatives can take some satisfaction from the fact that the 2010 election has allowed us to begin to make a stand against profligate federal spending. But we have a long way to go, and that mostly means that there are millions more Americans who need to be educated about the magnitude of the federal debt and the destructive effects of wasteful government spending.
Whatever one’s ultimate judgment on the deal, it establishes a terrible precedent in treating defense as a pot of money to be slashed if various spending-control mechanisms don't work. It will thereby make it more difficult to have a serious discussion of the military spending that’s required for our national security needs.
The logic of the “trigger” in the showdown depends on Democrats not minding defense cuts and desiring tax hikes. They won’t want either and will therefore be pushed in the Republican direction in the negotiations.
Though there are many conservatives who are critical of the bill that House Speaker John Boehner passed, and worried about splits within the Tea Party, the fact is that the left feels it lost the deal as well as the debate.
Both sides can claim victory, and both sides can blame the other guy for taking so long to come to terms. But the real winner here is President Obama. He stands to get the only thing that really matters to him — the troublesome issue off the table until after the next election, since the debt-ceiling argument wouldn't be revisited until 2013.
Stand hard against disproportionate defense cuts or we’ll regret it soon enough. The British and French have already made a hash of Libya because of their own defense cuts. If America goes, there’ll be nobody left to stand against the coming tide. And believe me, the tide is coming.
As president, my plan would have produced a budget that was cut, capped and balanced – not one that opens the door to higher taxes and puts defense cuts on the table. President Obama’s leadership failure has pushed the economy to the brink at the eleventh hour and 59th minute. While I appreciate the extraordinarily difficult situation President Obama’s lack of leadership has placed Republican Members of Congress in, I personally cannot support this deal.
If raising taxes on these politically disfavored classes was really the Democrats' priority, they could have done it already — either before the 2010 elections or by driving a harder bargain in the last three budget battles. But instead, their priority is debating these targeted tax increases and pretending they will save Medicare from insolvency. Democrats' willingness to compromise doesn't reflect superior maturity to the more rigid Republicans. Quite the contrary: It reflects caring less about policy than about politics.
This gives us a leg up, and I am amazed you [Boehner] got one for one on cuts, no violation of conservative principles, and I am amazed you got the deal that you did.
Pete Wehner, gunning for the day's unintentional irony award:
Rather than take into account the economic (and empirical) failure of Obama’s Keynesian approach, those who take a dogmatic, faith-based approach to American politics engage in intellectual contortions in order to try to innoculate their ideology from damage.
Jonah Goldberg, with characteristic profundity:
You don’t eat Satan, and you don’t coat sandwiches with sugar.
My takes here and here and here. Obama's announcement from last night:
Josh Barro puts the deal in perspective:
The deal includes a lot of spending cuts, but it’s important to understand how backloaded these cuts are. The headline figure is $2.5 trillion in cuts over ten years, but less than 1 percent of those cuts will come in FY 2012. The near-term fiscal changes are so small that they will matter very little for the economy. The long term changes will be subject to revision by future Congresses and will hopefully come when the economy is healthier—and the parts that do go into effect will probably not be that different from whatever fiscal adjustment we were going to have to enact sooner or later.
Any deal that avoids government shutdown or a default is to be welcomed. and a certain amount of can-kicking is also worthwhile; the latest GDP figures (particularly the downward revision to the first quarter) were so weak that the US could do without imminent fiscal contraction. But it is interesting to see that, like Europe, the US is keen to push the pain out to 2013. That could be the year when European nations default and the US slams on the brakes. What if the economy isn't strong enough to take its medicine?
Peter Beinart welcomes the defense spending cuts trigger:
The good news is that the Tea Party, more than Barack Obama, has now ended the neoconservative dream of an ever-expanding American empire. The bad news is that it has also ended whatever hopes liberals once entertained that roughly 100 years after Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, roughly 75 years after the New Deal and roughly 50 years after the Great Society, we were living in another great age of progressive reform.
Frum thinks defense hawks got rolled:
[T]he pro-defense conservatives who cheered and cheered as Tea Party Republicans were awarded veto power over GOP decision-making have completely outfoxed themselves. They are now parties to a deal that targets the defense budget as the main hostage in future budget negotiations.
On the one hand, I am among those who think you can really cut a lot of money from the Dept. of Defense budget over the next 10 years by trimming personnel costs — paring down the force structure of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps after Afghanistan, raising TriCare premiums and adjusting retirement and pension programs. On the other hand, I can't help but shake this sinking feeling that the United States became Europe a little bit yesterday, and not in the good our-espresso-is-now-better way.
Nate Silver wonders how far GOP lawmakers will go to avoid the the trigger:
[A]s a philosophical matter, tax increases are probably even more anathema to Republican voters than defense cuts. But as a practical matter the reverse may be true.
Kevin Drum is frank:
It's a shit sandwich no matter how you look at it. And it's a shit sandwich in at least two very specific ways: (1) It means we'll continue to live in a fantasyland that says we don't need any tax increases even though our population is aging and we're plainly going to need higher revenues to support this demographic reality. (2) We'll continue to live in a fantasyland that says our problems are primarily caused by discretionary spending. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of reality, which means we're going to screw the poor and do nothing serious about the long-term deficit. Nice work, adults.
[T]hese cuts will hurt our ability to pursue what I view as most positive aspects of the President’s economic agenda—investment in infrastructure, clean energy, research, education. They will pinch programs that are already budget constrained…programs that help low income people with child care, housing, and community services.
It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues to be part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced — either by his own strategic "blunders" or the "weakness" of his office — into accepting them. The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill …
Jonathan Chait is focused on the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2012:
The debt ceiling ransom may be a shrewd strategic retreat, or it may be the largest in a series of historic capitulations. We won’t know until the fight over the Bush tax cuts has been settled.
In the short run, the "bargain" just agreed to offers worse than no hope for addressing the really urgent problem of the moment, harmfully high unemployment. And in the long run, this has been as sobering a case study of a great nation misusing its resources, distracting itself from real problems, and discrediting its political system in the world's eyes as… as I can remember.
Unlike some of my friends, I don't believe Obama adopted this approach primarily because he thought it would improve his prospects for re-election. As I have written previously, I give the president a lot more credit than that, morally and intellectually. My guess is that he pursued this strategy because he didn't want to poison the atmosphere for negotiations and believed (genuinely, accurately) that moderate entitlement cuts should be part of a balanced deficit reduction agreement. But the atmosphere was poisoned from the start and Republicans were never going to support a balanced agreement. He was trying to do the right thing when it was not possible to do the right thing. It may not have made for bad politics, but it certainly made for bad policy.
If the bill passes, he can now claim the mantle of fiscal conservatism – a surefire defense to ubiquitous Republican accusations of socialism and big government. If the debt ceiling were breached and the economy tanked, he likely would’ve borne the greatest political price. But by swooping in and making the deal at the last minute, Obama can say he saved the day.
Ezra Klein looks ahead:
If the Joint Committee fails, the trigger begins cutting spending. If negotiations over taxes fail, the Bush tax cuts expire and revenues rise by $3.6 trillion. Neither scenario is anyone’s first choice on policy grounds. But you can get to both scenarios without Republicans explicitly conceding to higher taxes or Democrats explicitly conceding to entitlement cuts in the absence of higher taxes. Politically, that’s the lowest-common denominator, and that might mean it’s also the only deal the two parties can actually make. But that’s because it’s the only deal that doesn’t require, well, making a deal.
It’s worth asking. The inarguable fact is that he is presiding over a debt of massive proportions in a weak economy – and the debt is scheduled to get far, far worse over the next decade. Most Americans favored a blend of tax hikes and spending cuts to move us toward fiscal sanity. But the GOP successfully stuck to its refusal to allow any more revenues, and Obama was ambivalent enough about new taxes in the middle of this low-growth recovery to allow them to get their way. In a negotiation where one party is insanely committed and the other is marginally ambivalent, we all know who wins.
He really had only one other option, as PM Carpenter notes: insist on a clean debt ceiling rise and promise to use the 14th Amendment to enforce it against GOP intransigence. Apart from the constitutional question, this would easily have made him look like the big spender in a debt-ridden country and made him more vulnerable next year. More to the point and to Obama’s character and temperament, I just don’t think he could do that and remain a responsible president. In a battle for the votes of ideological purists on the right and the left, Obama would have lost to the GOP, and lost his own critical brand as the mediator, the non-ideologue.
The fundamental constraint is that the debt is so high. He’s not really responsible for the vast majority of that, but that’s the way the gluten-free cookie doesn’t crumble. Some may believe the debt should go much higher to help the recovery along. But I see no political way to pull that off. Again: the debt is so high.
This is a not entirely apposite analogy, but I remember once trying to negotiate cutting an article to size at TNR. The author, a pompous law prof, produced a long, arcane piece that could do with lopping off about a third. I did so, with minimal damage to the core argument. But the author resisted. He told me he had just recovered from heart surgery and the stress of having his article cut might precipitate a heart attack. I’m not making this up. What did I do? I reinstated the whole article and ran it. I was not willing to be responsible for the death of another human being over 300 words.
I gave in. Sometimes, when dealing with fanatics, hostage takers or ornery authors, it’s what you’ve got to do. And to be fair to the GOP, they ran on a platform like this and won back the House. They have a legitimate place at the table even if they used it for blackmail. Obama surrendered because he really had no adult, responsible choice but to fiddle with the terms of surrender. The president is not a dictator. Nor should he be.
The Dish 