The Overlooked Element in the Government Shutdown

Anyone who pays even a little attention to the news knows that there has been a substantial if incomplete shutdown of the federal government, precipitated by a temper tantrum thrown by John Boehner, who dances subserviently at the behest of everyone’s favorite foreign-born chauvinist, Ted Cruz. The allegedly left-leaning press has contorted itself into knots too complicated for the Boy Scout Handbook in order to appear impartial, suggesting that “there’s plenty of blame to go around,” and similar twaddle. Fact is, this debacle is 100% the result of a Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ falling well short of the maturity level of a particularly bratty 2nd-grader. Whereas there is little doubt that the Obama administration is playing this situation for political points rather than engaging in anything resembling statesmanship, the GOP—intentionally or otherwise—bear all of the responsibility for the shutdown.

The original excuse for the Republicans’ juvenile display—the alleged horrors of “Obamacare”—was transparently mendacious from the start. Curmie was only reluctantly and tentatively brought around to the point of view that the Affordable Care Act was a net positive, and may change his mind in the future. But the claim, as Fox News asserted and GOP politicos obediently echoed, that the ACA had “failed” before it even took effect would have to take a step up in integrity to qualify as sophistic. More to the point, you never get everything you want in politics: that’s the way of the world. Inconveniencing millions of people and actually endangering lives in order to engage in a histrionic hissy fit to overturn a bill that was passed by the Congress, signed by the President, and upheld by the Supreme Court isn’t statesmanlike; it isn’t adult behavior; it isn’t even ethical.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about. I choose instead to discuss something the yammering classes have scrupulously avoided… how we ended up with a divided government. After all, it would be impossible to imagine a Speaker Pelosi furloughing workers and denying access to needed services in a fit of pique against the Obama administration. I doubt, in fact, that had the 2012 election turned out radically differently, she’d have done so to protest the overreach of a Romney administration… she might have, of course, but we’ll never know.

We’ll never know because President Obama cruised to re-election while the GOP maintained their majority in the House, even though they lost seats both there and in the Senate. Given the fact that the Dems actually followed Curmie’s advice (not that they actually paid any attention to Curmie, per se, but you know...) and ran as Democrats this time, embracing rather than running away from the signature achievement of Obama’s first term, it would be disingenuous to suggest that the electorate rejected the ACA. Rather, there is one word that accounts for the Republican majority in the House: gerrymandering.

The Democrats won the popular vote for the House of Representatives in 2012 by over 1.6 million votes, or 1.4 points (not a landslide by any means, but not close, either) and yet Speaker Boehner claimed affirmation because the GOP kept a 33-seat majority (over 7.5 percentage points). In other words, the disparity between the popular vote and actual representation differs by about 9 percentage points. That’s a lot.

There are plenty of analysts who attribute much if not all of the disparity to gerrymandering, and while there are those who disagree, the fact that in, say, Pennsylvania, the Democrats took a clear majority of the votes but got fewer than a third of the Representatives… that certainly suggests an inequitable distribution of voting suasion. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that the district lines were drawn intentionally to shift the balance of power from one party to the other, and there were in fact some states in which Democrats received disproportionate representation—Republicans took the popular vote in Arizona by 8.5 points but the Dems got 5 seats to the GOP’s 4, for example. So the above commentary isn’t intended to criticize only the Republicans. But, as Sam Wang wrote in the New York Times in February of this year, “Both sides may do it, but one side does it more often.”

Moreover, there’s this: Texas Attorney General and (God help us) likely successor to Rick Perry as Executive Idiot Governor Greg Abbott actually brags about his gerrymandering chicanery, not in some backroom schmooze with campaign contributors like Mitt Romney’s unfortunate “47%” gaffe, but in public court documents (!). In a defense of Texas’s practice vis-à-vis the Voting Rights Act, Abbott argues as follows:

DOJ’s accusations of racial discrimination are baseless. In 2011, both houses of the Texas Legislature were controlled by large Republican majorities, and their redistricting decisions were designed to increase the Republican Party’s electoral prospects at the expense of the Democrats.

Seriously, he said that. You see, the attempt wasn’t to disenfranchise minority voters; it was to disenfranchise Democrats, and it’s just a concidence that a lot of Dems are minorities and vice versa. Paraphrasing only slightly: “Of course we cheated, but we’re not racists.” (A good many Texas Republicans actually are, of course, but that’s another matter.)

Most Republican legislators and other politicos aren’t as brazen as Abbott in privileging their own power over the actual will of voters, but you can bet that a lot of them had similar motivations. So when you contemplate the puerile antics of the Boehners and Cruzes of the world, remember this: there may be a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, but there isn’t in the population that elected them.

The Jobs Speech and the Bi-Partisan Failure of Leadership

The prelude to President Obama’s forthcoming address to a joint session of Congress has probably already generated more buzz than the speech itself will. Let’s face it, Obama’s speeches are more heavily weighted to the ornamental than the pragmatic, and the GOP will bellow in full-throated opposition regardless of what he says, even if he adopts the policy they themselves wanted twenty minutes ago.

The people who got Mr. Obama elected—progressives and labor—will be temporarily buoyed by the soaring rhetoric only to be profoundly disappointed a few days later when he trades away anything of substance in what are euphemistically referred to as “negotiations”: John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or whatever other corporate flunky happens to be in the room will demand something so outrageous that no rational being could even ask for it with a straight face, and Obama will give them about 98% of it. (To pick a number at somewhat less than random.) The corporate media will give equal credit for compromise to both sides, even though all the Republicans gave up was their initial insistence that Mr. Obama drop to one knee and sing “Mammy” at Eric Cantor’s nephew’s Bar Mitzvah.

So there’s a very real sense in which the speech itself will carry only a ceremonial function, if that. Still, a presidential address to a joint session of Congress to talk about what everyone says they believe is the number one issue facing the country ought to be a pretty big deal. Of course, it’s difficult to believe that either side, especially the GOP, really believes its own rhetoric. This Congress has been in place for several months now, and we’ve had legislation to restrict abortions, eviscerate the EPA, eliminate NPR, PBS and the CPB, etc. The party that claimed in the most recent election and its aftermath that its priorities were “jobs, jobs, jobs” has yet to propose a jobs bill. Funny thing, that.

The Democrats haven’t been much better, but at least they recognize that the GOP’s new-found interest in balanced budgets after years of profligacy cannot manifest itself solely through budget cuts without having a lot of people lose their jobs. Curiously enough, the Dems seems to think that cops and teachers and secretaries for government agencies are actually contributing members of society and of the workforce.

So… Obama decides he wants to talk about jobs, and although he apparently intends to circumvent Congress with a sizeable chunk of his plan, he wants to give a speech to them rather than to the rest of us. OK, whatever. But, of course, oh-so-coincidentally, he wanted to do this little exercise in pontification on Wednesday night. Let’s see… is there something else happening that evening? Oh, yeah, the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library, the GOP’s opportunity to worship yet again at the shrine of the man they all naïvely, ignorantly, and/or disingenuously purport to revere. I knew there was something.

In one of the most egregious fits of childishness of an administration that, not without reason, fancies itself the grown-ups in the room, Obama and his minions forged ahead. Apparently, John Boehner initially seemed amenable, but then a staffer probably reminded him that professionalism and civility were specifically outlawed by the creed of the new GOP. So Boehner, good soldier that he is, obeyed the marching orders of whatever corporate master called his private number first and became righteously indignant. Except… not really (see below).

The kerfuffle serves as an effective Rorschach test for all observers. The right-wing media were, needless to say, outraged at the maneuver: they call it “petty, hyper-partisan political gamesmanship,” “a silly request,” and “an unbelievable example of chutzpah.” They are in unanimous agreement that White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was lying in his protestations that the proposed scheduling of the speech was not designed specifically to trump the GOP debate. And they’re right.

The left-leaning press, meanwhile, are outraged at the “unprecedented” rejection of President Obama’s proposed time. They noted that the debate organizers agreed to delay the debate by an hour to accommodate the Presidential address. They point out that this is the second of twenty (count ‘em, twenty) Republican debates, that no one is really paying any attention yet: front-runners four years ago at this time, after all, were Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. They cite the fact that Speaker Boehner didn’t watch the first debate, that it’s carried by only one television channel (MSNBC… let’s face it, there’s a healthy subset of Republicans who think they’d be possessed by demon spirits if their sets stayed tuned to that channel for an hour), that if, as both parties claim, jobs are the central issue facing lawmakers and the President alike, then having a Presidential speech on the subject immediately on Congress’s return from hiatus seems like the reasonable thing to do. They’re right, too.

It is certainly true, as James Taranto points out, that it’s really “supporters of both parties,” rather than Messrs. Obama and Boehner themselves, “that are squabbling.” I’m reminded of the closing scenes in one of the most under-appreciated plays of the 20th century. In La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu (literally The Trojan War Won’t Happen, but translated—for reasons beyond my feeble ken—most often as Tiger at the Gates), Jean Giraudoux shows the heroes Achilles and Hector finalizing negotiations of a peaceful settlement even as their belligerent underlings are in fact starting a conflict that, once initiated, cannot but engulf both the Greek and Trojan civilizations. And, of course, we know that the war lasted a decade and resulted in the deaths of thousands, not least Achilles and Hector themselves. That Giraudoux was writing as much about current events (the play was written in 1935, when the prospect of a World War was still a spectre rather than a reality) is undeniable. But his portrayal of the systematic undermining of leadership by a cadre of bomb-throwers resonates all too well today.

In fact, it would offer some consolation to believe that Mr. Obama and Mr. Boehner aren’t quite the irresponsible ignoramuses they appear to be in this exchange. After all, both official letters were professional and cordial. Obama’s calls for the need to “put aside politics and start making decisions based on what is best for our country and not what is best for each of our parties.” He says he intends to “lay out a series of bipartisan proposals… to rebuild the American economy by strengthening small businesses, helping Americans get back to work, and putting more money in the paychecks of the Middle Class and working Americans, while still reducing our deficit and getting our fiscal house in order.” He concludes by urging the Speaker (and the Senate Majority Leader) to “put country before party.”

Of course, he did so by demonstrating the precise opposite: the scheduling was perhaps the most stupidly partisan political gambit of his administration. We are presumably to believe that an administration already in re-election mode really thought there would be no public relations repercussions to such a ham-handed decision. (To be fair to Mr. Carney, the tape makes clear he never tried to pretend that the administration didn't know about the conflict, even though some right-wing commentators have accused him of doing so.) Our choices are that a). Obama’s people believed they really had an agreement, when any sentient adult would have waited to make a public announcement until the formal invitation was in hand, or b). they somehow thought there would be no political downside to acting like a playground bully. Not happy choices, these.

Mr. Boehner fares little better, despite the fact that whereas the overwhelming majority of left-leaning commentators are on record criticizing Mr. Obama, there are those on the right who think Boehner acted nobly. At first glance, he did. After all, his letter to the President, though slightly partisan (as was Obama’s), contains phrases like “thank you,” “I agree,” and “look forward to hearing your ideas.” It never mentions the debate at all. The stated reason for asking the President to compete with the opening game of the NFL season instead of with a debate that I can’t imagine more than 10% of the population would watch at gunpoint was logistical: the need to adopt a Concurrent Resolution on short notice and security issues. The Speaker suggests the following night, when there would be “no parliamentary or logistical impediments that might detract from your remarks.” I mean, really, how accommodating could he be?

Except, of course, for the fact that everyone—left, right and center—knew damned well he was lying about the reason for the delay. I won’t claim to have read every article, watched every news clip, or scoured every blog on the topic, but I’ve certainly read a lot. I’ve yet to find anyone of any political stripe who believes that either a). Boehner’s letter was prompted by its stated rationale or b). it wasn’t intended to disrespect the President (there’s dispute over whether Obama deserved to be thus disrespected, but that’s another matter).

Luckily for Mr. Obama, the Speaker of the House is just as silly and politically tone-deaf as the President of the United States. (How jolly for the rest of us!) Even a twit like Charles Krauthammer gets this one right:

If he [Boehner] had just accepted this, the President would look small for stepping on the debate. Secondly, I think the Republicans could easily have moved the debate to 9:00 o’clock, and then had eight people on the stage gang up on Obama with essentially the biggest response to a Presidential speech ever done, rather than one person in a room with a camera… which never stands up to the majesty and the grandeur of a Presidential speech in Congress.

Krauthammer is thinking in purely political terms, but there are other reasons to believe that Boehner’s posturing is problematic.

For one thing, don’t you think it’s a little outré for the de facto leader of a major political party (at least until there’s a Presidential nominee) to be so… dare I say it… unpatriotic as to dis the POTUS? When the President of the United States asks for a moment of your time, you freaking give it. Period. Secondly, does the prevarication need to be quite so transparent? Finally, to the extent that Mr. Boehner is supposed to be the leader of the Republican majority in the House, isn’t it fair that he accept at least some of the responsibility for the even more irresponsible and juvenile antics of Joe Walsh (yes, the one who owes $100K+ in back child support), Todd Rokita and (of course) the reliably loathesome Eric Cantor and Jim DeMint?

But ultimately, the buck stops at the desk of the POTUS. A.B. Stoddard sums it up pretty well:

And they [the President and his team] absolutely knew, even if John Boehner said, “You’re welcome here on Wednesday, September 7, at 8:00 pm,” they knew that that long-scheduled debate was taking place. And this was the kind of thing that was going to come up regardless. It’s just too cute. And it’s not the type of thing that they should have done if they wanted the whole attention and the focus of independent voters, who can’t stand these kind of reindeer games, anyway, but might be shopping the Republican ticket eventually, or considering staying with President Obama, and wanting to also hear his jobs message, perhaps on another evening. It was just a bad call to begin with, no matter how silly the Republicans were in their response.

So it’s time to generate a final grade for both the principal players in this brouhaha, based on ethics, maturity, and political savvy:

Obama: F

Boehner: were I in a good mood, I could swing a D-. Do I seem to you like I’m in a good mood?

It's Finger-Pointing Season. Again.

The decision by Standard and Poor’s to downgrade the US government’s credit rating from AAA to AA+ has, unsurprisingly, led to a veritable feeding frenzy of finger-pointing, blame-assigning, and outright silliness.

This is serious business—the government’s credit-worthiness wasn’t thus questioned even during the Great Depression—but the prognostications of doom and gloom are no doubt exaggerated. For example, Edmund L. Andrews of the National Journal, hardly a bastion of liberalism, argues that:

Credit ratings, though hugely important, are only one of many factors affecting the cost of borrowing. The more important factors are broad forces of supply and demand for Treasuries, and the outlook for inflation and growth. That’s why Japan has been downgraded three different times in the past decade (it’s currently AA-) yet its long-term rates are lower than those on U.S. Treasuries.

And let’s face it, it’s pragmatic concerns like the cost of borrowing, not the symbolism of an official rating, that really matters. Moreover, as Andrews also notes

It’s also true that S&P is hardly some kind of Delphic Oracle. It and the other rating agencies were almost criminally negligent about the risks of subprime mortgages during the housing bubble. And it’s not as if S&P told investors anything about U.S. fiscal problems on Friday that they didn’t already know.

In announcing their move, S&P proclaimed “Standard & Poor's takes no position on the mix of spending and revenue measures that Congress and the Administration might conclude is appropriate for putting the U.S.'s finances on a sustainable footing.” Moreover, the rationale also criticizes the recent debt-ceiling agreement for “[envisioning] only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements, the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

That said, the analysis by Judd Legum at ThinkProgress seems fairly accurate: “In explaining their decision Standard & Poor’s cites both the decision by Republicans in Congress to turn the debt ceiling into a political football and the [Republicans’] intransigence on tax increases.” He cites a series of quotations from S&P’s explanatory document to bolster his point:

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

[...]It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options.

[...]The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them.

[...]Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Most notably, Legum points to the “revised upside scenario,” which

incorporates $950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration is advocating. In this scenario, we project that the net general government debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 77% in 2015 and to 78% by 2021 [vs. 79% in 2015 and 85% in 2021, as predicted if the Bush tax cuts are not allowed to expire].

Andrews concurs:

The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock. Part of S&P’s gloom, moreover, stemmed explicitly from what a new assessment of the GOP’s ability to block any and all tax increases.

In other words, the GOP’s willingness to play political games with something as serious as extending the debt ceiling—up to and including allowing the Donald Trumps, Pat Toomeys, and Michele Bachmanns to say remarkably stupid things without repudiation—is the real cause of the downgrade. Congressional Republicans’ puerile and petulant insistence on no new sources of revenue introduced a new element into the mix: the idea that government might be unable to meet its obligations because it chooses not to. No one serious believes the budget can be stabilized, much less balanced, without revenue enhancement: call it a tax increase, call it eliminating loopholes, call it asparagus for all I care, but more money needs to be brought into government coffers, and it needs to come mostly (not exclusively) from the people who have benefited most from tax breaks, subsidies, and loopholes: the rich.

When even S&P recognizes that, when 4000 millionaires pay no federal income tax at all, when the Balanced Budget Amendment that Rand Paul and his libertarian goon-squad wanted as a pre-condition to raising the debt ceiling is described by even Bill Kristol as “a pointless and embarrassing gimmick,” when Congress sets new records for disapproval, the GOP has a problem. The rank and file understands it. It’s the politicians themselves who can’t bring themselves to acknowledge reality.

They babble about how “the American people demand…” whatever they choose to ascribe to John Q. Public. Witness John Boehner’s proclamation that “Republicans have listened to the voices of the American people and worked to bring the spending binge to a halt.” All of which would be convincing indeed if that is in fact what the American public wanted (even if they were wrong). Except, of course, for that whole “not being true” thing that seems to haunt the GOP leadership.

Nate Silver’s analysis a couple of weeks ago is trenchant: even GOP voters favored a roughly 3:1 ratio of spending cuts to revenue enhancement as their ideal debt ceiling deal. Independents were at about 2:1, Democrats essentially 1:1. There was, as Silver points out, “a larger ideological gap between House Republicans and Republican voters than there is between Republican voters and Democratic ones” [emphasis his]. President Obama offered a mix of 83% cuts and 17% revenue—a position well to the right not only of the American people, but of Republican voters, and the GOP rejected it out of hand. Sooner or later, the public is going to recognize the adolescent posturing for what it is, especially since the Tea Party—whose political fortunes have been in decline since the population began to figure out just how crazy they really are—is now at just 18% in the latest New York Times poll, the lowest figure since the question started being asked.

Indeed, when we put that NYT poll (taken August 2-3) alongside the one from CNN (taken August 1), we get some pretty interesting numbers. In the chart below, I list the approval vs. disapproval ratings for a variety of political figures and groups. A + indicates an overall positive rating, a – means an overall negative rating. So, for example, a approval of 50% and a disapproval rating of 40% would result in a +10.

President Obama: +1 (NYT), -7 (CNN); specifically on debt ceiling negotiations: -1 (NYT), -7 (CNN)
Congress: -68 (NYT), -70 (CNN)
John Boehner: -27 (NYT)
Specifically on the debt ceiling deal: Congressional Republicans/ Republican leaders: -51 (NYT), -38 (CNN).
Specifically on the debt ceiling deal: Congressional Democrats/ Democratic leaders: -38 (NYT), -28 (CNN).
Debt deal should have included revenues: +6 (NYT), +20 (CNN).

Also, how about these figures from the New York Times poll: “Who do you think is mostly to blame for the federal budget deficit?” The Bush administration outpolled the Obama administration, Congress, and “someone else” combined, by 44-40%. Obama was blamed by only 15%, with “all of the above” and “combination” (neither of which was one of the prompted responses) chosen by 12%. A huge majority regarded the negotiations over the debt ceiling as an attempt to gain political advantage (82%) rather than doing what was best for the country (14%). Republicans in Congress were blamed for the difficulties in reaching an agreement by 47%, Obama and the Democrats by 29%, both (again, a volunteered response) by 20%.

The negotiations made 66% of those surveyed more pessimistic about Congress’s ability to “deal with future issues,” vs. only 12% more optimistic. Allowing the Bush tax breaks for the $250K+ crowd to expire: favored by 29 points. Impression of the Tea Party: negative by 20 points, with a huge (39 points) collection of variations on the theme of undecided. [Really?] The Tea Party has too much influence? 43%. Too little? 17%.

So… yeah… which brings us to the Republican response to all this, which is predictable in the extreme. Ultimately, I needn’t spell out all the variations on the same theme, which is basically that although Republican intransigence caused the problem, it’s all Obama’s fault, anyway. TARP was Obama’s fault. The Iraq War was Obama’s fault. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was Obama’s fault. The sacking of Constantinople was Obama’s fault. John the Baptist’s halitosis was Obama’s fault.

I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t provide at least one specific example of a GOP Presidential candidate’s take—the MSNBC article on the subject (linked above for the Boehner quotation) has this: “Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty, former Minnesota governor, said the downgrade is ‘a reflection of the failed leadership of President Obama. He really is inept when it comes to the economy. He's had over three years of being president. Barack Obama has had his chance and it's not working.’” Given the fact that President Obama has been in office about 31 months, which is not, in fact, “over three years” in my universe, perhaps we ought to leave the accusations of ineptness to those who can handle 3rd-grade arithmetic, eh, Tim?

John Boehner Gets One Right

Pay attention, because this doesn’t happen very often. John Boehner got one right.

Earlier this week, the Obama administration issued a 38-page report to Congress arguing that the ongoing NATO operation in Libya did not require Congressional approval under the War Powers Act because “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.” True, the operation has cost $716 million already, but that’s not really at issue—except, of course, that the money in question has to be authorized by Congress whether the mission does or not. At issue, apart from political posturing and no little hypocrisy from both sides, is the definition of “hostilities” as described in the War Powers legislation, a semantic delineation which has never been made by either Congress or the courts.

It is perhaps ironic how quickly roles have been reversed here: among the chief critics of the Obama administration is the former head of the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which may have been the smarmiest collection of sycophants ever assembled in a single federal office. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is distorting language fully as much as the Bush minions did in defending water-boarding.

As Charlie Savage and Mark Landner write in the New York Times,

The escalating confrontation with Congress reflects the radically altered political landscape in Washington: a Democratic president asserting sweeping executive powers to deploy American forces overseas, while Republicans call for stricter oversight and voice fears about executive-branch power getting the United States bogged down in a foreign war.

I’m going to leave aside the merits of the Libyan exercise itself: it is a complex issue, with legitimate arguments about moral imperatives on one side and equally persuasive arguments about lack of compelling national interest on the other. Rather, I want to concentrate on the question of whether the ongoing operations in Libya require Congressional approval. Yes, they do.

The administration’s case, one which ignored the objections of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and of Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is founded on three independent premises, none of which stand up to much scrutiny. The first is that an offensive mission involving drone attacks, sustained bombing, and occasional casualties doesn’t really constitute “hostilities.” The second is that, despite the fact that participation in a NATO-run, UN-sanctioned, mission to protect civilians has morphed into an aggressive attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the military and geo-political missions have not merged. The third is the apparent assertion that since the mission has taken longer than expected (and that’s never happened before, right?), we should really only be looking at how long the campaign was supposed to last. Add to that the extreme rarity of any White House over-riding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Obama administration has a mess on its hands… or perhaps on its shoes, because they’ve really stepped in something.

There’s even a lawsuit by ten members of Congress, led by leftie Dennis Kucinich, which seeks:

injunctive and declaratory relief to protect the plaintiffs and the country from the (1) policy that a president may unilaterally go to war in Libya and other countries without a declaration of war from Congress, as required by Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution; (2) the policy that a president may commit the United States to a war under the authority of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in violation of the express conditions of the North Atlantic Treaty ratified by Congress; (3) the policy that a president may commit the United States to a war under the authority of the United Nations without authorization from Congress; (4) from the use of previously appropriated funds by Congress for an unconstitutional and unauthorized war in Libya or other countries; and (5) from the violation of the War Powers Resolution as a result of the Obama Administration’s established policy that the President does not require congressional authorization for the use of military force in wars like the one in Libya.

Most observers believe the lawsuit will go nowhere, and that it represents more of an opportunity to get the complainants’ names in the paper than anything else, but it’s still an intriguing collection of Congresscritters, including Kucinich and John Conyers from the hard left, Walter Jones (remember “freedom fries”?) and Dan Burton from the equally hard right, and Ron Paul (who fancies himself a strict Constitutionalist and sometimes actually is).

But of course, it’s Speaker Boehner whose opposition matters most. It is no doubt true that Mr. Boehner would not be so critical of a Commander-in-Chief of his own party. It is also true that, this time, he’s right: sneeringly describing through a spokesperson Obama’s case as “creative,” then arguing (in his own words) “It just doesn’t pass the straight-face test, in my view, that we’re not in the midst of hostilities,” and subsequently asserting “The White House’s suggestion that there are no ‘hostilities’ taking place in Libya defies rational thought.”

What boggles the mind here is not the fact that Boehner would be critical of Obama, or that there would be debate about whether the administration’s strategy with respect to Libya is the correct one. Rather, one must wonder at the political ineptness of the President and his team—if you can’t convince this Congress that continuing the Bush administration’s policy of “exporting democracy” is a good idea, if you can’t make a case for fulfilling obligations authorized by the UN and NATO, if you can’t justify the mission in general terms, then scale back the offensive maneuvers, at the very least. More importantly, this silly rhetoric in defense of non-existent executive authority has lent legitimacy to the GOP's hitherto largely fallacious talking points about lack of consultation. And for what? The opportunity to spend a few more hundreds of billions of dollars to drop bombs on Libyan civilians? That really does sound a little too much like the Bush administration.

It takes more than a little ineptness to make John Boehner look good by comparison. The Obama administration has succeeded in doing just that.

Nibbling around the Edges

There’s an intriguing graphic on the New York Times website. It shows, in scale, President Obama’s budget proposal. The bigger the rectangle, the bigger the budget. The chart also gives an indication, by means of color, of whether Mr. Obama is asking for more or less money than last year's budget for each area: green means an increase, red a decrease.

What’s particularly interesting, however, isn’t the graph that first appears on the site. Rather, it’s what happens when you click on the tab that reads “hide mandatory spending.” What happens then is that “spending that is controlled by existing laws and not subject to the annual budget process” is eliminated from consideration. So, for example, the increase in Social Security spending is overwhelmingly mandated: there’s an increase of about $14.5 billion, of which about a half a billion or so, slated to be used for administrative expenses (off-budget!) is discretionary. In other words, about 97% of the increase is prescribed by law. Of the $17 billion increase in Medicare, less than $1 billion is subject to the budget process. And the $63 billion in new interest load just has to be paid.

But even within the realm of what could conceivably be cut, there aren’t a lot of significant declines. There are a handful of programs that are projected to lose 10% or more of their funding: but all of these line items put together generate a total savings of barely over $30 billion, less than half of the increase in interest payments, or roughly equal to the discretionary increases in various areas of military spending (there are also some cuts in specific areas of the military budget, but, significantly, not in personnel, procurement, or O&M).

The most striking thing about the chart that eliminates mandatory spending isn’t that it’s significantly more green than red (although it is), i.e., it represents more areas of increase than of decrease; what’s striking is how much white (mandatory expenditure) space there is. The total budget: $3.69 trillion, up from $3.6 trillion a year ago. That $90 billion increase matches almost exactly with the mandatory increases in interest and social security… and doesn’t count significant mandated hikes in Medicare (the federal contribution to states) and student financial assistance, for example.

The debt and deficit are both huge, and growing. Two numbers a lot of people talk about: the deficit reaching 10% of GDP and the debt reaching 100% of GDP. One number I don’t see a lot: we’re looking at a deficit equal to about 40% of the budget! That means that for every $5 we spend, we collect $3 in taxes. I’m not an economist, but that sure looks to me like an unsustainable pattern. We are looking, after all, at a deficit in the range of $1.5 trillion in this fiscal year.

This means the spiffy new $60 billion budget cut just passed in the House, even if it were to become law (which it won’t, although parts of it might), wouldn’t make a dent in the deficit. That’s not to say that attempts to rein in spending are inherently misguided: predictably, I’m unimpressed with the specific targets of House Republicans’ budget-cutting axe, but a little fiscal restraint wouldn’t be a bad idea. More to the point, the Tea Party proposal, which would have cut an additional $22 billion from the budget, was deemed “irresponsible” by the GOP power base. It would have cut “everything indiscriminately in a heavy-handed way,” quoth Rep. Hal Rogers of Kentucky. And we can’t have that: Republicans came into power declaring their opposition to federal spending, and they all said that “everything [was] on the table” (Speaker Boehner said so in precisely those words), but of course they didn’t mean their pet projects.

One thinks, for example, of Boehner’s opposition to cutting $450 million for a new engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter plane. (Here are links to good commentary by Dana Milbank and by Jack Marshall.) The Pentagon declares itself happy with the engine it has, making the cut seem a no-brainer. Half a billion dollars might not be a lot of money compared to the size of the deficit, but it ain’t chicken-feed, either. Yet John “We’re Broke” Boehner opposed the cut. Purely coincidentally, of course, the new engine would be made in Boehner’s little corner of the world. You see, “so be it” commentary about the loss of federal workers’ jobs notwithstanding, the good Speaker really does care about the American worker. Or at least the Southwestern Ohio worker, which is pretty much the same, right? It hardly qualifies as a revelation that Boehner is a hypocritical douchebag, but that knowledge doesn’t get us any closer to a sustainable budget.

What will do so, of course, is a recognition of reality. Protestations from both sides of the aisle notwithstanding, our old friends Waste, Fraud and Abuse are alive and well in most if not all federal agencies. My wife, who is a financial aid director at a community college, for example, sees more than her share of lazy and dishonest people whose “job” it is to attend classes long enough to collect a financial aid check, and then to simply flunk out and start over somewhere else. But Pell Grants and other forms of federal financial assistance per se aren’t the problem; indeed, they’re a central ingredient to a long-term solution. A well-educated workforce is crucial to any hope of a vibrant economy in years to come, and that means we as a nation need to provide a means for our best and brightest young people, not merely our most affluent ones, to attend not merely colleges, but good ones. Closing loopholes without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, however, takes actual work, actual commitment, and actual thought: neither party seems terribly interested in any of the above.

What this all boils down to, and pay attention because this doesn’t happen very often, is that Rand Paul was right in declaring that the federal government “can cut all of the non-military discretionary spending and not balance the budget.” You read that right. We could cut 100% of non-military discretionary spending and still not balance the budget. And that means next year’s debt payment will be bigger than this year’s, making it even harder to make any progress then. And so on ad infinitum.

I have a friend who is a costume designer. For a long time she had a saying posted outside her office: “Fast. Cheap. Good. Pick two.” The resurgent GOP has to make a similar choice, although I’m not sure they can really have more than one. Their options: maintain military spending, maintain current tax rates, and maintain the slightest hint of integrity in their rhetoric about caring about the deficit. It’s pretty clear, unfortunately, that such real resolve is lacking in the Republican leadership. Getting away with smoke and mirrors in the Reagan and Bush years, when the deficit (and spending) shot up but the rhetoric was always about fiscal responsibility, taught the current GOP all the wrong lessons.

Similarly, the Democrats, having slurped the Kool-Aid that makes them distrust the intelligence of the citizenry, seem far more interested in getting re-elected (by pretending to be Republicans), than in solving problems. There are solutions out there: raising taxes, probably significantly, especially on those can most afford it but ultimately on all of us; drawing down the war in Afghanistan and re-defining the mission of the American military throughout the world; recognizing that federal spending is often, even usually, a good thing, but current deficit levels cannot long be endured.

We’re well on our way to Oz. Here’s hoping we find a heart, a brain, and courage.