Mother Jones
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During the recent government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, Republicans had grand ideas—defunding Obamacare, for example—that they eventually had to abandon when their approval ratings took a nasty turn. But they ended up selling their base on one minor victory, crowing that they had forced President Barack Obama to the bargaining table to hammer out big budget issues.
Now, as the budget conference they demanded holds its first public meeting Wednesday, Republicans and Democrats are disavowing prospects for any “grand bargain,” offering nothing more than hope that a limited deal to shut off sequestration, the automatic budget cuts agreed to during the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations, might be on the table. Democrats are hoisting the threat of further public-relations debacles to convince Republicans that reconfiguring sequestration is in their best interest.
The new budget conference committee, a panel of 22 senators and seven representatives, is a byproduct of the agreement to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling. That continuing resolution kept the government funded through January 15 and created a bipartisan, bicameral budget conference that must present a proposed budget to Congress by December 13. The conference will meet publicly at the Capitol on Wednesday morning but intends to negotiate privately, unlike the 2011 super committee that was notable for grandstanding at public hearings and made little progress toward an actual agreement.
The move away from a grand bargain originated on the Republicans’ side. House Budget Committee chair Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), who is spearheading the conference along with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), his counterpart in the Senate, has set aside his lofty ambitions to privatize Social Security and turn Medicare into a voucher program, at least for the moment. “If we focused on doing some big grand bargain, like those prior efforts … then I don’t think we’ll be successful because we’ll focus on our differences,” Ryan said during an interview with Reuters last week. “Each party will demand that the other compromises a core principle and then we’ll get nothing done.” Senate Democrats share Ryan’s pessimism that the two sides can find a viable compromise on the major budgetary issues. “That is not going to happen this time,” Harry Reid said over the weekend. “There’s not going to be a grand bargain.”
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No Grand Bargain: Why Dems Think They Won’t Have to Budge on Sequester Demands
