Tea Party Should Listen to George Will

Peter Wehner
07.29.2011

George Will — after having recapitulated to Laura Ingraham his conservative credentials, which are impressive –said he supports the legislation being pushed by Speaker Boehner​ and explains why:

I happened to adore the Tea Party. I have no substantive difference with them on any important matter. But it’s important to understand how much they’ve won already. Harry Reid has proposed what the president denounces as an unbalanced idea. That is … all cuts and no new revenues. They’ve moved, in other words, the Senate Majority Leader, far in their direction. They should remember it seems to me that Barack Obama​ got into terrible trouble by overreaching with the stimulus, and then overreaching with the health care plan and the country recoiled from it. And our Tea Party friends don’t want to seem to the country to be similarly overreaching.

Will, a student of Burke, went on to say, “It really is fanciful to believe that the regulatory welfare state that has been built over 80 years can be substantially
deconstructed in August over a debt ceiling vote. It’s going to take a little longer than that.”

“We ought to pocket these gains and prepare for the next fight – and to understand, nothing fundamentally will be changed until we change the president who is determined to veto fundamental change,” Will added.

George Will has been right far more often than he has been wrong, and the Tea Party would be wise to listen to his counsel. He is, after all, among the finest minds (and finest writers) the conservative movement has ever produced.

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/07/29/tea-party-should-listen-to-george-will/
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Passing thru the FNC program airing at 2 PM MDT, I heard Gregg Jarrett note that polling shows voters, esp. indpendents (faux ex-Democrats who think they're kidding everyone with that pose that they are too high-minded to pick sides in the most important fight since slavery), give the most props to Obama and the Damacrats for willingness to compromise and serious-mindedness about the debt/deficit/unfunded liabilities issues.

To mix military metaphors, Boehner is Horatio at the bridge trying to prevent the 87 from driving Republicans into the valley of electoral death. If this keeps up, Obama will be the first president re-elected with a devastating economic record and no plan to fix it except debt oblivion because the Loyal Opposition was too stupid or too indifferent to its own fortunes to retreat from their laudible principles.

The goal isn't to win a popularity contest. The goal is to save the country.

Agree more or less with Will; don't agree with Jarrett.

Boehner is just one man, albeit a powerful one. There's no doubt in my mind that he's done his very best; and his best has been pretty good IMO. If history adjudges him as having failed here, then the people writing the history books have an unrealistically high expectation of what Boehner could accomplish.

And sooner or later, we're going to run out of money for discretionary spending. Might as well happen now then later. I definitely want us to pay our national debt, timely, but I don't think missing the 8/2 deadline means we're going to default. I don't trust them, for one thing.

Now THAN later.... yikes. Drop and give me 40, Filliger.

"don't agree with Jarrett."

I'm not trying to start a fight, but how can you agree or disagree with him? He's only reporting what the polls record. Maybe I misled you that my comments re: the dubious truthfulness of independents and the significance of the polls were Jarrett's?

Yeah, sorry, I meant I disagree with those polls and Jarrett's summary of them. You're right, my comment didn't make any sense.

"This book could be 1,000 pages and I'd still wish it were longer. There are so many aspects to this."

So were you the other one who read Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes: The Way to the White House, clodking in at 1072 pp.?

No, but I did read Les Miserables from cover to cover.

DREAMS OF MY FATHERLAND

Is it possible that Barry's plan all along has not been to turn us into European socialist country, but to turn us into a Third World country?

Whatever happened to Peter K? It seems his worst fears may be coming true.

Peter died at the end of May. He is greatly missed here.

http://johnbatchelorshow.com/jb/2011/06/soft-patch-2/

His worst fears came true, all right!

We trust a government that revises growth reports, after the fact, from 1.9% to 0.4%, to tell us to within one day, almost three months in advance, when it will run out of money?

I used to collect junk which some would generously label collectibles. Now all this junk just sits in my attic collecting dust. I don't have the energy to unpack or, even, the space to put things if I do. However, I was saddened to learn about Peter's passing and wanted to collect my thoughts, so I opened a box of six old irons. In thinking about Peter I thought for a second about who might have used these heavy pieces of junk that, with tremendous effort, used to make a very wrinkled shirt nice enough to wear. I have no idea. I have no idea who owned any of the stuff I now own. I wonder who'll own them in the future, but really don't care. I let my shirts dry on a hanger over the bath tub. If they stay wrinkled I wear them anyway.

A cousin once told me that we don't own any of our possessions. We are merely caretakers for them. I believe this is true.

Not all of us own our own thoughts. But Peter did. And he was nice enough to share them with us.

The Senate vote on Reid's debt plan has been postponed until 1 p.m. Sunday.

Karen Tumulty on the All-Star panel Friday quoted some presidential scholars as saying that the ideological divide between the two parties is greater now than it has been since Garfield's day.
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Why the GOP is more a two-part "coalition" than a party

Washington (CNN) -- Hardly a day goes by without dismissive and arrogant invective from the White House about the House Republican Conference and its alleged fear of, or fealty to, "the tea party." Too many Fourth Estaters have lazily bought the line and played along with President Obama's spaghetti western construct. That's not the right explanation for this drama.

Instead, we should look east, across the pond, for an explanation. The House of Representatives post-2010 is built more like a European parliament. I know the irony is too delicious for all you apologizing Europhiles on the left, but hang with me for a few more paragraphs.

The 240-seat Republican Conference delivered by the American public last November is functioning more like a two-part governing coalition than a political party. But it's not two parties -- that would imply the tea party is an actual organization, which it's not, any more than the anti-war netroots movement of the last decade was. In fact, there's hardly a hair's breadth of ideological division within the whole group. The differences lie instead in their tactical approaches and their self-identification.

Somewhere between 100 and 150 Republican members -- a majority of the conference on a given day -- self-identify as both outsiders and conservatives. They won in 2010 by saying "Washington's broken and both parties are to blame" just as often as they said "Obama and Pelosi are too liberal." This was not just campaign strategy; it was conviction. They believe both statements earnestly and equally, and in 2010, the voters did, too -- a fact conveniently ignored by too many in this town.

As a result, it's going to be darned difficult to get unanimity among House Republicans, even behind conservative legislation. It takes 218 votes to pass anything in the House. Plenty of Republicans are wary of being in any group of 218, no matter which 218 it is -- solely for fear of what being herded might say about them.

Conversely, the House Democrats now have both ideological and tactical hegemony, as minorities often do. What little dissonance ever existed in the Democratic Caucus was extinguished almost entirely by the voters in the last election, with an assist from a tone-deaf former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. If you don't believe it, just ask ex-Blue Dog Reps. Gene Taylor and Travis Childers, and hosts of others who faced the music and lost their races last November.

Don't look for a solution to this debt issue -- or any issue -- that unites half the Democrats and half the Republicans. The ideological chasm is just too great for that at this point in our history. If you want to know what can pass, look at what can unite the GOP coalition -- something that is conservative and rebukes Washington's modus operandi at the same time. There's probably no other path in this Congress, and even getting that will not be easy.

The GOP leadership will always face a high hurdle to win the support of the "outsider" half of its membership. If this frustrates you as a political observer, don't blame the new congressmen; blame the pesky voters who sent them. It is a representative body, after all.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Brad Todd.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/30/todd.debt.debate

I think there is no point in making a new decision to raise the limit before the election.

The election will be a referendum on spending. Let it loom. Let voters decide who they want making the call. The country doesn't need a continuous crisis on this issue. We have a continuing crisis already. Keep our eyes on the goal and make the case. Build trust. Warn, track, report, plan, make alternatives. Respond to objections (salesmanship) win the argument and win the election- then fix it. A victory has been won already as has been noted. The debate is changed. Consolidate. Blocking and tackling of fundamental politics. Talking calmly and gently to people who don't agree with you yet.

I keep thinking of Grant in Virginia. He advanced. Lee blocked. Grant moved left and advanced again. And again and again. Bloody and painful but it worked.

"Remember all the talk of Manchin here on the JB website?"

Manchin announced Fri. that he would vote 'no' on both the Reid and Boehner bills. Remember that a vote "for" cloture is a procedural vote that equates to a 'yea' vote on the substantive bill behind the cloture. So if they were debating cloture on the Reid bill, then a vote for cloture would be the same as a vote for the Reid bill.

For those with 15 minutes to kill, check out Senate Session 4918 (C-span Video Library), minutes 45-60 (approximately) - a colloquy between John McCain and Dick Durbin earlier today - very entertaining, all the economic debate of the last 30 years rolled into a good-natured, intelligent repartee. Kind of like a scaled down, non-musical version of "Keynes Versus Hayek, Second Round".

"Not if you know that the cloture vote is going to fail."

Right you are, if one voting 'no' was the bill's floor leader. That's so they can bring it up again.

"Thanks for the Brad Todd piece. I agree with his basic thrust; however, I don't think it's especially insightful to note that the current-day GOP is a loose coalition liable to internecine quarreling. What American political party has NOT been such a coalition?"

Absoultely spot on, Tom. Even the modern Boomer version of the Dems is a coalition of many interests. As the rethinking of our government system, begun at least under Reagan if not in the immediate post-war era, continues, it has become clear that the organizing principle for them is big and intrusive government controling unpleasant risks of loss. The organizing principle for Republicans, who have undergone a similar re-alignment of constitutencies at the same time, is cheaper, smaller, more efficient government.

Peter Morici put it very well today on CNN: We have to decide how much government we are willing to pay for and get rid of that which we are not willing to pay for. Right now, that is by no means clear to the majority of voters. Virtually all of the electorate is willing to eliminate defense and waste, fraud, and abuse. I.e., the electorate lives in a never-never land where somehow none of our enemies notices we're not spending on defense and nobody gets hurt with crippling cuts in services. People are going to be hurt, if temporarily, and there's no way around it. There's not enough money in the defense budget to make a dent in the entitlements problem. I spoke yesterday with a very well informed friend who follows the debt/deficit debates closely and understands how much history stretches out behind this crisis. What was she willing to sacrifice? The foreign aid budget. I thought everyone understood decades ago that while foreign aid is a sore point with many, there's no there there. At less than 0.001% of GDP, it's not going to contribute a dime's worth to the reduction of the treat from fiscal calamity.

I'm game, but so far there hasn't been the political will to do any of that.

Head Start is notoriously ineffective. There have been zero studies by people who are NOT affiliated with or receiving benefits from the program that have found any measureable educational success against the program's stated goals. It's basically day care for the poor. But whenever the Republicans have tried to cut it, the Democrats drag out the "you're mean" and "you're dooming generations of poor" arguments, and the Republicans, who are not mean and not dooming generations by cutting one ineffective program, grow faint and spineless before the image.

Ag programs are universally protected. Not just in the US. The mythic image of the sturdy rustic feeding the nations is so dear to societies that once an ag subsidy is voted in, it rarely goes away.

Everyone's in their pitching for their share of the budget, meanwhile something like 50% of workers pay no income tax at all. You can't have 50% of working population not paying taxes and hope for a responsible electorate. Ain't happening.

REVIEW & OUTLOOKJULY 31, 2011, 11:13 P.M. ET.

A Tea Party Triumph
The debt deal is a rare bipartisan victory for the forces of smaller government..

If a good political compromise is one that has something for everyone to hate, then last night's bipartisan debt-ceiling deal is a triumph. The bargain is nonetheless better than what seemed achievable in recent days, especially given the revolt of some GOP conservatives that gave the White House and Democrats more political leverage.

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The big picture is that the deal is a victory for the cause of smaller government, arguably the biggest since welfare reform in 1996. Most bipartisan budget deals trade tax increases that are immediate for spending cuts that turn out to be fictional. This one includes no immediate tax increases, despite President Obama's demand as recently as last Monday. The immediate spending cuts are real, if smaller than we'd prefer, and the longer-term cuts could be real if Republicans hold Congress and continue to enforce the deal's spending caps.

The framework (we haven't seen all the details) calls for an initial step of some $900 billion in domestic discretionary cuts over 10 years from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline puffed up by recent spending. If the cuts hold, this would go some way to erasing the fiscal damage from the Obama-Nancy Pelosi stimulus. This is no small achievement considering that Republicans control neither the Senate nor the White House, and it underscores how much the GOP victory in November has reshaped the U.S. fiscal debate.

No wonder liberals are howling. They have come to believe in the upward spending ratchet, under which all spending increases are permanent. Not any more.

The second phase of the deal is less clear cut, though it also could turn out to shrink Leviathan. Party leaders in both houses of Congress will each appoint three Members to a special committee that will recommend another round of deficit reduction of between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion, also over 10 years. Their mandate is broad, and we're told very little is off the table, but at least seven of the 12 Members would have to agree on a package to force an up-or-down vote in Congress.

If the committee can't agree on enough deficit reduction, then automatic spending cuts would ensue to make up the difference to reach the $1.2 trillion minimum deficit-reduction target. One key point is that the committee's failure to agree would not automatically "trigger" (in Beltway parlance) revenue increases, as the White House was insisting on as recently as this weekend. That would have guaranteed that Democrats would never agree to enough cuts, and Republicans were right to resist.

Instead the automatic cuts would be divided equally between defense and nondefense. So, for example, if the committee agrees to deficit reduction of only $600 billion, then another $300 billion would be cut automatically from defense and domestic accounts (excluding Medicare beneficiaries) to reach at least $1.2 trillion.

This trigger is intended to be an incentive for committee Members of both parties to agree on more cuts, but defense cuts of this magnitude would do far more harm to national security than they would to domestic accounts that have been fattened by stimulus. This is the worst part of the deal, and Mr. Obama's political goal will be to press Republicans to choose between tax increases and destructive defense cuts. The GOP will have to fight back and make the choice between domestic cuts and harm to our troops fighting multiple wars.

While the "trigger" includes no revenue increases, the committee itself could agree to raise taxes to meet the $1.2 trillion deficit reduction target. This means GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have to be especially careful in their choice of appointees. No one from the Senate Gang of Six, who proposed tax increases, need apply. The GOP choices should start with Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, adding four others who will follow their lead.

One reason to think tax increases are unlikely, however, is that the 12-Member committee will operate from CBO's baseline that assumes that the Bush tax rates expire in 2013. CBO assumes that taxes will rise by $3.5 trillion over the next decade, including huge increases for middle-class earners. Since any elimination of those tax increases would increase the deficit under CBO's math, the strong incentive for the Members will be to avoid the tax issue. This increases the political incentive for deficit reduction to come from spending cuts.

Mr. Obama's biggest gain in the deal is that he gets his highest priority of not having to repeat this debt-limit fight again before the 2012 election. The deal stipulates that the debt ceiling will rise automatically by $900 billion this year, and at least $1.2 trillion next year, unless two-thirds of Congress disapproves it. Congress will not do so.

Given how much the current debate has damaged the public perception of Mr. Obama's leadership, this will be a relief at the White House. This is part of the negotiating price that Mr. Boehner had to pay because of the back-bench revolt that showed he couldn't guarantee a debt-limit increase with only GOP votes. This gave Democrats more leverage.

***
The same supposedly conservative Republicans and their talk radio minders may denounce this deal as a sellout, but we'll be charitable and assume they've climbed so far out on the political ledge they don't know how to climb back without admitting they were wrong. They're right that this deal doesn't "solve" our fiscal crisis, but no such deal is possible as long as liberals run the Senate and White House.

The debt ceiling is a political hostage the GOP could never afford to shoot, and this deal is about the best Republicans could have hoped for given that the limit had to be raised. The Jim DeMint-Michele Bachmann-Sean Hannity alternative of refusing to raise the debt limit without a balanced-budget amendment and betting that Mr. Obama would get all the blame vanishes upon contact with any thought. Sooner or later the GOP had to give up the hostage.

The tea partiers pride themselves on adhering to the Constitution, which was intended to make political change difficult. Yet in this deal they've forced both parties to make the biggest spending cuts in 15 years, with more cuts likely next year. The U.S. is engaged in an epic debate over the size and scope of government that will play out over several years, and the most important battle comes in the election of 2012.

Tea partiers will do more for their cause by applauding this victory and working toward the next, rather than diminishing what they've accomplished because it didn't solve every fiscal problem in one impossible swoop.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

On the House side, Boehner should name Bachmann, Gohmert, and Cheffetz to the committee. Man, that'd stick in the Dems' craw like too many dry crackers in one swallow.

My GOP Sen (fantasy) picks for the Committee: Demint, Rand Paul, Mike Lee.
Fantasy GOP Reps: Jeff Flake, Paul Ryan, a TP freshman like Tim Scott or Raul Labrador.

NO GOP Senator who has ever been part of a "Gang." Nor any House appropriator type. All it takes is one weak GOP Establishment squish or self-imagined hero to become a tax increase enabler (like the usually wise Coburn would have become). Yes, tax/revenue increases can happen, despite the current flawed, incomplete MSM reporting.

Who Boehner and McConnell appoint will determine the Committee endgame, notwithstanding the initial reports we hear now (remember Mr. Batchelor's admonition that the "first 3 reports are wrong" -- it applies in the fog of war or sausage making).

The only framework in which "loopholes," "tax expenditures" or "revenues" should enter is an integrated, comprehensive tax REFORM framework in which tax RATES are being lowered as part of the package. To do otherwise is not Reagan-esque or smart, not even when people like Ben Stein and Jim MacTeague pine for such measures.

And I think you bring in OASDI and HI into the tax reform framework, because even though the urban myth holds that the employee contributions under those plans earn entitlement to benefits, the fact is that benefit eligibility is not directly tied to contributions (both plans being purely defined benefit in nature), and perhaps more importantly, the contributions are not held in reserve for payment of benefits of the employees who contributed them.

We have got to bust the myth, sooner or later, that these taxes are inherently different from income taxes. They be carefully disguised, and misrepresented, but taxes be they still. Like a pirate I be talking.

ARRRRRrrrrrrrrrr. Then Hobbit sounds.... (e.g., eating cookies).

Used to love/worship Coburn. Then.....even before the ObamaCare atrocity, when he had reams of evidence to the contrary, Coburn made a wholly gratuitous compliment about Pelosi being a nice person, effectively reprimanding GOPers implying otherwise. Poor judgment, poor timing, undercutting people who were right about her nefarious record, nature and wiring. More recently, Coburn and the generally OK Saxby Chambliss joined the recent Gang of Six, thereby giving surface, bi-partisan legitimacy to a detestable package (which BHO LOVED and expressly endorsed) containing tax hikes, flawed tax reform and paltry, backloaded spending cuts from baseline budget idiocy. The Gang of Six madness, plus Mitch McConnell's boneheaded, convoluted, concurrent, process-monkeys' proposal, undercut and doomed the GOP focus that should have remained longer on Cut, Cap and Balance. Thanks for the legacy, Senators C & C & McC.