The Perfect Logic of Boehner’s Crazy Sequester Strategy

[babylonsister]

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/02/logic-of-boehners-crazy-sequester-strategy.html

The Perfect Logic of Boehner’s Crazy Sequester Strategy

By Jonathan Chait


The mystery of John Boehner’s sequestration strategy — What are they thinking? How do they imagine it will work? — is slowly coming into focus. Viewed as a plan to accomplish some policy end, it makes no sense. But that doesn’t seem to be its main intent. Boehner’s plan seems mainly designed to keep John Boehner from losing his job. In that sense, and in that sense only, the logic holds.

The first thing to understand is how crazy the Republican strategy is as a partywide approach. Sequestration is automatic cuts to spending, but only to the parts of the federal budget that Republicans hate the least. Their least favorite part of the federal budget — anti-poverty programs — is exempt. Their second least-favorite part — broad social insurance programs, meaning Medicare and Social Security — is also exempt. What’s being cut is discretionary government spending, which Republicans dislike in theory but not so much in practice, and defense, which they quite like.

snip//

Indeed, their plan of forcing high-profile confrontations with Obama almost surely weakens their position in every way. Obama is much more popular than they are, Obama’s budget proposals are much more popular than theirs, and Obama has a much more advantageous platform with which to communicate. Republicans would be much better served to sit down and negotiate with Obama now. Once sequestration starts to bite, defense contractors and other businesses harmed by it will be howling for Boehner to compromise, and rational party leaders will likewise begin to panic at a reprise of the Gingrich-era government shutdown that cements the party’s image as a pack of loons.

snip//

Why not do it now? Because Boehner understands that “starting off this new session of Congress by hiking taxes again would be akin to political suicide for the Ohio Republican.” He has to show the ultras he’ll fight. If the GOP takes a major hit in the process, which it almost surely will, then he’ll have an internal rationale to compromise. Boehner is marching his party into war because the guns facing his troops are less dangerous to him than the ones pointed at his own back.