As the 112th Congress gets down to business, a major element of the Tea Party agenda, deficit reduction, seems to have already been reduced in scope, now seemingly becoming the object of negotiation and political theater. Having reached the halls of Congress it's a bit ironic to see such a major plank of the Tea Party platform slipping away so soon. It reminds one of that old Paul Simon refrain: "Slip sliding away, slip sliding away. You know the nearer your destination, the more your slip sliding away." According to Jackie Calmes of the New York Times: "Many people knowledgeable about the federal budget said House Republicans could not keep their campaign promise to cut $100 billion from domestic spending in a single year. Now it appears that Republicans agree." This new found reluctance to enact budget cuts is a function of several factors. First, the federal fiscal year is already one third over so the amount of time left to affect meaningful cuts is greatly reduced. Second, lacking control of the Senate effectively stymies any attempt at drastic budget reductions over the next two years. Moreover, there is a reluctance on the part of Senators on both sides of the aisle to enact deep budget cuts during a time of severe recession as such measures may derail the weak but building recovery. Again to Calmes: "a House vote would put potentially vulnerable Republican lawmakers on record supporting deep reductions of up to 30 percent in education, research, law enforcement, transportation and more." This degree of debt reduction would take millions of dollars out of the economy in the short run in spite of the longer term concerns about debt levels. While we can't ignore the deficit problem indefinitely, any attempt to reduce the simulative effects of government spending in a weak economy may be just to risky for those currently occupying the halls of power. Thus the new line coming out of Republican leaders on Capitol Hill is that the $100 Billion number was a hypothetical figure to begin with. So much for a radical new day in Washington.
Then there is the fact that many of the proposals favored by the Republicans may do little if anything to rectify the budget deficit issue. According to Brian Beutler of Talking Points Memo: "Republicans' deficit reduction platform, which may have helped catapult them into the majority, is about to run headlong into a hard reality: Many of their key policy goals will increase the deficit dramatically. To get around this fact, they've included measures in their new rules package to exempt some of their biggest legislative priorities from deficit consideration. Among the exceptions, which the House is likely to consider in the 112th Congress, are the health care repeal bill, the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, an AMT patch, extending the estate tax, and more.... The health care law, according to the Congressional Budget Office, will reduce the deficit by $143 billion through the end of the decade, and more so in the decade after that. Thus, repealing the law will blow a similarly sized hole in the deficit." Likewise a recent editorial appearing in the Washington Post comes to a similar conclusion. Quoting from "New pay-go rules reveal GOP's misplaced priorities"; "ARE HOUSE Republicans serious about dealing with the deficit? You could listen to their rhetoric - or you could read the rules they are poised to adopt at the start of the new Congress. The former promises a new fiscal sobriety. The latter suggests that the new GOP majority is determined to continue the spree of unaffordable tax-cutting. The ominous signs come in the wording of the new majority's version of its pay-as-you-go rules, which normally require that new programs or tax initiatives be covered with cuts to other programs or new revenue. In the GOP concept, pay-as-you-go applies only to spending programs. When it comes to tax cuts, it's all go, no pay. Taxes can be cut, and the national debt increased, without any offsetting savings." Now granted it was not the newly elected Tea Party backed lawmakers who engineered this shift in strategy, it's their new found partners within the Republican establishment. Thus it would appear that we are on the verge of a three way fight in the halls on Capitol Hill between the Democrats and the G.O.P., and between the G.O.P. and the Tea Party. That begs the question, what does this mean for the future of the Tea Party agenda and the movement's ability to produce the single most important product a party creates, policy.
As the first day of the 112th Congress came to a close, two veteran political observers in Washington, both appearing on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, took stock of the new Congress, its Tea Party contingent and what could be expected going forward. Norm Orenstien of the conservative American Enterprise Institute said that the Republican Party had the "freedom" to pass whatever they wanted to in the House so as to attempt to undo the legislative achievements of the past two years. However, they also know that anything too radically to the right won't survive the Senate or the President's veto pen. That said, all that the newly radicalized lawmakers could accomplish was to "bollix up the health care debate and the legislative process", to paraphrase Orenstien. Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, cautioned that it was unwise to read too much into the stunning Republican victory of 2010. Beschloss pointed out that while the Tea Party crowd ran for office on a radically rightwing agenda, the historical record shows that undoing the type of legislation just enacted doesn't happen too often. Pointing to the G.O.P.'s similar victory in 1952, Beschloss said that while this victory was freighted with ideas such as dismantling Social Security and rolling back the Soviet Union militarily in Eastern Europe, none of that ever came to pass. In fact the Democrats regained Capitol Hill and basically held onto it until the election of 1994. Likewise Kimberley Strassel of the Wall Street Journal in her "after action report" on the 2010 election pointed to the fact that last November's results don't politically guarantee anything: "History doesn't inspire optimism. Over the past 100 years, every time a president two years into his first term lost Congress, he went on to re-election: Truman in '48, Eisenhower in '56, Clinton in '96. Newt Gingrich even wrote a book, "Lessons Learned the Hard Way," about the GOP mistakes in the wake of 1994. It boiled down to Republicans over-promising and under-delivering-becoming the foil off of which President Clinton was able to skillfully pivot away from his own liabilities." Thus we are about to witness some of the most interesting politics, political theater and political oratory to come onto the American scene since the end of the Second World War. At the very least is should be interesting as well as colorful.
The American Enterprise Institute's Rick Hess Patrick McGuinn has a DC-centric column up this week spotlighting what he believes to be the two competing factions in the Democratic Party attempting to determine the destiny of the so-called school reform movement.
In his view, the argument over education policy in the Democratic Party is between competing "equity and accountability narratives". On the one side - the "Equities" - are the more traditional Democrats linking back to the Great Society who insist the role of the federal government in education is to ensure that educators and schools that serve impoverished kids are given resources equal to what their better-off peers get. In Hess's McGuinn's view, "the first narrative sees public schools as generally well-performing and attributes poor student performance to the effects of poverty."
The second faction is the "accountability" driven Democrats. This faction "sees the status quo in American education as untenable, and believes that it is unlikely to change absent strong reform pressure from Washington that holds states and schools accountable for improving student performance."
In this simplistic view, one sees the same sort of story playing out in other conventional views of the Democratic Party - that there is a liberal "old guard" tied to "tired" government programs from the New Deal and Great Society vs. a more dynamic reformist "new guard" that is full of bold thinking and "innovation." And at the heart of this contest is a determination to find solutions for poor kids.
We're experiencing, right now, a PR offensive this week for the surge. What's stunning is how irrelevant the surge really is to popular opinion, and yet, this farcical debate is key to policymaker attitudes. Why is this? Well, in a word, it's the think tank industrial complex. Elected officials, when they come to Washington, are often bright-eyed and confused about all the new information they encounter. And they are really busy. There are many people here who will offer them useful information, polling data, even staff, to help them in their job, and pretty soon, they begin speaking and thinking as Washington DC pundits do, disconnected from the public and in thrall to conventional wisdom crafted by elites.
Probably the most 'elite' institution in DC is the nonpartisan think tank called the Brookings Institution. The Brookings Institution is considered a 'centrist' think tank, though at various points it's dubbed 'liberal' when it suits their purposes, and it is led by Democrat and former Clinton official Strobe Talbott. Brookings sees itself as a 'nonideological' playground of ideas, where nonpartisan scholars can debate and hash out the best ideas for public officials to implement. Brookings is a key pillar of the 'think tank industrial complex', the unelected policy-making branch of government, which includes lobbyists, journalists, and a host of think tanks around town. This is where 'studies' come from upon which public officials rely to move legislation or regulations.
It is where the most serious of the very serious people live. I'm not sure if this is the case anymore, but when a 'study' came from Brookings on any policy matter in the 1980s, it carried golden credibility. Brookings is nonpartisan, non-ideological, and simply tells the truth about what is best for the country, with all the unstated elitist assumptions that implies. So it's useful to see how the institution is interacting with the policy known as the 'surge' in Iraq.
It won't surprise you that this paragon of serious non-ideological policy-making isn't handling it very well. On September 13, Talbott's organization will hold a panel of "leading Brookings experts representing a uniquely broad spectrum of views [that] will examine the implications of a pivotal Iraq progress report." The composition of the panel is, in a word, simply absurd.
The consistent packing of hawks onto these panels, and the timing of said panels, is normal in DC. What's fascinating is how far this has placed Brookings from its stated role as a reservoir of expertise. Brookings head Strobe Talbott sees the role of his 'prestigious' think tank' as being a significant generator of ideas.
Brookings is often referred to as "a university without students." Many of our 75 senior scholars have advanced degrees, and quite a few come from university faculties. Their research and writing is subject to scholarly review.
It's entirely unclear what scholarly review Michael O'Hanlon's work, a Brookings 'expert' who has consistently erred in his judgments about Iraq, been subject to. And then there's this.
Elaborate rules are in place to guarantee that financial providers have no influence over the design and outcome of Brookings research.
This may be true. Still, it just so happens that Haim Sabam, who funded the 'Saban Center for Middle East Policy' with $13 million in 2002 and who says that on "security and terrorism I am a total hawk", has funded a Brookings department that employs employs total hawk O'Hanlon as an 'affiated scholar' and total hawk Ken Pollack as director of research. I'm curious what 'scholarly review' took place to put Pollack in these very serious positions, and what rules were in place to ensure that Saban's ideas didn't influence the center he funded.
Of course, Iraq, and having their hawkish fellows bash people like Noam Chomsky, is just one example of how degraded and anti-academic the Brookings Institute really is. In their partnership with AEI, the original movement conservative think tank, Brookings employs people like Timothy J. Ryan in their 'election reform project', who just yesterday attacked Rush Holt's bill on verified voting and attacks the very notion of a paper trail, all on the Washington Post's right-wing Op-Ed page (it's nice how the different DC institutions interlink, isn't it). And of course, in the joint AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, two very serious scholars came out against net neutrality as an onerous regulation, despite net neutrality being a foundational cornerstone of the internet.
Talbott's Brookings Institute has been an anti-academic institution helping corporate interests for years now. I'm reading books on lobbying in the 1980s, and this 'university without students' was offering nonpartisan 'scholarship' to help move tax credits for large corporations in the guise of research back then, scholarship often paid for with corporate money.
Iraq has really ripped the mask off of what Brookings and Talbott really do. And I think they know this. The panel on Iraq, which Yglesias was invited to, isn't even on their public calendar. I wonder why.
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