House Republicans Miss Big Opportunity
Rob Horowitz, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™
House Republicans Miss Big Opportunity
As the conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal put it this past weekend in discussing the actions of House Republicans during the debt limit fight, “Republicans are not looking like adults to whom voters can entrust the government.”
I couldn’t agree more. As of the writing of this column on Monday, it looks as if an agreement to raise the debt ceiling has been reached just in time to prevent a catastrophic default, no thanks to the House Republicans and more specifically the 87 freshman Republicans many of whom are aligned with the Tea Party. Faced with their strident opposition, Speaker John Boehner backed away from an earlier deal with President Obama -- a "grand bargain" which would have resulted in $4 trillion of debt reduction and real action on entitlement reform. But the fact that closing tax loopholes were going to be used for about $1 trillion of the deal, caused House Republicans to walk away from $3 trillion of spending cuts.
These House Republicans maintain that putting our fiscal house in order is the most important problem facing the country even while they refuse to allocate even one dollar of new revenue towards a solution -- revenue derived from closing tax loopholes and revenue that leverages more spending cuts. As a result of their ill-advised rigidity, they ended up with a final agreement that cuts spending less.
The insanity reached a pinnacle when Speaker Boehner couldn't muster the votes necessary from House Republicans for his spending cuts-only proposal without requiring that Congress pass a Balanced Budget Amendment prior to a second debt limit increase slated for a few short months from now. This resulted in the House legislation dying in the Senate before it even left the House chamber.
Part of the problem is that there are House members who believed nothing would happen if we did not raise the debt ceiling. Perhaps this was understandable given that a number of Republican Presidential candidates and leading talk show hosts downplayed or completely disputed the grave consequences of default. Recognizing this fact, Speaker Boehner invested time and energy in bringing in Republican financial and budget experts to explain to his members that they were playing with fire. It was only when the business community weighed in that some of these ill-informed skeptics finally believed action was required.
In the debt ceiling fight, House Republicans have demonstrated their sincerity and strong convictions, but have failed to couple these admirable qualities, with needed maturity and judgment. As we move towards other budget fights, it would do the House Republicans well to remember that they only control one house of Congress, so by definition action on the big issues requires principled compromise.
And at the end of the day, no one group, party or individual has a monopoly on wisdom.
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Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.