Tweet
Speaker of the House John Boehner
The sequester was created in the most bipartisan way possible. It was a proposal from a Democratic President to find a way around an impasse with House Republicans that both sides each believed would eventually advance their long-term agendas. It was approved by a Republican House, a Democratic Senate and signed by a Democratic President. As a result, everyone will agree this is a truly horrible policy that will needlessly hurt the country, but no one responsible for it will probably ever pay a political price.
This is why bipartisanship is so fetishized in Washington by so many. It gives politicians a way to approve unpopular or even knowingly bad policies without fear. This sequester fight is probably the purest demonstration of exactly how bipartisanship is exploited to destroy accountability.
Top Republicans are telling their base it is all Obama’s fault. After all, Obama did come up with the idea, he thought it would work for him, and he signed it into law. For Republicans it is the “Obama Sequester.”
Liberals get to tell the Democratic base that their President is mostly blameless. They argue that Republicans voted for it, Republicans demanded only spending cuts, Republicans called it a victory, and Republicans aren’t making an effort to replace it. Apparently, the buck no longer stops at the President’s desk.
Much of the media can report it as both sides are equally to blame, because to a large degree they are, but politically that is a wash. Even if both parties approval ratings drop because they knowingly adopted a bad law, it doesn’t matter. Two-party political systems are a zero-sum game. As long as both parties are hurt equally, the net effect on elections is nothing.
Thanks to bipartisanship a law almost everyone admits will be bad for the county is likely go into effect and no one will really be held responsible since it is “everyone’s fault.” This is why bipartisanship is so prized during pushes for things like military actions, cutting entitlement benefits, or national security measures that will shred our freedoms.
Rarely do you get to see the accountability shell game being played before the policy is actually put into place. Normally, a bipartisan compromise is enacted with great fanfare and this blame shifting game is only played much latter once the “totally unforeseeable” negative consequences begin happening.
Photo by Gage Skidmore released under Creative Commons License
31 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About FDL Action
Maybe it’s wrong but I’m gonna blame Obama. He coulda said no and didn’t. This is part of what he has wanted for a long time.
So when the Republicans were willing to shut down the government over raising the debt ceiling, President Obama should have simply said no to the sequester “solution” and shut down the government?
“. . . what he has wanted for a long time.”
Care to expand that? As written it makes no sense.
these people are so evil. there are so many people who are going to be hurt by a shut down. a friend of mine is going to lose her job b/c of it. she’s not likely to find work again, at her somewhat advanced age.
they sicken me. every last one of them playing this game needs to be strung up by their feet and roasted over a slow fire. ok, not really, but putting them in jail works for me too. also.
I wish Republican ideas got destroyed along with the Republican party when their blackmail and hostage taking schemes blow up in their puffy faces. If it were so, I could maybe give a damn about partisan politics, and I could maybe also stop saying they should all dumped in the sea, R & D together, together forever, in bipartisan harmony.
Instead, what seems to happen is that the R “ideas” simply migrate to the D party, fleeing their now sinking R party. Oh yeah, and more “R” people come over, having shed none of their taste for authoritarian government and imperialism. Bleh.
He appointed the cat food commission and wanted a four trillion dollar reduction in spending. There’s been much written on that even here at FDL. He is still looking for more reductions. Notably,this time around he,said he would not negotiate with the Rs over the debt limit. Why not then? Or better yet why not find a way around it? There were at least two options around it.
I don’t know why Republicans would call it the “Obama’s sequester.”
Spending is getting cut. I thought they were for spending cuts?
They are but they don’t want to be blamed for the coming recession. Nice game. Obama is a bit of a fool.
In theory but not in practice. They like to bitch about gummint spending but they like to do it, too (just not on poor folks). Typically hypocritical politicians.
no he’s not. he’s a damn smart con artist. fooled a lot of people here, and in liberal circles everywhere, dinnit he?
he knows exactly what he is doing. making the rich happy, so when he retires from prezintin he’ll be offered a plum position with some richee think tank and his daughters will marry princes and all the rest. think tony blair.
talk a good game, then go back on your election promises, “compromise” with the right = lifetime of wealth and privs. that’s what he’s about, nothing more.
Still, after four years, I don’t know what this guy is about.
GOP these days is confused. THey can’t find their ass with both hands and a flashlight.
He is hard to read. But this sequester I really think he could have avoided. I think he believes the deficit has to be cut. I heard him say so many times. So that debt limit debacle gave him the perfect excuse. You can’t get away from responsibility for your actions forever. Now I am not sure what his game is. It is possible he wants out of the last deal. But if he does, he has only himself to blame.
You’re either forgetting or are unaware that after that happened Obama said he would veto *ANY* effort to get rid of the sequester:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqD2h7e_MLg
Whatever had happened previously Obama took 100% ownership of the sequester by lecturing Congress about not trying to remove it by saying he’d veto it.
Saying no to something he proposed would have been embarrassing, no?
Isn’t it always complaining that the Republicans do that? That they propose something then, if he agrees with them, they oppose it?
They are not for the particular cuts that the sequester requires. In particular, they are not for the cuts in so-called “defense” spending.
BTW, we never should have re-named the War Department a la Orwell’s 1984.
He’s a corporatist and a deceiver.
Then again, so are most of our Democratic elected officials anymore.
As best I can tell, he’s been about three things:
His election, his re-election and corporatism.
Actually, he can get away with it forever. He got re-elected. That was the only thing that he needed from the 99% and he will never need it again.
Obama proposed the sequester. Why would he have vetoed something that he proposed himself?
My guess is that, as campaign season was upon them, Democrats and Republicans were happy to put off the hard stuff until after the election, Obama most of all.
Why do we cling to the wishful thinking that we have two very different political parties in D.C., such that compromise and bipartisanship are essential?
In reality, have a unipartisan federal government, to coin a word, especially when it comes to money issues. So, there is no bipartisan fetish.
There are just Democrats, exhausted from trying to make the Republicans take the blame for the cuts that Obama and the rest of the DLC crowd have wanted all along.
For their part, the Republicans want the cuts, too, but, knowing that Obama wants them, they’ll be damned if they will take the political hit for them.
Maybe it’s more of a game of musical chairs.
“… a law almost everyone admits will be bad for the county is likely go into effect.”
I thought so too this time yesterday, jw, and concluded a post about WaPo Op-Eds with the thought. Today I think it is more likely that they will punt again. You say next that “no one will really be held responsible [when the sequester since it is “everyone’s fault,”” but it is more likely that the public would blame this everyone, or at least the Congress if not Obama.
When Congress comes back from its (incredibly stupid) vacation next week and sees the handwriting on the wall, it is of course not going to come up with a sane positive program, but neither is it going to want to face the music with the voters. It will put off the problem again with a deferral of the sequester … and again … and …
“Thanks to bipartisanship a law almost everyone admits will be bad for the county is likely go into effect and no one will really be held responsible since it is “everyone’s fault.”
Jon, I don’t know how to break this to you. But, it is literally IMPOSSIBLE for sequester to go into effect. As bad as this sequester is bad for the economy and the middle class, it is worse for the superwealthy who enabled Obama to raise most of the almost billion dollars he raised for his re-election bid. Hence, come Feb 26, President Obama will show that he has an even bigger fetish than his “bipartisan” fetish. And, that fetish is the “caving” fetish. Around Feb 26 or so, President Bipartisan will get into a major “cave” mode and accept most all of the most-atrocious Republican demands and put in a couple of not-so-important Democratic demands (to enable him to claim victory), and thereby make history (yet again) and save our economy (yet again as well).
Solomon, I believe you may be right. When I heard the Obama speech enumerating the punishing effects on various sectors due to the advancing sequester, it occurred to me that after scaring the shit out of everyone everywhere, he can easily “cave” to roll em over on Soc Sec and Medicare/Medicaid. And isn’t that what they are really seeking to do? Just another bait and switch, divide and conquer tactic by the Abuser in Chief. Can’t we start impeaching this guy, this phony? He is absolutely fearless and brazen when its for his sponsors- and very hostile to his own voters who seek peace and clean environment.
If this sequestration goes through by default, I’m pretty sure the administration will come up with an emergency measure. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall during the Fiscal Cliff debacle Timothy Geithner said they could do just that, for a while. One outside proposal was to have the gov’t issue IOUs (redeemable nearly at face value at banks), which was done in CA a few years back. If so, that could buy time for a huge popular outcry of protest …but will the lambs come out into the streets? (Not likely, judging from the insufficient turnout I saw at the Forward on Climate rally in my major city last Sunday.)
Obama is not smart or effective which is the only thing that might save us from him imposing the chained CPI. Boehner, the strange orange alcoholic, represents a Republican party that only represents the Oligarchs. The sequester should be postponed if they can’t agree to just get rid of it. Once the Federal government shuts down when civil servants are furloughed, there is a real danger the people will revolt – at least at the ballot box.
What Obama wanted was cuts to Social Security via the “Grand Bargain”, without his fingerprints on the knife handle.
And they would have happened, except the goopers refused to agree to any tax increases at all.
~
Seriously? You’re taking partisan pride in beating on a straw man while the field is burning around you.
Dumb, ineffective operators do not see a billion dollars from large businesses and wealthy individuals spent on behalf of their reelection campaign, especially against a clear twit. If someone’s reelection is worth a billion dollars to someone, they expect to see a return greater than unity on that, and saying you donated a million to re-elect Obama only has so much value at cocktail parties.
An office that attracts that kind of money at the margin must necessarily be efficient at accomplishing *something*, and a nonpartisan look at the past few years suggests that insulation from accountability has proven *extremely* valuable to those who have been deemed worthy of it.
You lost me with your assertion that the sequester is “impossible.” I think you are definitely on the right track. I think you wanted to say that changes caused by the sequester would be inherently self-limiting or self-defeating. You may have skipped over some of the steps in your logic.
Could you try to show with an A, B, C … list how the sequester would, in effect, stop itself? I have a gut feeling there are second-order and third-order effects from such a sudden cessation of such a major amount of economic activity that go far beyond a mere Keynesian reduction in demand. I can’t verbalize my gut feelings, either.
For example, a lot of public employees will suddenly have a lot of free time on their hands and will be looking for the district offices of their Senators and congresscritters ….
I can see a lot of daycare babies suddenly being dropped off at Congress Lady Bumfuck’s office because the federally-funded daycare services were shut off …. work with me here
Good call Jon!
I’ve noticed something lately while keeping half an eye on the odd political conversations on the interwebs. There are two parties, each of which has a particular branding campaign. One evokes victory against adversity, of personal responsibility and enterprise, of the moral value of privation, of essentialism and knowing one’s place in the world. The other evokes public purpose and responsibility, equal opportunity, collective power, and fair play. Informed by the brand images and talking points of the products each party is selling, partisans are turned loose and encouraged to fight the other party’s arguments with their own party’s arguments.
Meanwhile, the shadow parties behind each of the brands, the parties that actually produce the policy, have their own institutional goals and imperatives like any institution or corporation, which presumably include self-determination and fear of death similar to most other semi-intelligent life forms. Like any other semi-intelligent life form, they seek to minimize expenditure of energy, maximize profits and shape the world around them to best suit them. As such, they deal with as few others as possible, favor those bearing the easiest return on investment (the wealthy with pre-written bills), and use their messaging apparatus to present a distorted (to be generous) but self-consistent narrative that favors their ongoing comfortable existence and influence.
In other words, partisans are patting themselves on the backs for beating the stuffing out of the other guy’s straw Coke/Pepsi bottle with Nerf(tm) bats while the field masters are behind them sipping one another’s product (mostly the red can), shooting rockets at 7-Up trucks, and throwing lit matches into the field whenever they think nobody’s looking. This is the real world outside the playhouse, kids.
At the next Nürnberg trials, “I was just following orders” will give way to the equally hackish and triply craven “I was just serving my Party”.