As sequestration cuts bite, Congress is content with recrimination
With partisan campaigning for the 2014 midterms looming, the window of opportunity for better budget policy is closing fast
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. Photograph: Pete Marovich/ZUMA Press/Corbis
Even for a Congress as remorselessly unproductive as this one, the summer of 2013 presents a unique challenge: there is a lot of work to avoid accomplishing on several important pieces of legislation, from the farm bill to immigration reform to passing a budget.
All of these topics stirred up controversy at the Aspen Ideas Festival, a yearly gathering that draws luminaries and the intellectually curious to a town deliberately far from the world's problems so that they can be examined and contemplated from afar. But you can't get far enough from this Congress's problems, and in particular, the sequestration plan to cut the federal budget willy-nilly; it has dominated most of the economic and political panels.
"It's an awful, awful piece of legislation," former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin groused about the sequestration.
Current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned:
"I don't think the consequences of sequestration are policies that are good for the country or broadly what the American people want … I have a fairly high degree of confidence that what was designed to be a bad policy is going to have consequences that are very unattractive."
But there was a new, still more bitter perception: the feeling that Congress just doesn't care anymore. David Rubenstein, the co-founder of the powerful Washington investment firm the Carlyle Group, noted that sequestration – designed to be terrible – has not increased Congress's desire to pass a real budget. In fact, it's done the opposite:
"The deficit is down to $350bn [from more than $1tn], so the ardor to do anything has completely gone."
Lew, while pledging to get something done, also steered clear of promising that it would get done this summer:
"I think we have to get on to the debate of how do we have alternative policies to do deficit reduction and make room for the kinds of investments that will keep America on the cutting edge in the next generation. And I can't tell you if that's going to be the next two months or not."
When someone in Washington says he's not sure if something is going to get done "in the next two months or not", you can count on "not". That means you can forget about a budget passing this summer.
It's a wonder if one will pass at all. In previous years, Republicansthreatened not to raise the debt limit, which meant they refused to allow the Treasury to pay the bills run up by Congress. That provided them with some leverage on budget negotiations – a stupid sort of leverage, which they now wisely seem to have abandoned as an option. It also means that without a manufactured crisis, there is no urgency to a budget solution.
This confirms that the stalemate is here to stay. The variety of comments from the Aspen conference shows that the expectation of progress on the matter of the budget is most likely a pure illusion. A lot of attendees and speakers complained – either privately or in public – about the destructive stubbornness of the other side.
These grumbles illuminate that the real problem with getting a budget passed is not primarily the amount of money to be cut, or even where to cut it. Rather, it's that, in the words of a movie trailer, this time it's personal. Neither side has any interest in doing business with the other. Many don't even know how.
Take the exasperated comments of Eric Cantor, leader of a group of conservative Republicans that have driven most of the opposition to the Obama administration's legislative plans. Cantor suggested that Obama was unfriendly – at least, compared to Joe Biden – and called the president's "charm offensive" on Congress "a success that has not yet been realized (pdf)". Cantor, describing his dinners out with the Bidens, noted:
"From a personal perspective what I can tell you is I don't feel … I speak to the president enough to try and resolve differences and work problems out. I contrast that with my relationship with the vice-president … We actually go and interact with the vice-president and go out to dinner with him and his wife and call each other – and that's how relationships should happen in Washington, just like they happen everywhere else in this country, in the world."
In a later panel on American-Israeli relations, the philanthropist Lester Crown expressed a similar sentiment, suggesting that Obama has hurt his base of support for Middle East policy by showing little emotion:
"Both Clinton and Bush were huggers, and the American Jewish community loves huggers."
Obama has also made light of his supposed coolness toward Republican leaders. At the White House correspondents' dinner, he said:
"Some folks still don't think I spend enough time with Congress. 'Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?' they ask. Really? Why don't you get a drink with Mitch McConnell?"
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew seemed to know that this was a major issue. In his interview at the Ideas Festival, Lew mounted a defense of the president's personality (pdf):
"And I guess I'd say this, he is one of the smartest people that you can engage with. Broadly knowledgeable, well-read, listens, remembers, could easily jump into the technical work that each of us do. And he is, I think as good as anyone I've ever seen, going in and out of the detail so that he rolls up his sleeves and he'll work with, you know, anyone on anything."
Do you see the problem here? The president's adversaries lament his lack of warmth and his remote intellectualism; his supporters see the same quality as an analytical and cool-headed virtue. This could be a cute "the president is from Mars, Republicans are from Venus" thing – if it weren't for the fact that several important issues this summer, including the budget and food-stamp funding, hinge on whether these two crazy kids will ever figure it out. At the base of their problem is an absence of mutual respect and a lack of legislative sportsmanship.
Until the players figure this out – and there's no sign they ever will – we're going to be stuck in an endless loop of revisiting these unhelpful battles that drag on for years. This summer is the last chance for any legislation to get through. Starting in the fall, the campaigns for the 2014 midterm elections are going to start, and the window for serious legislative action will have closed – at which point you can kiss any progress on major bills goodbye.
This feels familiar. This budget battle is, as Lew pointed out, a karmic revisitation of the last budget battle:
"This isn't a question of one side kind of winning or losing. I think the notion that there are some who are saying sequestration was our great victory … nobody thought it was a great victory in August 2011. It was kind of the only way to resolve a miserable battle over whether or not theUnited States should default, by getting the debt limit extended and having a frame for Congress to get some more time to make some sensible policy."
Lew is right about one thing: the sequestration cuts are not a question of "one side" winning or losing. They're a question of the nation, the economy and the American people losing. They're a question of poor people losing: Meals on Wheels will suffer, as will those living in federal housing.
No one, so far, is winning at all. Even more concerning, it's not abundantly clear that anyone in Washington knows how to play the game anymore.
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