{"id":5940,"date":"2012-04-19T22:51:51","date_gmt":"2012-04-20T02:51:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=5940"},"modified":"2012-04-19T22:52:07","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T02:52:07","slug":"the-daily-gouge-friday-april-20th-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thedailygouge.com\/?p=5940","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Gouge, Friday, April 20th, 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Friday, April 20th, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!<\/strong><\/p>\n

First up on the last edition of the week, a provocative bit of prose from Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute; and for one of the few times we can remember, we have to say a member of the AEI<\/em> isn’t just off base, he’s half-way to second:<\/strong><\/p>\n

The doomed marriage between Mitt Romney and congressional Republicans<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Republicans in Congress belatedly closed ranks behind Mitt Romney this past week, with House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell abandoning their neutrality in favor of the clear nominee. The goal is a happy political marriage until Election Day in November\u2014and, ideally, beyond.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Arranged marriages of this sort\u2014between presidential candidates and their parties\u2019 members in Congress\u2014are practically mandated by the election cycle. But historically, they\u2019ve tended to produce shaky unions\u2014and there\u2019s good reason to believe the relationship between Romney and the Tea Party-driven congressional Republicans will be exceptional only in the severity of its uneasiness.<\/span> This is not an example of passionate matrimony, but a mere wedding of convenience\u2014and it\u2019s safe to say the honeymoon won\u2019t last long<\/em><\/span>.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

To be sure, there are always tensions between a presidential candidate and his congressional party. Their strategies are never in perfect alignment, because they need to reach different electorates. Presidential candidates focus on an electoral college map, which means emphasizing some states and ignoring others\u2014the latter to the detriment of House and Senate candidates from those areas, who miss out on the money spent and raised by the top of the ticket, and the get-out-the-vote organization it sets up. For their part, all lawmakers share a paramount aim\u2014assuring their own reelections, and keeping or winning a Congressional majority.<\/span><\/strong><\/span> If the presidential candidate can help, great. If not, as Newt Gingrich gleefully showed Bob Dole in 1996, they will readily throw the presidential candidate under the bus.<\/p>\n

This often becomes apparent in the issues that compete for spotlight in an election year. Presidential candidates may focus on issues or send messages that congressional candidates would prefer to avoid\u2014and congressional leaders may focus on issues that the presidential candidates want to shun. (Sometimes this is simply because the legislative timetable is out of sync with the presidential candidate\u2019s needs.) So when Bill Clinton mentioned gun control and an assault weapons ban in 1992, it made Democrats in Congress from the South and Southwest cringe. When George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative in 2000, it drove uncompassionate right-wingers batty; when those Congressmen and Senators adopted a hard edge, he had to try to temper it.<\/p>\n

But when it comes to Romney and his fellow Republicans in Washington, these inherent tensions are amplified considerably. At the center of the problem is the major gaffe of the campaign (gaffe in the Michael Kinsley sense: The utterance of an inconvenient truth): Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom\u2019s admission that after securing the nomination, Romney would do a reset, shaking the Etch-A-Sketch to pivot from his hard-right positions toward the middle, where the crucial swing votes reside.<\/span><\/strong><\/span> Congressional Republicans have never had interest in facilitating such a pivot. Indeed, they are already taking steps to prevent it.<\/p>\n

Start with the budget designed by Representative Paul Ryan, which House Republicans passed on a party line vote, and which Romney warmly endorsed. While that endorsement may have won Romney some credibility among conservatives, it also promises to tie his hands considerably if he wins the election.<\/strong><\/span> To take one example: The Ryan budget says that it will reduce all discretionary spending, domestic and defense, to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050, less than half of what it is today; but Romney has also pledged to put an ironclad 4 percent of GDP floor under defense spending alone. Taken together, then, a Romney administration would be committed to abandoning the entirety<\/em> of non-military government. No air traffic control, no Coast Guard, no transportation, energy program, NIH, CDC, Customs, FBI, NASA, and so on. None.<\/p>\n

Of course, that is 2050, decades off.<\/strong><\/span> But the Ryan budget also poses headaches for Romney right now. It jettisons the bipartisan agreement reached last year to avert default, offering sharply lower discretionary domestic spending numbers for next year\u2019s budget.<\/span><\/strong><\/span> That means there\u2019s a looming confrontation between the House and the Senate over their respective spending bills, which could result in a government shutdown when the new fiscal year begins on October 1\u2014less than five weeks before the election. For House Republicans, mostly from safe seats dominated by a feisty conservative base happy to have a confrontation, that is just fine. For Romney, not so much.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the Ryan budget numbers have been translated into a dozen specific spending ceilings for Appropriations subcommittees. That means the vague promises of cutbacks are in the process of becoming concrete proposals for cuts in specific programs. To pick an example, we already know that the House will propose a drastic cutback<\/span><\/em> in funding for food stamps. At a time of high unemployment, that will allow President Obama to conveniently portray not just the GOP, but Romney personally, as bent on taking food out of the mouths of poor children for the purpose of protecting tax breaks for billionaires.<\/span><\/strong><\/span> The food stamp cut will be matched or exceeded in coming months by other even less popular cutbacks, in health research, farm subsidies, food safety, and a host of popular programs. The Romney campaign would probably like to distance the candidate from some or all of these cuts, but it\u2019s exceedingly unclear if he\u2019s prepared to deal with the subsequent blowback from the Republican rank-and-file.<\/p>\n

But it isn\u2019t just budgetary matters that the Republican Party has boxed Romney in on. As a general election candidate, Romney would no doubt like to broaden his appeal among women and reduce the huge gender gap that he currently faces\u2014but such a pitch is complicated by the commitments that have been made by others in the party, and have subsequently earned his tacit endorsement. Nearly all congressional Republicans voted against the Lily Ledbetter Act on equal pay for women (most Senate Republicans filibustered against it); Romney, for his part, has remained silent on the issue. At the same time, Romney has offered full-throated support for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who faces a recall election in early June; Romney has yet to comment on the fact that Walker is about to sign a bill that repeals Wisconsin\u2019s equal pay for women.<\/p>\n

Mitt Romney would no doubt like to press a reset button, the better to appeal to voting blocs like women and Hispanics who now disdain him. He also clearly wants to sustain a united Republican party behind his candidacy.<\/span> It does not appear, however, that he will be able to have both.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

We don’t know what the AEI<\/em>‘s been serving in their coffee, but Ornstein’s had enough.\u00a0 First, let’s be clear about one thing: Paul Ryan’s budget cuts NOTHING….NADA….NOT A SINGLE FEDERAL PROGRAM.\u00a0 All it does is decrease<\/em><\/span> the rate of INCREASES!\u00a0 If Ornstein doesn’t know this, the AEI <\/em>should pull his Resident Scholar status; if he does and still wrote what he did, he should be traded to PMSNBC for a future draft pick.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Second, the vast majority of true Conservatives\/Tea Partiers are backing Mitt despite<\/em><\/span> his policies, not from any sense of support.\u00a0 And regardless of what Ornstein may think, this Conservative block, the true heart and soul of the GOP, is counting<\/em><\/span> on the House to rein in Romney’s RINO urges….and looking to position a like-minded candidate in the VP slot so as to groom a Conservative successor should the need arise to jettison Mitt if he strays from the Republican reservation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lastly, Ornstein assumes House Republicans will somehow be forced to vote on an actual budget between now and Election Day….as if!\u00a0 Harry Reid would sooner surrender his seat than allow the Senate to vote on a budget….ANY budget; and without a Senate alternative, all anyone on Capitol Hill will be voting on is another continuing resolution to keep the lights on until after the election.\u00a0 In the meantime, House Republicans and Mitt Romney have gone on record as willing to support a plan which would curtail the runaway spending that’s driving America into insolvency.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The way this election’s shaping up, this alone should allow the honeymoon to last at least until after President Romney’s inauguration.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As for anything Harry Reid thinks….<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reid: Save the Postal Service, seniors depend on junk mail<\/span><\/h1>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Pick us a winner, Harry!<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is making a top-to-bottom case for prompt passage of a Postal Service reform bill that if defeated, he says, would deny seniors their beloved junk mail. \u201cI\u2019ll come home tonight here to my home in Washington and there\u2019ll be some mail there,\u201d the Nevada Democrat said Wednesday on the Senate floor. \u201cA lot of it is what some people refer to as junk mail, but for the people who are sending that mail, it\u2019s very important.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when talking about seniors, seniors love getting junk mail. It\u2019s sometimes their only way of communicating or feeling like they\u2019re part of the real world.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

….we’d be willing to bet Bob McClain’s net worth no one give a flying fart!\u00a0 Which should surprise no one given Reid’s penchant for the preposterous:<\/strong><\/p>\n