Reactions from the right on the debt deal reached in Washington, last night, run the gamut from the WSJ’s “A Tea Party Triumph”,
The tea partiers pride themselves on adhering to the Constitution, which was intended to make political change difficult. Yet in this deal they’ve forced both parties to make the biggest spending cuts in 15 years, with more cuts likely next year. The U.S. is engaged in an epic debate over the size and scope of government that will play out over several years, and the most important battle comes in the election of 2012.
Tea partiers will do more for their cause by applauding this victory and working toward the next, rather than diminishing what they’ve accomplished because it didn’t solve every fiscal problem in one impossible swoop.
to Glenn Beck’s “We’ve just been betrayed by Washington”:
Republicans and Democrats have just negotiated away the future of our children behind closed doors. The big compromise on Capitol Hill features elaborate triggers, tranches, Hornswogglers, Snozzwangers, Super Duper Commissions that will make the Snozzberries taste like Snozeberries, and a whole bunch of other convoluted gibberish that will, no doubt, come with loopholes and create entire new bureaucracies. What it doesn’t do is fix the problem.
I’d like to know how Glenn Beck thinks we can get everything we want when Republicans hold only the House and we’re dealing with Democrat Socialists in the Senate and White House. It’s true that newly elected Republicans have a mandate. Obama doesn’t care about their mandates, and he doesn’t care about the constitution. He thinks he has his own mandate. That’s what Boehner and Mitch McConnell have to deal with.
Jed Babbin at The American Spectator walks us through what led to the current deal: Slippery Weasels, Deals, and Triggers:
McConnell was in the driver’s seat for two reasons. First, House Speaker John Boehner was double-crossed by Obama and rightly walked away from negotiating with Obama two weeks ago, but his plan to cut a deal with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid was — as I pointed out at the time — bound to fail. When it did, and after Boehner’s own attempt at a solo solution was blocked by House conservatives, Boehner was so weakened that McConnell was forced to step in. Second, because the “notoriously subdued” McConnell (as the Washington Post characterized him yesterday) proved able to flush the president out of the tall grass that he’s been hiding in for months.
McConnell, as he said repeatedly this weekend, was negotiating with the only person who can sign a bill into law. “If we get a deal,” he said yesterday, “the president will be supporting it.”
We know a lot about the deal, and part of that knowledge is that neither Boehner’s plan nor Reid’s will be the result.
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Newsmax interviewed Gover Norquist, who Loves the Deal: Obama Big Loser:
“The deal proved that we can cut spending without trading away tax hikes,” Norquist says.
He adds that the deal is no passing congressional fad, but a milestone in Capitol Hill thinking about spending and taxes.
Norquist says that Obama is the big loser in this deal:
“Obama’s internal polling must scare the heck out of him,” Norquist says. “He caved on the key Republican demands: no tax hike, spending cuts equal to the debt ceiling increase.”
According to the White House, the deal would potentially impose $850 billion in cuts to the Defense Department – $350 billion now, and another $500 billion in automatic cuts if a special committee can’t agree on anything by the end of the year. Additional cuts would come out of other national security spending.
Obama earlier this year had proposed to cut $400 billion from Defense, a bad idea that has somehow gained general acceptance. Now the president is prepared to try to force the special committee to come up with a plan – and avoid the automatic cuts – by holding our national security hostage.
Here’s what incoming Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said last week about such defense cuts, before he knew they would be part of the debt ceiling deal:
Based on the difficulty of achieving the $400 billion cut, I believe $800 billion would be extraordinarily difficult and very high risk.
Forget what Dempsey says – as our president and Congress evidently did. It doesn’t take an expert in military planning to understand that you don’t vastly decrease defense spending during a time of war and while overseas threats are growing.
Fox News has the reactions of presidential candidates Newt Gingrich, Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and John Huntsman – all but Huntsman give it a thumbs down.
UPDATE:The Foundry: *Even the Fakery is Fake: Joint Committee is NOT REQUIRED to Recommend $1.5 Trillion in Deficit Reduction:
The “Budget Control Act of 2011″ (BCA) contains provisions for a joint committee of Congress, whose supposed job it is to make recommendations to reduce the deficit by $1.5 trillion. But the legislation does not require the joint committee to do that job. It is merely a “goal” of the joint committee to recommend at least $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction, but even if the committee fails to do so, the Congress will give expedited consideration anyway to whatever is in the joint committee bill. The Congressional Budget Office letter of August 1, 2011 scoring the legislation noted that the joint committee is merely “charged with the goal of reducing the deficit by at least $1.5 trillion between 2012 and 2021.”
We know that proposing $1.5 trillion is the intended job of the joint committee, because a slide from Speaker Boehner’s office (marked “Updated: July 31, 10:35 pm EST”) says the agreed-on framework “creates a 12-member Joint Committee required to report legislation by November 23, 2011 that would produce a proposal to reduce the deficit by at least $1.5T over 10 years.”
But sometime between the Speaker’s slide at 10:35 p.m. and the House Legislative Counsel’s draft of the “Budget Control Act of 2011″ (marked “August 1, 2011 (12:04 p.m.)” and posted on the House Rules Committee Website) somebody made the decision that the joint committee does not actually need to propose $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. Because the actual legislation does not require the joint committee bill to recommend $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction for the bill to get expedited consideration in Congress.
The Tea Party activist group FreedomWorks has issued what they’re calling a ‘Key Vote “NO” letter’ to all members of the U.S. House of Representatives, urging them to vote against the revised Boehner bill, which attempts to avoid crisis by reducing the deficit and raising the debt ceiling.
The letter says the House Speaker’s plan “still fails to fundamentally change the way Washington spends. Anything less than that, FreedomWorks cannot and will not support.”
FreedomWorks instead pushes Republican lawmakers to stick to the “Cut, Cap and Balance’ bill passed in the House earlier this month. “We will be engaging our activist network of over 1.4 million grassroots volunteers… to remind Speaker Boehner and the rest of the Republican establishment that the “Cut, Cap, and Balance Act’ is both good politics and good policy.”
latest update:
The Congressional Progressive Caucus will hold a 4pm news conference on the debt deal. Yesterday, Chairman Rep. Raúl Grijalva put out a scathing critique of the bill.
See also:
The Other McCain: Congress Expected to Vote on Debt Deal Today; Left, Right Spin It in Blame Game
The Rhetorican:
How did we get here? You can blame the whole mess on cynical Democrats like Harry Reid, who could have raised the debt ceiling while in control of Congress last year. But they simply didn’t want to, preferring to play politics with the nation’s finances instead.
RELATED:
Dick Morris: OBAMA FACING LANDSLIDE LOSS – DICK MORRIS TV: LUNCH ALERT!
Nile Gardiner, UK Telegraph: Barack Obama’s vulgar Twitter spamming campaign is a classless act of desperation by the US president:
One would have thought the leader of the free world might have better things to do with his time than spam Twitter with highly partisan tweets that quickly became a major annoyance, the online equivalent of receiving voluminous amounts of junk mail through the post. With the United States facing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression due to towering mountains of federal debt (much of it racked up by his own administration), the president should be actively thinking of ways to reduce the size of government, cut the budget deficit and spur job growth, instead of flooding social media with politically charged propaganda.
As the president’s approval rating slips to a dismal 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the spin-obsessed White House only looks further out of touch with reality in a nation where 75 percent of likely voters believe the country is moving down the wrong direction.
P/Oed Patriot: Obama: “This Has Been A Long And Messy Process”
Watch Obama’s video message to his minions (OFA), thanking them for all the hard work they did spamming Congress in letters, phone calls, emails, and tweets.
Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin: Debt Deal Watch; Update: Boehner Having Trouble Rounding Up Enough House Votes
Frances W Poretto weighs in with: No, No, 240 Times No:
Your Curmudgeon has concluded that the debt ceiling must not be raised — that the federal government must be constrained to spend only what it can gather in normal revenues, regardless of any appropriations bills that militate to the contrary. Here are his reasons:
Keep reading.
UPDATE:
HOT AIR: Open thread: House vote to finally put America out of its misery; Update: Trouble getting votes? Update: Gabby Giffords returns to D.C., will vote yes; Update: Bill passes, 269-161
Linked by Michelle Malkin in Buzzworthy, thanks!
Nice Deb 