David Weigel attempts to clear the air about the sequester (2013’s hottest buzzword) but manages to only make things more murky.
How did this become Obama’s fault? It started with Mitt Romney, a once-influential Republican Party politician and its 2012 nominee for president. In the third debate with President Obama, Romney fretted that “a trillion dollars in cuts through sequestration and budget cuts to the military” would weaken America’s defenses. The president literally dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “The sequester is not something that I proposed,” he said. “It’s something that Congress has proposed. It will not happen.”
That was a lie. Obama and his advisors proposed it. Read on:
But here, on national TV, the president was putting the blame for sequestration (we can probably blame him for popularizing the bowdlerization, sequester) on “Congress.” Republicans knew that wasn’t true.
It wasn’t? Not really. The accidental Bible of Sequestration is The Price of Politics, Bob Woodward’s history of the debt-limit wars, and one of the least flattering portrayals of the president this side of Breitbart.com. In it, Woodward recounts a July 27, 2011, afternoon meeting between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and White House negotiators. Reid wanted a “trigger” as part of a debt deal, some way to force more cuts in the future without defaulting on the debt that summer. Chief of Staff Jack Lew and adviser Rob Nabors proposed sequestration, as a threat that could be averted if/when Congress passed a better deal.
Before that, Lew and Nabors talked over the idea with Obama. Boehner disliked the idea:
July 12, 2011:
They turned to [White House national economic council director Gene] Sperling for details about a compulsory trigger if they didn’t cut spending or raise taxes in an amount at least equivalent to the debt ceiling increase.
“A trigger would lock in our commitment,” Sperling explained. “Even though we disagree on the composition of how to get to the cuts, it would lock us in. The form of the automatic sequester would punish both sides. We’d have to September to avert any sequester” — a legal obligation to make spending cuts.
“Then we could use a medium or big deal to force tax reform,” Obama said optimistically.
“If this is a trigger for tax reform,” [House speaker John] Boehner said, “this could be worth discussing. But as a budget tool, it’s too complicated. I’m very nervous about this.”
“This would be an enforcement mechanism,” Obama said.
So Boehner didn’t want the sequester as it was designed. The President did. And now he claims he had no involvement with it at all.
But didn’t John Boehner take credit for sequestration? Yeah, but he didn’t take credit for the concept. On July 31, 2011, Boehner made a PowerPoint presentation to House Republicans that mentioned all the nice triggers they’d get if they backed the deal. Boehner, at the time, was trying to convince a lot of members who had sworn never to raise the debt limit that they could knuckle under and get cuts later. “Sequestration process,” read one slide, “is designed to guarantee that Congress acts on the Joint Committee’s legislation to cut spending.”
Boehner only wanted it if it came with tax reform. Which it doesn’t.
Republicans have tried to avert Obama’s sequester twice:
The House passed two bills related to sequestration replacement, but the first one, in May 2012, didn’t offer specific cuts. It moved the total amount of defense cuts over into the non-defense budget, like a croupier moving chips into the winner’s pile. The actual replacement cuts were only spelled out in the Spending Reduction Act of 2012, passed by a razor-thin, Republicans-only vote on Dec. 20, 2012.
And the Republicans get hammered for it:
The public is pretty well acclimated to blaming Republicans for a government shutdown…[t]he White House knows that.
By the way, why are they shutting down White House tours and threatening that government workers will be fired because of the sequester?
• $85 billion of automatic spending cuts will snap down on the federal budget. Half of the cuts will hit defense; half will hit Medicare spending.
So no, the parks won’t close, schools won’t close, and business should work as usual. The government will only shut down unless the administration wants it to shut down for political purposes.
In short: The Obama administration designed a mechanism to make Republicans look bad that cuts government spending. Republicans tried to stop it from being enacted, but the administration went ahead anyway, and now blames Republicans for the whole idea. It’s like lighting a stick of dynamite, placing it in someone’s hand, and then blaming them for trying to get you both killed.
