That whole sequestration thing the 11-dimensional chess king came up with!
Most Democrats have grudgingly agreed to six more weeks of funding under 2013 sequestration levels, which the Senate-passed budget preserved on Friday—and that would their best-case scenario at this point. Not everyone is thrilled, but in comparison to altering Obamacare, shutting down the government, or negotiating over the debt ceiling, it is the bare minimum that Congress can and must do, President Obama stressed on Friday.
“My message to Congress is this: Do not shut down the government, do not shut down the economy,” the president said. “Pass a budget on time. Pay our bills on time.”
But whether intentionally or not, it could ultimately help Republicans shift the goalposts in terms of the actual 2014 budget, some Democrats fear. “One could say it is a great bait and switch. We’re talking about Obamacare, which really has no place in this debate at all. In the meantime, they’re giving us a very low number—they’re enshrining sequestration,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat. “The Senate number, which is $70 billion higher, that would be the old Ryan budget number, which we used to say was terrible. Now if only we could get that high.”
“I believe we are going to see sequestration made permanent, and I believe quite frankly that’s where so many in the Republican ranks want to go,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro. The fight over Obamacare is ”a sideshow to where we go on sequestration.”
Democrats could still regain fiscal leverage if Boehner decides to cut a deal with Democrats and abandon the conservative flank of the GOP he’s been beholden to. Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi has already said she’d be willing to “split the difference” between the House GOP and Senate Democratic budgets by passing a $1.17 trillion bill. But Democrats aren’t going to even pick up the phone until Republicans take their Obamacare demands and debt-ceiling threat off the table.
As a Boehner aide told reporters on Friday: ”The president has not called the speaker at all this week.”
The anarchist Right (libertarian Republicans and T-baggers) hate government. They want government defunded (sequestration) and then abolished. Last night the anarchists (one who believes in anarchy) shut our government down. The anarchist Right insists that laissez faire capitalism (free markets) be allowed to supplant government. That notion is known as corporatism or more commonly Fascism. (See Mussolini’s Italy.) Is there an anarchist Left? What are they called? Wasn’t WWII, in fact, a civil war waged between the anarchist Right and the anarchist Left?