Our ongoing debt battle will soon move to its next phase, where the 12-member "super Congress" will attempt to negotiate $1.8 trillion in further budget cuts; if they can't come to an agreement, or if they do come to an agreement and their plan isn't adopted by the full non-super Congress, a package of cuts, taken equally from defense and non-defense discretionary spending (with a few programs held harmless) goes into effect. Jonathan Chait sees a silver lining in all this:
The anti-tax movement has held absolute sway within the GOP for two decades. But it's worth noting that the GOP has never had to choose among its constituencies in a zero-sum fiscal environment before. The policy of huge tax cuts and big defense spending hikes could coexist as long as Republicans could just run up the budget deficit. The party refused to reconcile its contradictions by refusing to acknowledge fiscal reality. Higher revenue to pay for the wars? Reagan proved deficits don't matter. It's easy to hold all your factions together when you refusing to acknowledge basic accounting properties (deficits equal expenditures minus revenue, not just "too much" expenditures by definition.) George W. Bush made the defense hawks happy, made the medical industry happy with a prescription drug bill designed to maximize their profits, and made rich people in general happy with a series of regressive tax cuts.
But imagine Democrats insist on higher revenue, and they decide, sensibly enough, that failure to cut a bipartisan deal is better than $1.8 trillion in cuts. (Which is probably is.) Then what? Well, then the entire defense lobby plus the entire medical and insurance lobbies turn fiercely against the very people with whom they had marched shoulder-to-shoulder under Bush. If the Democrats hold the line and insist on more revenue, the committee has the potential to split the GOP coalition wide open.
It's certainly possible, but after having incorrectly predicted crackups of the GOP coalition at various times over the last few years, I've concluded that their ability to stick together should never be underestimated. One should also remember that with a few exceptions, the anti-tax people and the pro-defense people are the same people. There are almost no true budget hawks in the Republican Party -- almost to a person, Republicans want to cut spending on things they don't like, but not on things they do like.They appear to be budget hawks only because compared to Democrats there are fewer government programs they like. As Jon points out, there is already pressure coming to make sure the six Republican members of the commission are anti-tax absolutists. But that shouldn't be a problem, since that describes pretty much every Republican these days. In other words, it's hard to have a battle between two kinds of Republicans when on these questions there is really only one kind of Republican.
Nevertheless, the commission does potentially set up the situation Jon describes, where they are forced to choose between a package that includes tax increases on one hand, and the triggered cuts, which weigh more heavily toward defense cuts, on the other. The problem is that that outcome depends on the Democratic members of the commission being steely-eyed negotiators who don't budge on their insistence that some revenue be included in the commission's final recommendations. That might happen, I suppose. But let's just say we don't have many recent examples of Democrats being steely-eyed negotiators. So it would seem that the more likely outcome is that the Democratic commission members make a pro forma request for revenue, then drop it in the face of Republican immovability and spend their time trying to limit the damage to important programs that $1.8 trillion in cuts will cause. Then the final recommendation spreads the pain around but includes no tax increases, just as the Republican members insist. And once again, Republicans get what they want, and Democrats say, "Hey, it could have been worse."
