Scott Spiegel

The deal Congressional Republicans made with Democrats last week to cut the federal budget and avoid a government shutdown is the scam of the decade.

Mainstream media, conservative commentators, and Republican politicians call it a grand victory for the GOP, showing as it does Speaker of the House John Boehner’s suave negotiating skills, the GOP’s ability to nudge Democrats from their opening position, and Republicans’ luck in getting $6 billion more in cuts than Boehner had asked for.

FOX News’ Carl Cameron crowed, “Who Won the Shutdown Showdown?  It Wasn’t Even Close…  Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved.  They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.  Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.”

All of these numbers are meaningless, constituting as they do microscopic slivers of the federal deficit.

To put the cuts in perspective, CNS News reported that the federal debt jumped $54 billion in the eight days before Congress approved the $38.5 billion in cuts.  The cuts leave the 2011 budget $773 billion greater than the 2008 budget, higher by about the same amount as the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus bill.

Congress is negotiating over grains of sand while a dune is about to collapse on us.

Also riding the self-congratulatory bandwagon was the CATO Institute’s Chris Edwards, who declared, “It is a victory for freshman conservative Republicans.  The real question is whether this is the beginning of a sustained movement, or a one-shot deal?  I’m an optimist, so I think it is the first of many spending-cut actions…”  I’ve seen wily Democrats and spineless Republicans in action, and I’m a pessimist.

Edwards: “Also, if the baseline is down $38 billion this year and that is sustained or built upon, it’s down $380 billion or more over 10 years.”  The operative word here is ‘and.’

The other operative word is ‘if.’  Not only do the alleged $38.5 billion in cuts constitute just 1% of Obama’s proposed budget, they consist of: things that had no chance of being funded, unused funds from prior years, funds that hadn’t been specified for projects, non-renewals of things meant to be one-off expenses, one-time cuts that will be reversed next year, and salaries for czars who have already resigned.

Half the cuts involve, as The Associated Press put it, “simply mopping up pools of unused money spread across the budget” and using them “to shore up day-to-day agency budgets and other programs like health research.”  In other words, half the cuts don’t involve actual cuts.

But the Heritage Foundation’s Ron Utt gushed, “Without examining the numbers in any detail I consider it an important win for our side, and a momentum boost for the bigger issue to come: the FY 2012 budget battle.”  Without examining Lindsay Lohan’s parole record in any detail, I declare her fully rehabilitated and fit for polite society.

There’s also the nature of the cuts to consider.  Here are a few things Republicans cut: $2 billion from Defense, $1 billion from Homeland Security, $600 million from the Army Corps of Engineers, and $5 billion from a crime victim compensation fund.

Here are a few things Republicans didn’t cut: ObamaCare, the Agriculture Department, NPR, PBS.  Republicans also left out resolutions blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing global warming restrictions and preventing implementation of new Wall Street regulations.

Republicans’ defense—they had to compromise on the 2011 budget so Democrats would work with them on the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget—is as fallacious as they come.  If Republicans can’t stand up to Democrats on pennies, what chance is there they’ll stand up on dollars?

Why should we believe Boehner will side with us tomorrow?  Boehner concluded a recent op-ed in USA Today saying, “[W]e are committed to using our limited power to maximum effect in the effort to end the uncertainty facing job creators and put our economy back on a path to job creation and prosperity.”  That’s not a strategy for fighting Marxist Democrats, it’s a campaign slogan.

Even Paul Ryan, bless his Path to Prosperity proposal to cut $5.8 trillion from spending over the next decade, fell for the trap.

If Republicans do anything to prevent the $14 trillion debt ceiling from being raised and make meaningful cuts to entitlement spending, it will be in spite of the first step they gutlessly refused to take on the 2011 budget.



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• Did We Say $38 Billion in Cuts? How Does $14 Billion Sound? (reason.com)
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• In budget deal, White House avoided deeper cuts by harvesting leftover savings (oregonlive.com)
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On Saturday President Obama magnanimously announced that he was willing to support cutting $33 billion from 2010 federal spending levels for 2011—which, for the mathematically challenged, is about 1% of infinity.

Congressional Democrats screamed that these cuts were way too large.  Republicans countered that the cuts didn’t go far enough and should be extended to $61 billion, which amounts to about 2% of infinity.

With current spending set to run out this week, the federal government faces a shutdown on Friday night unless Congress can agree on which of these piddly sums to cut from the budget.

Tea party supporters have been rightly insulted by these farcical negotiating positions, arguing that hundreds of billions could be saved just by, for example, eliminating redundant programs.

As Rasmussen reports, a majority of Americans haven’t been snookered into thinking these microscopic doses of fiscal austerity will do a thing to address our long-term budget crisis.

Meanwhile, the only Congressman clear-eyed enough to appreciate the extent of the crisis, knowledgeable enough to propose a plan to resolve it, and brave enough to stand up for his proposal in the face of Republican wishy-washiness—namely, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan—and also not crazily isolationist on foreign policy (Ron and Rand Paul) has offered a blueprint called “A Path to Prosperity,” modeled after his 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future.”

Ryan’s plan proposes phasing out Medicare by replacing it with vouchers and turning it over to the states, making major changes to Medicaid, and taking similar action with Social Security after these two behemoths have been wrestled to the ground.

The central irony of Ryan’s stance is that, as he claims, his is the only proposal that will help “save” these programs, whereas current entitlement obligations will, if continued at their present levels, lead to eventual insolvency.

While Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security are unsustainable, unconstitutional Ponzi schemes, and while our country somehow managed to survive 189 and 159 years respectively without them, I suppose we need to start somewhere.  I guess a Budget Chairman who wants to drastically reform these albatrosses in order to save them is as good a start as we’re going to get nowadays from a political standpoint.

Ryan’s plan proposes cutting $5 trillion from the national debt over the next decade, and eventually eliminating the national debt, all without raising taxes.

On Tuesday, Obama rejected a third stopgap offer from House Majority Leader John Boehner to keep the government open another week while budget negotiations continue.

Obama’s right—we shouldn’t settle for on-the-fly, seat-of-our-pants, week-by-week spending plans.  Republicans should hold their ground and not be afraid to shut the government down on Friday.

Some who claim to favor entitlement reform have counseled House Republicans to compromise with Democrats on this week’s negotiations, so that Democrats will work with them later on more substantial cuts like Ryan’s.  The Chicago Tribune counsels, “Better to declare victory at $33 billion, or whatever more Republicans can wrest from Democrats, and move on to the bigger picture.  Because sanity in federal spending isn’t going to be restored by dealing in billions.  It’s going to be restored by dealing in trillions…  A deal today on discretionary spending could lay the foundation for bipartisan agreement on the far more impactful issue of entitlements.”

So giving in to Democrats will create goodwill and set the stage for larger-scale cuts, whereas shutting down the government will cause Democrats to dig in further and resist compromise later on.

One question: Since when did Democrats respond to Republican compromise with magnanimous, reciprocal behavior?

Sensing that they’re about to win on the shutdown, dyed-in-the-wool leftists like E. J. Dionne are already crying, “The Ryan budget’s central purpose will not be deficit reduction but the gradual dismantling of key parts of government…  Americans are about to learn… how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.”  Ezra Klein whines that Ryan’s plan will mean “leaving the old and the poor without health care.”  These are the people who are going to be placated by giving in on minute cuts now into accepting huge cuts several months from now?

Republicans’ negotiation strategy, from Bush I to Bush II to Boehner, has always been: The other side asks for an inch; Republicans give a mile.  Democrats’ strategy is: The other side asks for an inch; Democrats take a mile.  See how fair and evenhanded things are!

To take just one recent example, Congressional Republicans begged Democrats to consider including medical malpractice tort reform, legalizing health insurance sales across state lines, and offering greater tax deductions for health care costs in their ObamaCare bill.  Democrats responded by ignoring all these ideas and muscling through their bill inappropriately using the budget reconciliation procedure after the enraged residents of Massachusetts denied them their 60th Senate vote.

Battling Democrats legislatively is like fighting terrorists militarily—you don’t show them how weak and spineless you are; you show them how ruthless and merciless you can be.  They don’t respond to anything else.



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President Barack Obama wants the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 extended at the end of this year for only those making under $250,000, and not for small business owners and two-income families—sorry, “the filthy, stinking rich.”

Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, want all of the tax cuts renewed.

Last June, Obama’s former economic advisor Christina Rohmer published an empirical paper demonstrating that tax cuts stimulate economic growth.

In July, Obama’s Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke observed that continuing all of the Bush tax cuts past 2010 would be a wise idea.

Recently, moderate Democrats and Independents in Congress including Senators Kent Conrad, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Jim Webb, and Joe Lieberman, and a dozen Representatives, have stated that they are open to extending all of the Bush tax cuts.

Last week, Peter Orszag, Obama’s former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote an editorial in the New York Times supporting both sets of tax cuts as preferable to neither.

On Monday, Rasmussen reported that a majority of Americans favor letting the Bush tax cuts continue for upper income brackets.

Naturally, in this environment of receptiveness to renewing the Bush tax cuts and reinterpreting economic history, Boehner has capitalized on the wave of bipartisan goodwill and public support by announcing that he is fine with… discontinuing the tax cuts for high earners.

The setup for Boehner’s boner was foreseeable, since it has happened to spineless Republicans too many times before.  During his speech last Wednesday in Cleveland, Obama did a nice little hit job on Boehner and his policies, claiming that Boehner had no new ideas and simply wanted to return to the Bush era.

Last week, The New York Times did its own hit job on Boehner.

On Sunday, Boehner did something to actually deserve a hit job.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” host Bob Schieffer tried, successfully, to trap Boehner into saying that he would support only the middle class tax cuts, if Democrats opposed the tax cuts on high earners.

I may be reading too much into the tea leaves, but it seems that Schieffer may possibly have tipped his hand to Boehner when he rhetorically asked his audience, in the immediate lead-up to the interview, “Will he try to block middle-class tax cuts, if he can’t get the same cuts for the wealthy?  We’ll ask.”

When asked, Boehner sheepishly agreed that this would be a dandy idea.

Schieffer rubbed Boehner’s nose in his blunder by restating, no fewer than three times, what Boehner’s new position on taxes apparently was.  Boehner never once regained his footing.

As Mark Levin put it, Boehner responded to Schieffer by “embracing the template of the left, rather than deconstructing it.”

In the midst of a national anti-spending, anti-taxing, anti-class warfare tempest, in which Republicans have their largest lead by far in the history of the generic poll, and are poised to make overwhelming gains in Congress, Boehner decided, on the most important issue of the day, to punt.

Evidently Boehner fears that if he stands his ground against extending only some of the tax cuts, Democrats will try to portray the Republican leader as opposing all tax cuts.  This is like portraying a fish as opposing water.  Even liberal voters don’t believe Republicans are opposed to tax cuts.

Boehner should have responded, “I object to the premise of the question, which inappropriately puts our side on the defensive.  Why aren’t you asking House Democrats, who are actually the ones in power and can set the agenda for what we vote on, whether they would veto tax cuts for the middle class if the legislation didn’t exclude tax cuts for people in the upper brackets?  Is their irrational desire to punish the rich so strong that they would hurt lower income earners just to spite Republicans?  Are they not even going to allow an up-or-down vote on our proposal?”

When the Republicans sweep Congress in November, they will need a leader who can bravely implement conservative views and oppose Democratic monstrosities.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Minority Whip John Kyl all disavowed Boehner’s comments on Monday, affirming that they would insist on a vote on renewing the entire set of tax cuts.  McConnell and Kyl reported that all 41 Republican Senators are opposed to extending the tax cuts to only the middle class.  But no—Boehner had to make nice to a liberal talk show host and demonstrate to Democrats that he was too weak-kneed to stand up to their disastrous agenda.

I don’t care if Boehner is “triangulating,” or trying to win points with the administration because he thinks Obama’s bill can’t pass the Senate anyway.  He needs to defend the principle that tax cuts for high earners increase incentives to invest and take risks, and yield greater government revenue, and he needs to say it using those terms.  Boehner may think he’s being clever, but what if his strategy backfires during the upcoming lame duck session of Congress—a distinct possibility, given the ruthless kamikaze machinations we saw from Democrats on the health care bill?  What if his words lead some moderate Republicans to feel pressured into giving in on tax cuts?

This is not an ideological purity test—it is a test of basic competence.  If Boehner isn’t clever enough to come up with an uncompromising response to a predictable query from a leftist septuagenarian in the dinosaur media, then he’s not adept or coherent enough to be an effective House Majority Leader for the reenergized, newly ascendant, Tea Party-infused conservative movement.



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Lindsey Graham, Olympia Snowe, Dede Scozzafava… whoops—that’s the Huffington Post’s Top 10 Conservatives of 2009!

10. Hannah Giles, Conservative Activist and “Performing Artist” – Twenty-year-old Giles helped bust ACORN with her brilliantly direct scheme of walking right into their offices and asking their staff if they’d help her set up a prostitution ring with underage El Salvadoran girls, to which they responded by falling all over themselves to comply.  It’s so horrifying it’s like those classic psychology experiments in which researchers had no idea their subjects would actually carry out their instructions, like Stanley Milgram’s electric shock experiment.

9. Sarah Palin, Democratic Congressional Reelection Death Panelist – This summer Palin helped put Democrats’ health care “reform” initiative on indefinite life support by identifying the logical conclusion of their plans to expand health care coverage while slashing Medicare and not increasing the deficit—i.e., health care rationing, or “death panels.”  In addition to resigning in July and saving Alaskans millions by heading off costly and baseless ethics complaints against her, she released an autobiography that’s on track to become the best-selling political memoir ever.

8. Dick Cheney, Former Vice President and Current Presidential Superego – If there’s anything that can compensate for not having Dick Cheney as VP anymore, it’s getting to hear him expound on the pigheaded mistakes the new President is repeatedly making on foreign policy.  Cheney hammered Obama for promising to close Guantanamo Bay, for releasing the “torture” memos, for “dithering” over his decision on General Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops in Afghanistan, and for bringing self-confessed 9/11 masterminds to Manhattan for civilian trials.

7. Rick Santelli, CNBC Editor and Ranteur Extraordinaire – On a wintry day in February, some prescient burst of fiery indignation took hold of this outspoken CNBC commentator, who railed on-air against the irresponsibility of Obama’s Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan and got the CME Group futures traders on the floor around him up in arms.  His idea led to the grassroots Tea Party Movement, which spawned rallies on April 15, the July 4 weekend, and September 12 in thousands of cities across the country, with hundreds of thousands of attendees.

6. Doug Hoffman, RINO Party Crasher – Though he lost the special election for the open House seat in New York’s 23rd congressional district, he came remarkably close to winning, and he forced out a RINO who had backing from ACORN and was as bad as or worse than the Democratic candidate.  Hoffman reenergized the GOP on a national level, and an Obama visit or two to New York’s 23rd district, like the multiple stops he made for losing gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia, would probably have pushed Hoffman over the top.

5. Liz Cheney, Accomplished Conservative Mother of Five Who Isn’t Palin or Bachmann – Cheney tirelessly fought off the fact-deficient ravings of Andrea Mitchell, Norah O’Donnell and others, demonstrating the temerity desperately needed by the GOP in defending its principles against an MSM stacked against us.  Cheney will indisputably be a figure on the national political scene in coming years, because she’s already said she’s “open” to running for public office—and in politics, “no” means “maybe” and “maybe” means “yes.”

4. John Boehner, House Minority Leader and Stimulus Bill Percussionist – Boehner played an unassuming but important role, out of the spotlight, visible mostly only to his colleagues on the House floor.  He consistently pushed for free market reforms to health care and denounced the Democrats’ plans to increase government involvement and spending in health care.  He also ably deconstructed Obama disasters like the stimulus bill and Cash for Clunkers.

3. Rush Limbaugh, Racist Attention-Seeker Who Hates Obama for Personal Reasons – Rush could have taken the year off and coasted into the top 10 with the cumulative influence he’s had on the conservative movement, but in 2009 he had a particularly effective year, one in which he dissected the Obama administration’s schemes and always kept his listeners one step ahead of the MSM.  Rush stated early on, “I hope Obama fails.”  Everyone, including Rush’s opponents, knew exactly what he meant—and Rush never backed down from his statement.

2. Michele Bachmann, America’s Favorite Tea Party Hostess – This was the year that Bachmann, like Liz Cheney, became a conservative rock star.  She rallied the troops at Tea Party gatherings, including the massive march in D.C. in September, proposed her own health care reform bill, and cosponsored others.  Gail Collins labeled her “Washington’s newest Famous Strange Person,” proving once again that liberals have no measure of the force of the reinvigorated conservative movement that is about to hit them.

1. Mark Levin, Best-selling Author Never Interviewed by ABC, CBS, or NBC or reviewed by the Times or the Post – Sarah Palin was photographed carrying it at rallies, Michele Bachmann called it “the book of all time,” and Rush Limbaugh predicted conservative college students would clandestinely pass it around in plain brown wrappers.  Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny was the best-selling nonfiction book of the year, spending three months at #1 on the New York Times bestsellers list; Levin also had the best year yet of his radio show, still the fastest-growing in the country.

Honorable Mention: Joe Wilson, Destroyer of Obamacare Illusions – Wilson refused to let Obama get away with lying about illegal immigrants’ not being covered under his health care reform bill; the Democratic denouncement of his “You lie!” outburst resulted in a heated, protracted debate over an issue that was supposedly already settled.

Ineligible, but Fought the Good Fight: Joe Lieberman, Obamacare Obstructionist – He’s not reliable—he marched three miles to the Capitol on the Sabbath to vote for a $2 trillion spending bill, after all—but this Independent Democrat stalled health care “reform” almost long enough to push the Senate’s deliberations into the no-man’s land of a midterm election year.

Special Award: Jake Tapper, Reporter So Ruthless in Investigating Obama You Couldn’t Tell What Party He Belonged To – From uncovering Tom Daschle’s unpaid taxes to investigating the President’s phony stimulus spending claims, Tapper deservedly ended the year at the top of Mediaite’s list of most influential journalists in the country.