Shut Down, Volume Two

It looks like the federal government has avoided a shutdown for at least two weeks. House Republicans passed a continuing resolution that cuts $4 billion in federal spending through March 18, and Senate Democrats - despite the Senate's misgivings about cuts in social programs that affect vulnerable people like children and the poor - feel compelled to pass it as well and send it to President Obama for his signature, since many of the cuts in the resolution are cuts the White House favored anyway. Obama would prefer to avoid a repeat of the 1995 government shutdown. By forcing the Democratic Senate to accept these cuts, the Republican House has achieved what many in the media are calling a victory.

Senate Democrats think they can win the next round of negotiations for a budget for the rest of the fiscal year, but their hope seems to rely on very wishful thinking. Some moderate Democratic senators representing states that currently lean Republican - Pennsylvania's Robert Casey, Jr., Missouri's Claire McCaskill - want to support more cuts, dividing the majority caucus in the upper house while the Republican majority in the lower house are more united. And congressional watcher Norm Ornstein reports that the idea of a new budget deal hammered out in a fortnight remains very slim. "The odds are minuscule that the Tea Party-driven freshmen would accept the equivalent of 15 or 20 cents on the dollar from their pledge to cut $100 billion this year," Ornstein says of newly elected House Republicans, "without first pushing for a confrontation. They did not come here to cave barely three months into their terms."

Several Democrats have suggested that the wind will be more at their backs once Americans see how draconian some of these cuts are, but I suspect that the wind at their backs will be their own. The arguments that such cuts would cripple an improving but still weak economy, valid as they are, are politically irrelevant. These cuts mostly affect poor people. The Tea Party, which calls for deep cuts in everything except defense (gotta protect ourselves from the British!), appeals to Middle Americans. Middle Americans, by and large, hate poor people, as some of the Tea Party demonstrations in the health care debate proved. So I imagine that cuts to aid for the poor and the less fortunate will prevail. To quote Bob Dole, where's the outrage?

Some of it was in the House. Seven House Republicans - including Rodney Frelinghuysen, my congressman - fought to protect federal funding for Planned Parenthood. (The others were Judy Biggert of Illinois, Mary Bono Mack of California [Sonny Bono's widow], Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, Charles Bass of New Hampshire, and freshmen Robert Dold of Illinois and Richard Hanna of New York.) I'm proud of Frelinghuysen for that. But the efforts of these seven representatives have put them in an unenviable situation, as the House Republican majority has injected social conservatism in the debate of fiscal responsibility, forcing them to walk a fine line between voting their consciences and reducing government spending.

We need cuts in agriculture subsidies, as Rand Paul has suggested. We need cuts in highway spending; mass transit moves more people for less cost. We need deep cuts in "defense" spending. And, we also need to do something about entitlement programs to keep them solvent. But most especially, we need so tax the rich. To generate more money for the federal government, we need to follow legendary bank robber Willie Sutton's advice and go where the money is.