Kansas, Back in the Middle of the Country

The Republicans’ seven year quest to repeal and replace Obamacare is currently as dead as a proverbial door nail, and likely to remain so for a long while, so for now the party is mostly concerned with apportioning the blame. Many of the fingers are pointing at our beloved Kansas’ very own Sen. Jerry Moran, and from our wind-swept perspective here on the southern great plains that suggests the party has some hard-to-solve problems.

Moran and Sen. Mike Lee of the equally blood-red state of Utah simultaneously “tweeted” on Monday that they would vote “no” on the Senate’s repeal-and-replace bill, and with Sen. Susan Collins from deep blue Main already voting “no” because of the bill’s stinginess and Sen. Rand Paul from the hard-to-define shade of red Kentucky objecting to its largess, that that was two Republican votes too many for the bill to survive. On Tuesday Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, also from that complicated Kentucky, floated the idea of simply repealing Obamacare with a promise to replace it with something so great it will make your head spin within within two years, but Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of the reliably red state of Alaska and Sen. Shelley Moore Caputo of the West Virginia, which is only recently red but with all the fervor of a new convert, joined together to put the kibosh on that. All will be blamed for the party’s failure to get something passed, but we suspect that many of their colleagues are quietly grateful for the favor.

The Senate bill was polling so horribly it had actually made the hated Obamacare bill popular, which was more than President Barack Obama’s oratorical flourishes and outright obfuscations ever achieved, and every sort of Republican also had some objections. It wasn’t the root-and-branch repeal-and-replacement that the Republicans had been promising since every single member of the party had voted against the damned thing those many years ago, and retained many of the poll-tested but economically unworkable provisions of Obamacare that are currently driving up premiums in a politically potent number of states and congressional districts, so the conservative arguments were hard to refute. The bill also included significant cuts to Medicaid and other entitlement programs, and when Vice President Mike Pence tried to deny that at a governor’s conference several Republican governors politely explained he was flat wrong, and given that they and all those wary Republican congressional members are all polling much better in their home states than either President Donald Trump or his senate there’s no arguing with the political logic.

All politics is local, as the old proverb put it, and as Kansans we sympathize with how complicated that must be for Moran. Ever since the abolitionists came here to fight the Bleeding Kansas pre-civil war the state’s tended Republican, and except for the landslide elections of ’36 and ’64 it’s voted GOP in every presidential races and has only once sent a Democrat to the United States senate, but of course it’s more complicated than that. Those abolitionists were upright establishment New Englanders with high-minded ideas about good government, and of course they were also religious zealots and unabashed radicals, always facing the harsh reality of making a honest living on treeless plain, and those various forces still inform the political debate around here. They were later joined in the party by Swedes and Russians and Germans and the black Exodusters fleeing the slavery of the south, but the party remained in steadfast opposition to the Democrats and the even crazier Prairie Populists and in disagreement about everything else.

For the most part the moderate factions always prevailed, standing firmly against the most radical Democrat ideas but willing to embrace a certain amount of good government. The party generously funded the state’s schools, kept the roads between all the small towns paved, locked up the occasional mass murderers and other criminal types, paid the salaries of all the pointy-headed professors at the regent universities, and provided for widows and orphans. Kansas has always provided fertile soil for a more ruggedly individualistic style of conservatism, though, and it has also exerted an influence on the party.

When the election of President Barack Obama unleashed some of the Democratic Party’s more radical ideas back in ’08 the state was at the forefront of the “Tea Party” reaction, with pretty much the entirety of the Republican Party on board. All of the state’s congressional delegation, including then-First District Rep. Moran, voted against Obamacare and the rest of the Democratic agenda, and the conservative outrage trickled down to the rest of the state’s politics. By ’10 the Republicans in Congress and the statehouse who were deemed insufficiently rocked-ribbed faced primary challenges, the successor to Democratic-governor-turned-Obama-cabinet-secretary Kathleen Sibelius was replaced by the exceedingly rock-ribbed Republican Gov. Sam Brownback, and when some of the Republicans in the state legislature balked at his tax-and-budget-cutting proposals they were largely replaced by primary challengers.

When Brownback relinquished his Senate seat to run for governor Moran beat out the more “Tea Party” Fourth District Rep. Todd Tiahrt in a hotly contested primary, and a couple of years later the curmudgeonly conservative but by-now-establishment Sen. Pat Roberts barely survived a primary challenge from an even more curmudgeonly conservative political neophyte who was related to Obama on the Kansas side of the family tree, but the conservative and anti-establishment faction of the party was clearly in control.

Since then, however, the moderate and establishment wing of the Grand Old Party has been making a comeback. Brownback and Roberts and all the rest of the party won re-election in the nationwide Republican wave of ’14, but by then it was clear that Brownback’s theoritically-sound but admittedly radical tax-and-budget-cutting proposals weren’t spurring the economy and balancing the books as predicted, and that after so many rounds of cuts the schools and roads and prisons and the rest of the states business were bound to be affected, so suddenly the establishment moderate types were winning the primary challenges. Enough of them won in the last election that they were able to join with the Democrats to recently override Brownback’s veto of a tax increase. Tax increases are anathema to a Kansas Republican’s soul, but so are unbalanced budgets and uneducated schoolchildren and unpaved roads and unpunished criminals, and in Kansas as elsewhere politics is complicated that way.

Which is pretty much the complicated place that Moran found himself when he decided to cast a “no” vote that he surely knew would invite plenty of pointing figures, here and in the rest of the Republican precincts of the country. He and Lee shrewdly timed their announcements so that neither could be blamed as the guy who cast the fatal vote against repeal-and-replace, both reasonably explained that a “yes” vote wouldn’t have fulfilled their campaign promises of a root-and-branch repeal and replacement, and both surely have other unstated more moderate reasons that make an undeniable political logic.

Once you get outside the big bad city of Wichita and the trendy suburbs of Kansas City or the booming college town of Lawrence and the recently-recession-plagued state capital of Topeka, Kansas is mostly a scenic but sparsely populated expanse of rapidly aging small towns with a dwindling supply of rapidly aging people. In many of these locales, which are still quite charmingly all-American, the main driver of the local economy and the most crucial local institutions are the local hospitals and old folks’ homes, largely funded by Medicaid, and despite what Vice President Pence says on behalf of President Obama those Republican governors with the healthier poll numbers are probably right about the Senate bill. For all the economic harm Obamacare is doing to the healthy young hipsters of Lawrence and the family guys commuting back to the Kansas City suburbs and the factory guys here in Wichita, we can hardly blame Moran for not wanting to face the wrath of all those paid-up geezers in the rest of the state.

If Moran wants to cynically claim conservative principles to justify his more moderate political instincts, we’ll not blame him for that the next time he’s up for reelection. After a half-century of proud Kansas Republicanism, which instinctively stretches back to the abolitionist Bleeding Kansas days, we’ll not fault a guy for insisting on anything less than an root-and-branch repeal-and-replacement bill, and that a truly free market would have cared for those old folks in those charming small towns, and until then we’ll also figure we have to take care of them somehow.

All the rest of the Republican votes that killed the Republican dream probably have their own local logic. Trump won Utah by the same usual Republican margins that he won Kansas, but he finished a distant third in both state’s Republican primaries, and his polls numbers aren’t sufficient to scare Republicans in many states. The three senators who took the stand against repeal-only are all women, each of whom were excluded from the behind-closed-doors writing of the bill, which is one of the many very stupid things that McConnell did during the failed process, but we credit each of the ladies with more sensible local political reasons for their “no” votes.

Go ahead and blame them all for wrecking the Republicans’ seen-year quest, as they willingly volunteered for the finger-pointing, but from our perspective here on the southern plains there’s plenty of blame to go around. Trump arm-twisted enough House Republicans to pass a bill that he later “tweeted” was “mean” and lacking “heart,” never gave any major speeches with oratorical flourishes or outright obfuscations on behalf of the similar Senate bill, and not even such sycophants as Sean Spicer or Sean Hannity can deny that he didn’t made good on his campaign promises of universal coverage and lower costs and no cuts to Medicaid within 100 days of his inauguration. If you’re more inclined to blame McConnell and the rest of that GOP establishment that Trump vowed to burn down, well, we can’t readily think of any excuses for them.

Those treasonous turncoats might have saved the Republican Party from passing a wildly unpopular bill that set off another round of wave elections, though, and given the party a chance to go slowly according to old-fashioned good government principles and get things right, which is more than those damned Democrats ever did. That’s what we’re hoping for here in the middle of the country, at any rate.

— Bud Norman

The Real Threat of the Ebola Virus

We still haven’t panicked about the Ebola virus, but the news that President Barack Obama cancelled two days of fundraising to deal with the disease has made us a bit more nervous. Only a matter of the utmost seriousness would interrupt the president’s fundraising, judging by some of the earth-shaking events that haven’t dented the schedule, and we’re not reassured that he’s taking charge.

The news is chock full stories suggesting that we’re all going to die, and even the most optimistically skeptical reader can’t help concluding that the government’s response has thus far been inept, but we suspect that the president’s newfound urgency has more to do with a growing threat to his approval ratings in the public opinion polls, which are lately low enough that the Democratic candidates in flyover country are declining to say if they ever voted for the guy. People get skittish about deadly diseases flying in unimpeded from the third world, and there’s already a widespread public perception that the president spends an inordinate amount of time fundraising and golfing and hanging out with his fellows celebrities while the world burns, so some photo-ops with a few anonymous health care workers and the equally anonymous cabinet are just what the spin doctor ordered.

Thus far Democratic efforts to score political points from the Ebola virus have faltered, with even The Washington Post giving a “Four Pinocchios” rating to the claim that evil Republican budgets are the reason we’re all going to die and the more conservative media having great fun with all the frivolous studies of feces-flinging chimpanzees and other esoteric subjects that the relevant agencies have been spending all those billions on rather fighting deadly viruses that fly in unimpeded from the third world, but the president’s photo-ops might prove more effective. They not only reassure his dwindling fan base that he’s still on the job, but also distract attention from a variety of other unsettling stories. The Islamic State terror gang’s rampage through the Middle East has spilled into the streets of Europe, the stock markets continue to slide in response to a slew of bad economic news, all those long-forgotten scandals are still under investigation, a wily unpopular executive action granting amnesty to millions of people who have already snuck into the country is still being threatened, and the kids are still grousing about the First Lady’s school lunch menus. Success stories for those Democratic candidates in flyover to tout are hard to find, too, so the making the Ebola virus a higher priority than even fund-raising and the fact we haven’t all died yet is bound to help more than another speech about billionaire-loving Republicans in front of a bunch of billionaire Democrat donors.

This might seem a cynical assessment, but the only alternative explanation is that the threat posed by the Ebola virus is as dire as the most alarmist stories suggest and that the president feels he needs to personally take control. This would cause us to panic, and we’d prefer not to.

— Bud Norman

For a Few Billion Dollars More

The national nervousness regarding the Ebola virus seems to have gone up another notch with the latest case, but rest assured that the leading experts are all hard at work to limit the potential political consequences.

At first glance the disease’s introduction to the United States would seem a problem for the Democrats, who for multi-cultural rather than medical reasons have resisted a ban on travel from the countries where the Ebola virus has become epidemic. This and other missteps also undermine the Democrats’ argument on behalf of letting government handle every aspect of American life, bolster the Republicans’ argument that the government is a gargantuan fool, and distracts attention from free contraception and the recent availability part-time jobs and anything else the Democrats might prefer to talk about. Despite these obvious disadvantages, however, the Democrats are still hoping to score a few points with the Ebola virus.

The first small effort came from Van Jones, the former Obama administration “green czar” and a self-professed communist, who told his fellow panelists on the Cable News Network’s “Crossfire” program that “We can’t let the Republicans get away with some of the stuff they’re doing this week, just trying to bash Obama. Hey, you know, government is always your enemy until you need a friend. This Ebola thing is the best argument you can make for the kind of government we believe in.” We take this to mean that it is a legitimate function of government to protect the country from the outbreak of deadly diseases, which is such a reasonable argument that only the conservative straw men of Jones’ demented imagination would dispute it, and that the country should therefore rack up further debt to pay for the cell phone bills of Cleveland crack addicts and the phony-baloney “green energy” scams of the administration’s big contributors and all the rest of the pernicious nonsense that comprises the kind of government Jones believes in, which is complete non sequitur. The argument clearly needed some refinement, so the non-profit and allegedly non-partisan Agenda project has unveiled an advertisement in several states with close election races that explains how Republican budget-cutting is responsible for the Ebola virus’ arrival in the United States. The smart folks over at Reason persuasively makes the case the that funding for a variety of agencies devoted to preventing epidemics is hardly stingy, and we’d question the advertisements premises in any case. No evidence is presented that a few more billion would have made these programs any more effective, nor is the magic amount that would have kept the disease out of the country ever stated, and there’s always a conservative counter-argument that any necessary amount should have come out of the budget for the Cleveland crack addicts’ cell phones and those phony-baloney “green jobs” scams.

The argument that just a few more billion dollars of government spending would have the difference is growing less persuasive with each passing day and every billion added to the national debt, and is especially weak made on behalf to he current efforts to control an Ebola virus outbreak. A timely ban on travel from the infected countries would have prevented a brave young nurse from battling this usually deadly disease, and it would have been cost-effective.

— Bud Norman

For the Defense

China is beefing up its military and bullying its neighbors, the apocalyptic suicide cult running Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons with an arms race in the always-volatile Middle East bound to follow, Russia has been gradually re-establishing its Soviet empire while extending its insidious influence even farther, and in every corner of the world there is still the usual portion of crazy people with guns. This seems an odd moment for a peace dividend, but the administration is proposing drastic military budget cuts.

There are good geo-political reasons for the proposal unveiled Monday by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, we are told, but none seem convincing. The leaner budget will provide a meaner military by eliminating outdated Cold War weapons systems and emphasizing high-tech cyber-warfare over the old-fashioned armed servicemen shooting at the enemy approach to conflicts, according to the Defense Department’s argument, but we can’t help thinking that the aircraft designed to take out Soviet tanks will do just as well against any other country’s armor and that there are likely to be occasions when shooting an enemy will be more effective than disabling his lap-top computer and cutting off his Twitter account. Hagel’s proposal would reduce the number of troops to the lowest level since 1940, a date that has some resonance for the few Americans who still have some rudimentary knowledge of 20th Century history, and includes reductions in military benefits that would make service even less appealing for those who would remain on the watch. If you don’t buy that, there’s a backup argument that the proposed budget out-spends the sequester agreement those dovish Republicans imposed on the hawkish administration, but this ignores the well-documented fact that the sequester was the administration’s idea and that the Republicans would gladly agree to any deal that would beef up the military with money taken from elsewhere in the vast federal budget.

To believe that one have to believe that the Republicans have suddenly become the weak-on-defense party and is forcing pacifism on an administration eager to pursue a robust foreign policy backed up by a credible threat of force. The argument requires such an extraordinary feat of imagination that the press has already decided to go with the argument that a pre-World War II defense posture is the post-modern solution to national security at a time when seventh century theocracies have nearly arrived in the nuclear age. This is also a tough sell, of course, but given the public’s lack of interest in national security and its enthusiasm for the welfare benefits that will be spared by corresponding cuts in the military it might just work.

At least the public is wised up enough that no seems to be peddling the true rationale for the cuts. The smaller military fits nicely with the smaller role that the administration intends for America to play in the world’s affairs, but even the president no longer seems willing to convince anyone that this will bring peace. A belief in “soft power” and the president’s magical ability to charm dictatorial nations into peaceful co-existence with the democracies still informs every aspect of America’s foreign policy, but they no longer expect anyone else to believe it. The administration clearly believes that money from current and future generations of taxpayers is better spent on Obamaphones and advertisements touting the benefits of Obamacare than on national defense, but it is a hopeful sign that they have to get that message out to the grateful constituencies without being too noisy about it.

The Republicans, who we can hope are still hawkish as ever, might even be able to exploit that reticence to pass a more responsible budget and even force the president to sign it. Such a rare feat wouldn’t force the administration to pursue a more forcible foreign policy, but at least it would leave sufficient force for future administrations to do so.

— Bud Norman

The Unfriendly Skies

The Democrats’ argument is that the slightest cut to the federal government’s spending will be unbearably painful to the general public, what with the stingy $3.7 trillion of funding being so effectively and essentially apportioned, and when they blundered into “sequester” cuts of $44 billion from planning spending increases they seized the opportunity to prove their point. They couldn’t affect the promised end of the civilized world, but they made sure that minor inconveniences ranging from cancelled White House tours to campground closings were imposed and prominently blamed on those awful budget cuts.

Inflicting some of the pain on America’s air travelers has apparently proved politically counter-productive, however, as the Democrat-controlled Senate voted on Thursday to allow the Federal Aviation Administration to keep air traffic controllers on the job. A previous policy calculated to cause flight delays at several of the country’s busiest airports was unpopular, as per plan, but the weary travelers waiting around the airport lounges weren’t blaming the right people.

Despite the best efforts of much of the media, it was hard to hold the Republicans responsible. The idea of the sequester originated with the White House, could have been avoided by a White House concession on further tax increases, and could have been more painlessly administered by the White House under legislation offered by the congressional Republicans. Nor did the relatively slight cuts in the rate of increase in spending have to be noticeable at all. The FAA’s post-sequester budget of $15.999 billion is more than it requested, for example, and should be more than sufficient to carry out its duties. When the Republicans offered a specific remedy to the FAA’s feeble claims that it had no choice but to furlough air traffic controllers without regard to the traffic at the airports where they worked, the Democrats faced a public relations debacle if they resisted.

Not that the Democrats liked doing it, of course, and they seemed especially galled that the air travelers were spared the pain of budget cuts while other programs to suffer the cruel cuts of sequestration. Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington complained to C-SPAN that “no 3- or 4-year-old is going to call my office and say, ‘I’ve been kicked out of Head Start, replace that money,’” and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island groused to Politico that “I doubt the most disadvantaged citizens are flying on commercial aircraft.” Larsen hasn’t considered the possibility that even 3- and 4-year-olds are shrewd enough to question the value of Head Start and wonder if there aren’t some administrative costs that can be trimmed in its mammoth budget, and Whitehouse apparently doesn’t fly coach, where the guy in the next seat might well be wearing a barrel these days, but no matter. Even if Head Start weren’t a boondoggle, and even if the “Jet Set” were still a meaningful term, it would still be a peculiar notion of fairness that everyone has to be miserable even when it can be easily avoided.

— Bud Norman

The Show Goes On and On

We’ve been following this “sequester” business with rapt attention, but we’re of the sort that enjoys a good farce. More normal people are apparently rather bored with the whole affair.

Or so it would seem from the latest batch of opinion surveys, which indicate a widespread weariness with the topic. A high 38 percent of respondents to the Gallup poll admitted that they are not following the story closely or at all, an even higher 48 percent made the same confession to the Pew Center, and it is likely that many of the people who claimed to be following the story closely or at least somewhat were fibbing for fear of looking foolish. To the extent that people have been paying attention, they don’t seem to be very worried, with about 40 percent telling Pew that they won’t mind seeing the budget cuts go into effect and about one-fifth being shrewd enough to offer no opinion at all.

One can hardly blame these folks for the lack of interest. After a seemingly endless series of debt ceiling debates and “fiscal cliff” controversies it is asking a bit much of the public to bone up on yet another budgetary brouhaha, especially with yet another round on the debt ceiling fight scheduled for next month, and there really isn’t anything special about this spat. Even a cursory glance at the news reveals that it’s only a matter of $44 billion, a mere nick in a $3.8 trillion budget, and no one seems to believe that even the most successful resolution of the matter would have much effect on the broader economy.

Still, those switching to another channel to avoid the “sequester” show will be unlikely to find a more hilarious comedy. Thursday’s episode alone featured enough wacky subplots to fuel the typical sit-com for a season. California’s Rep. Maxine Waters, who is always good for comic relief, warned that the budget cuts will cause 170 million Americans to lose their jobs. Homeland security honcho Janet Napolitano, another side-splitter, went on television to say that she “regretted” the “poorly timed” release of detained illegal immigrants even before the budget cuts went into effect. There was also the spectacle of the Washington press elite savaging the reputation of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, who had been the most elite pressman in the city until he challenged the Obama administration’s self-serving version of how the whole “sequester” business got started in the first place. Adding yet another humorous twist, the President took time out from flying around the country in his $180,000-an-hour jet to warn that there is no fat to be trimmed from the budget and scheduled his first face-to-face meeting with the congressional leadership on the months-old matter just a few hours ahead of the deadline for the budget cuts to take effect. In a move that would be considered “jumping the shark” on any other sit-com, the president even set aside a full seven minutes for the meeting.

There’s no predicting where such a wacky plot will go next, but our best guess is that it’s heading toward another one of those anti-climactic finales common to budget debates and other long-running television shows. What everyone’s waiting to find out is who will get the blame, of course, and that’s more easily predicted. Over at the Washington Post some of the writers seem concerned that the aforementioned poll results show that Obama has failed to whip up the intended frenzy of fear about the budget cuts, but those same polls indicate that a slight majority of Americans are willing to place the blame on the Republicans even if nothing noticeably bad happens. That’s become a natural instinct for a slight majority of Americans, and it doesn’t require that any attention be paid.

— Bud Norman

A Blast From the Past

The youngsters among you might not appreciate the irony of Bob Woodward’s recent feud with the Obama administration. You really had to be there back in the early ‘70s, those halcyon days of the Watergate scandal when the Woodward legend was born, to fully savor its deliciousness.

Woodward was a superstar back then, famed as the late night cop reporter for the Washington Post who covered a third-rate burglary at the Democratic National Headquarters and teamed with Carl Bernstein to doggedly pursue it all the way to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The left reviled Nixon with a red-hot hatred that is difficult to describe today, although it might be likened to Bush-hatred exacerbated by an all-out culture war between the hippies and squares, and thus Woodward was revered with an equal passion by the left for his heroic role in bringing in at long last bringing down their favorite villain. “All the President’s Men,” Woodward’s and Bernstein’s account of the Watergate scandal, became a runaway best-seller. The hit movie starred the famously handsome Robert Redford as Woodward. A Pulitzer Prize and other plaudits were lavished on the duo, and Woodward and Bernstein both enjoyed a celebrity that had never before been attained by mere newspaper scribes. Journalism schools saw a sudden surge in enrollments, and a generation of reporters set out to win the same kind of scandal-driven fame.

Like all legends it was rather overblown, ignoring the role that other reporters and especially the congressional investigating committees played in forcing Nixon’s resignation, and subsequent revelations about the identity of the anonymous sourced dubbed “Deep Throat” have given rise to a revisionist account about his motives. Still, it was true to the extent that Woodward had done an impressive job of reporting, and Woodward would henceforth be referred to as a “journalistic icon.” He continued to do solid work over the decades, focusing on his daily duties as a Post editor and his meticulously researched books about the passing administrations while the rest of the press tried to duplicate his past glories by digging up the hot scandal, and although he would sometimes uncover something embarrassing to a Democrat or flattering to a Republican he retained his reputation as a reliably liberal reporter.

Until now, at least. While meticulously researching “The Price of Politics,” a book about the Obama administration’s dealings with the congressional Republicans over budget matters, Woodward learned from his sources that the idea for a “sequester” had originated at the White House. The revelation attracted little notice at the time of the book’s publication, but now that President Barack Obama is jetting around the country to blame the Republicans for the impending budget cuts that have resulted the claim is suddenly the source of much controversy. Woodward stood by his story even after an indignant White House denial, then further offended the administration by insisting that the earlier deal struck by the administration did not include the tax hikes the president now insists on. White House press secretary Jay Carney went so far as to call Woodward’s allegation “willfully wrong,” the most serious allegation that can be made against a journalist. Not backing down, Woodward has become increasingly critical of the president’s handling of the sequester issue, even going on the left-wing MSNBC network’s “Morning Joe” program to describe Obama’s budgetary threats to withdraw an aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf as “a kind of madness I haven’t seen in a long time.”

This presents a dilemma for the press, which much choose between two heroes, but we suspect that most reporters will opt for Obama’s version. That story features villainous Republicans, and besides, Watergate was a long time ago and Obama has done more for their side lately.

Woodward’s latest scoop probably won’t bring down another presidency, we’re sad to say, and certainly won’t make its way to the silver screen, where Woodward would undoubtedly be portrayed by a more homely actor, but it does seem to have complicated Obama’s efforts to blame the latest mess on his opponents. For that Woodward deserves another round of applause, this time from the right, and perhaps some grudging acknowledgment that his earlier work was more about a pursuit of the truth rather than just partisan politics.

— Bud Norman

The Cruelest Cut

Oh, what a marvel of efficiency is the federal government. Most organizations that spend $3.8 trillion in a year are probably wasting at least a small portion of it, but the federal government has apparently gone about it with such frugality and cost-effectiveness that cutting a mere $44 billion will result in all sorts of calamities.

If the Republicans don’t immediately agree to a “fair” and “balanced” policy of soaking the rich even further, President Barack Obama said on Tuesday, he will have no choice but to institute the painful spending cuts required by the “sequester” agreement. Even before Friday’s deadline illegal immigrants were being released from custody, nightmarish air travel conditions were being threatened, and Obama was telling a shipyard full of anxious workers that he would be forced to choose between “funding for the disabled kid or the poor kid.” Elsewhere the White House was warning that sequestration would mean meat plants would be unable to ship beef for a lack of food inspectors, hurricanes and tornadoes will go undetected because weather satellites aren’t being launched, “special needs” students will be denied an education, leaking underground storage tanks will continue to leak, criminals will run amok with guns they obtained because background checks were halted, poor children will be denied the dubious benefits of Head Start, home weatherization subsidies will halt, and drugs will become less intelligent as the National Drug Intelligence Center loses $2 million of funding.

That last item isn’t so very worrisome, given that the National Drug Intelligence Center ceased to exist last summer, and the end of home weatherization subsidies will likely go unnoticed, as did the existence of the program, but the rest of it sounds just awful. Although the government assures that the released illegal immigrants are “non-criminal,” other than the crime of being in the country illegally, it is frightening to consider that Obama now has a fiscal excuse for failing to secure the border. Air travel is already nightmarish enough, and even if the Federal Aviation Administration is now handling less traffic with more employees than in the recent past we take Obama’s threat to make it worse very seriously. We’re against leaking underground storage tanks and amok-running criminals on principle, and as Kansans we are eager for tornado detection and absolutely horrified at the prospect of being relegated to a vegetarian diet. We’d also hate to choose between disabled kids and poor kids, both of them being so darned cute, so the president certainly has our sympathy.

Those top-hatted, moustache-twirling Republicans leave the president with no other options, however, as everything else in the federal budget seems to be more essential than even poor kids, disabled kids, poor disabled kids, and beef. The past election made clear that it would be unthinkable to cut subsidies to the Sesame Street producers, despite the gazillions they rake in, and Sen. Harry Reid has made clear the Cowboy Poetry Festival in Elko, Nevada, is sacrosanct, and no one dare take that scary Cleveland woman’s Obamaphone away, so surely the kindest cuts are the ones the president has proposed.

Obama’s many fans will be relieved to learn that his own salary and generous package of perquisites have been protected from any budget-slashing, and we hope this will offer some comfort to those poor and disabled kids. The more-costly-than-expected Obamacare program will stay in place, and its accompanying Medicare cuts will go on schedule, too, and fans of big government can be assured that spending is still up over the past four years. Even in these troubled times, there must be priorities.

— Bud Norman

The Sequester Question

To hear the president tell it, this “sequester” business is darned scary.

According to the president’s account, if those rich-folk-loving Republicans don’t accede to his demand for more taxes there is absolutely nothing he can do to prevent “about a trillion dollars” of “arbitrary budget cuts.” This will be about the worst thing that ever happened, the president explained on Tuesday, as this “meat cleaver approach” will hinder the nation’s military readiness, “eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research,” reduce the hours worked by Border Patrol agents, furlough agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, force prosecutors to let criminals run amok, cause further delays at airports, lay off thousands of teachers, cause tens of thousands of parents to “scramble to find childcare for their kids,” and leave hundreds of thousands of Americans without health care. The president also noted, as a group of uniformed emergency responders sat grimly behind him, that “their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded.”

None of which, the president seemed quite pleased to report, is in any way his fault. It’s all because Congress passed a law which forced itself to agree on a plan to cut $4 trillion of deficits or face this dire outcome. Alas, the president sadly noted, “They haven’t come together and done their jobs, so as a consequence, we’ve got these automatic, brutal spending cuts that are poised to happen next Friday.” Being a reasonable sort of fellow, the president assured those emergency responders and the rest of the nation that he would have preferred a “balanced approach” of tax hikes and “smart cuts” to “spending that we don’t need” and “programs that aren’t working,” but that he can’t bring himself to sign any bill that doesn’t further soak the rich because it “would hurt the middle class.”

This makes the sequester seem so frightening, and the president so sensible, that one might not notice that it’s all nonsense.

The president was the one who cooked up the sequester plan, as the formerly revered Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward has documented, and anyone with a “Schoolhouse Rocks” level of education knows that the bill Congress passed didn’t become a law until the president signed it. Furthermore, the Republican-controlled House has passed two attempts to undo the sequestration agreement but could not get them through the Democrat-controlled Senate, and a series of more sensible cuts could still be quickly agreed upon if the president were willing to compromise his redistributionist principles.

One should also note that none of the dire consequences that the president describes will come to pass unless he wills it, as the executive branch will decide how the mandatory cuts to each agency are enacted. Competent chief executives of many enterprises have made similar cuts in their organizations without calamity, so the smartest president ever should be able to do the same.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the consequences will be so dire as the president claims. The defense cuts are worrisome, but not nearly so much as a country that will believe Barack Obama’s accusation that it is the Republicans who are eager to undermine the nation’s military readiness. Those job-creating “investments” in energy are creating jobs at a cost of $4.8 million a piece, a rate that will bankrupt the country long before it reaches full employment. Border Patrol administrators rather than agents could have their hours cut, although that might have the unintended consequence of making the border more secure. Teachers and emergency responders will still be generously funded at the state and local level, assuming the economy doesn’t collapse under the weight of the national debt. Better prioritizing could prevent the other horrific outcomes, as well, although we’d still be treated to sob stories about the poor bureaucrats tossed out of their plush offices by the heartless Republicans.

If the president truly believes that there is “money we don’t have to spend” and “government programs that don’t work” he could easily arrange an agreement with the Republican leadership to cut those, but so far he has failed to identify anything in government that he doesn’t want. During the past campaign he made clear that subsidies to the multi-million dollar Sesame Street producers were sacrosanct, so it is hard to imagine anything else the federal government is doing that the president won’t deem essential.

No cuts will be entirely pain-free, of course, but a failure to get the government’s spending within the nation’s ability to pay for them will soon wind up hurting a great deal more. The president should know this, but he seems confident that the Republicans will wind up with the blame and he’ll avoid the scariest consequence of all.

— Bud Norman