Sequestration Strategies

Brian Beutler speculates on the Democrat's thinking. Yes, Dems Have A Structural Advantage In Sequestration Fight. "The most important factor in this fight is probably the reality that Obama doesn’t have to face voters again and thus is willing to veto sequestration replacement bills if they’re composed of spending cuts alone. Congressional Democrats are fully aware of this, too, and that creates a powerful incentive for them to hold the line.

So sequestration will begin. Obama won’t cave. And then the tension sequestration was intended to create — and in fact has created — between defense hawks and the rest of the GOP will intensify and actually splinter the party. If that doesn’t happen quickly enough, then the sequestration fight will become tangled up in the need to renew funding for the federal government at the end of March. If Republicans don’t cave before then, they’ll precipitate a 1995-style government shutdown, public opinion will actually begin to control the outcome, and it’ll be game over."

Digby agrees though thinks the Democrats retain their ability to cave. "I'm not quite as sure as Beutler that the White House won't fold in some way, but I certainly agree that the whole point is to divide the Republicans between the defense hawks and the debt fetishists. You can see the tension in the Senate already with Graham and McCain calling for revenue to avoid defense cuts. That's where the action's going to be. But I would also point out that the Democratic party has a share of defense hawks who can be counted upon to exert pressure for some kind of a deal as well. If it gets too uncomfortable I can see the White House throwing in the towel on their one demand for revenue and giving the GOP even more cuts to discretionary programs. (They could even throw in the Chained-CPI as a luscious slice of foie gras to the elite Villagers.)"

Ezra Klein is trying to figure out How Republicans see the sequester.

"The only tax increase on the table in the sequestration discussion is a cut to tax expenditures — to “distortions [that] are similar to government spending” in which “the government directs resources to politically favored uses, creating a drag on growth.” No one is even discussing an increase in marginal tax rates. And if Republicans agree to cut tax expenditures, they can get, in return, entitlement cuts, and they can protect defense spending, and they can get more deficit reduction. Pushed on this point, various Republicans I spoke with made different arguments. One argument was that Republicans are saving cuts to tax expenditure because they want to use them to pay for rate-lowering tax reform later." The other arguments were that they don't trust the White House, feel they've already lost the PR battle and while they don't like the ways the sequestration cuts are setup, they like cuttings things so "the basic quantity and distribution of the cuts is, if not optimal, far better than nothing."

"Insofar as there’s a long-term strategy here, it comes down to 2014. Republicans feel that this is a defensive year for them, and if they can resist further tax increases while locking in some spending cuts, that will be more than they could reasonably have expected in the days after the election. But in 2014, they expect the implementation of Obamacare to be a debacle that will give them an opportunity to mount a policy offensive against the White House. If they can just get through this year and get to 2014, their position will strengthen considerably."

This is the real flaw in the idea of the sequestration. The idea that after the 2012 election it would be easier because the vote would give one side more leverage. But the thing about elections, there's always another one in a couple of years.