Obama isn’t out of danger in debt-ceiling debate -

Obama isn’t out of danger in debt-ceiling debate

By E.J. Dionne Jr., Published: July 14

 

The wounded are especially dangerous fighters. President Obama now occupies the high ground in the debt-ceiling debate, having called the Republicans’ bluff on the debt. He showed that deficit reduction is not now, and never has been, the GOP’s priority. He dare not get overconfident.

After thwarting the deal that House Speaker John Boehner was cooking up with Obama, Rep. Eric Cantor, the majority leader and Boehner’s rival, needs to show he knew what he was doing and recoup political ground. Cantor is likely to present Obama with spending cuts that the president once seemed to endorse as part of a large deal but will have to reject now that the big agreement is dead. There is still a lot of danger out there

The best way out of this impasse is, unfortunately, a political nonstarter: to work with the budget crafted by Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), which shows you can get a lot of deficit reduction by mixing some spending cuts with higher taxes on the very wealthy. It’s a road Obama might usefully have considered earlier.

The rational alternative is a deal with enough cuts to satisfy a majority of Republicans and enough revenue to win over a sufficient number of House Democrats to make up for Tea Partyers who’ll never support a debt limit increase. If Boehner reasserts himself, that’s probably where things will go.

Here’s the worrisome scenario: Cantor takes every domestic spending cut that was discussed as part of the negotiations with Vice President Biden, declares that the administration has blessed them, and packages them together for a vote.

Never mind that Cantor walked out of the talks before there was serious negotiation about defense cuts and revenue, and thus no real agreement. Cantor, who needs to embarrass the Democrats and pull Obama down from the commanding heights, was shrewd to get the administration talking early about cuts in domestic spending and to put a lot of its cards on the table. He can now play those cards against Obama by forcing the president to reject reductions he had once considered when a larger agreement looked possible.

This might look like a political game. But at this stage, House Republicans can’t afford to end this whole sorry episode with a whimper. The bang they are looking for could yet cause a lot of collateral damage.