GOP's Fiscal Ruse Unmasked: They want entitlement cuts, but they want Dems to own them.

[kpete]

The Morning Plum: The GOP’s policy nihilism
Posted by Greg Sargent on April 12, 2013 at 9:09 am

Mark April 11th, 2013, down on your calendars as the day that the GOP’s fiscal ruse was finally unmasked with total clarity: Republicans don’t actually want entitlement cuts. Or, to put it another way, they say they want entitlement cuts, but they want Dems to own them.

A few of us have been pointing this out for some time, but now it’s breaking through to the neutral press, thanks to the ongoing shenanigans between John Boehner and NRCC chair Greg Walden. As I noted here yesterday, Boehner says he supports Chained CPI, but Walden continues to signal that he’ll use Obama’s embrace of it in his budget to pillory Dem candidates in 2014.

Walden’s position has infuriated conservatives who support Chained CPI, but he’s sticking with it, anyway. In a must read, Roll Call’s Jonathan Strong captures the meaning of this dynamic perfectly:

The debate Walden’s remarks has set off inside the GOP shows many Republicans harbor deep-seated fears about publicly supporting the entitlement cuts they supposedly back and have demanded Obama and other Democrats embrace since taking control of the House in 2011.

“Walden is doing the right thing for the 30 seats that control the majority of the House, and that’s what the mission of NRCC chair is,” said Brock McLeary, the president of Harper Polling and a former top political hand at the NRCC.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/boehner_slaps_nrcc_chairmans_wrist_in_chained_cpi_spat-223943-1.html?pos=htmbtxt

Got that? Walden is doing the right thing politically for Republicans by attacking Dems over a proposal that GOP leaders say they want Dems to embrace. Not only that, but Boehner — who claims he disagrees with Walden — won’t call on him to stand down, and actually finds the whole thing funny:

Boehner declined to publicly urge Walden not to use chained CPI to attack Democrats, noting again that he had talked to Walden and “we’ll leave it at that.” Asked later in a Capitol hallway what he said to Walden, the speaker just laughed.
http://www.rollcall.com/news/boehner_slaps_nrcc_chairmans_wrist_in_chained_cpi_spat-223943-1.html?pos=htmbtxt

MORE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/04/12/the-morning-plum-the-gops-policy-nihilism/

[AzDar]

1. ...And our President happily obliges.

[duffyduff]

2. Obama wants them, too

Don't you dare forget that. He wants them to bail out his Wall Street backers who tanked the economy.

[djean111]

3. Well, as ruses go, this one is working magnificently.

[MyshkinCommaPrince]

4. I've tended to think...

I've tended to think that they deliberately create messes and force us to clean them up so that Democrats have to make the hardhearted and unpopular changes to society that Republicans actually want. This would be a double-win for them. They get the changes they want and they force us to be the unpopular party which makes those changes. It alters what our side is and changes the expectations we have for government. A rather smart, if horrible and vicious, way to approach the matter. Whatever we think of Republicans, they've shown us that they do have some pretty smart people planning their strategies. They've managed for decades now to pull the political discourse and spectrum rightward in this country. They've backed themselves into a corner right now, but we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that this current Republican dilemma indicates that all of them are, always have been, and/or always will be stupid.