Conservatives are worried that the negotiations that will begin this week to avoid the so-called "fiscal cliff" will, from their point of view, end in disaster. And in using history as our guide, they're probably right to be worried. Tax increases that will weaken the economy could be combined with spending cuts, that have a tendency to never materialize, in an agreement that will leave many Republicans, especially those who have signed the "no net new taxes" pledge promoted by Americans for Tax Reform, vulnerable to public outrage, and indeed to primary challenges in the midterm elections. And that, my friends, is as it should be. We cannot simply go on raising taxes while at the same time, continuing to spend like there's no tomorrow.
The way to avoid that, much worried, about outcome may be for conservatives to insist on the transparency and openness that Barry "Almighty" has spent so much of his time promoting but has almost never actually delivered on. The White House has asserted false claims of executive privilege to avoid questions on the Justice Department’s Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. The Washington Post reported last year that a large number of requests for public records elicited no material at all from the administration. The same Barry "Almighty" who as a 2008 candidate promised that health-care negotiations would be shown on C-SPAN instead cobbled together the abomination of Obamacare completely behind closed doors.
Those who have been around ling enough can still remember that Republicans agreed on tax-increase-for-spending-cuts deals in 1982 under Ronald Reagan and in 1990 under George H. W. Bush. These deals politically damaged the party in the short run, and also proved to be bad policy. The 1982 budget deal, which promised seven dollars in spending cuts for every three dollars in tax increases, was never honored. Congress agreed to less than 27 cents in spending cuts for every dollar of tax increases, and President Reagan came to bitterly regret his decision to approve the deal. Ed Meese, Reagan’s senior counselor at the time, recalls that the 1982 deal "was the worst domestic-policy mistake of the Reagan administration."
Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee today, has argued that transparency will help conservatives avoid the worst of possible budget outcomes. "Secrecy cements the status quo: more spending, more debt, more runaway government," he said in a recent news release. "It is the enemy of accountability, change, and reform. We cannot simply rush through some secret deal that no one can amend, alter, review, scrutinize, or dispute." He says that Congress needs to take at least a week to debate any deal and offer amendments, and that it needs to make the proposal available on the Internet for public review: "It is time to try the one thing that hasn’t been tried: open, public process on the Senate floor."
Americans for Tax Reform’s founder, Grover Norquist, who originated the anti-tax-increase pledge, says that having an honest, open debate will promote political accountability. "The party that doesn’t want the budget debate to be transparent can be held to account," he said. "The American people should get to see the sausage being made and get to read the contract before it’s signed. They shouldn’t have to wait a year for Bob Woodward to write a book about what really happened behind closed doors." But calling for transparency isn’t enough. Democrats have every incentive not to agree to transparency, but conservatives should not let the issue fall by the wayside. They must insist on an open process as the fiscal cliff approaches.
Meanwhile, everybody's favorite corrupt old slime-bag, 'Dingy' Harry Reid, has now been getting away with flouting the law, the same law that requires the Senate to adopt a budget resolution each year by April 15, for more than 1,300 days. 'Dingy' even went so far as to actually admit back in 2011 that one of his primary motivations for ignoring this law was that it would be politically "foolish" for his party to adopt a budget. Democrats, you just gotta love 'em, right? Barry offered up his own budget plan earlier this year, but it was so unbelievably unrealistic and stuffed with so many questionable accounting gimmicks that not even a single Democrat in Congress supported it when it came to a vote.
And in February, Timmy 'The Tax Cheat' Geithner admitted in congressional testimony that the administration lacks any kind if a long-term plan to deal with the nation’s soaring $16 trillion debt. "We’re not coming before you today to say we have a definitive solution to that long-term problem," is what he told Committee chairman Paul Ryan. And this moron said, "What we do know is, we don’t like yours." Having the budget negotiations out in the open would at least expose such blatant hypocrisy on the part of Barry's clowns or, at best, force it to pony up and negotiate honestly. If negotiations remain in the shadows, Democrats will only follow the precedent they’ve set in years past, pushing for higher taxes with no accompanying spending cuts.
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