"With the prospect of a government shutdown looming, some Republicans fear that GOP representatives in Congress have made a critical mistake by beginning the battle of the budget by going after specific programs to cut, rather than applying cuts across the board.
The strategy has engendered ideological side skirmishes, over relatively small amounts of spending, on programs ranging from Planned Parenthood to National Public Radio. The House voted to cut both as part of $61 billion in proposed reductions in the current budget. Last week, Republicans took on the powerful AARP in a report and hearing questioning the organization's nonprofit status, a move that some saw as payback for AARP's support for the Democrats' 2010 health care reform bill.
These kinds of short-term ideological skirmishes are emotional and fiscal bonanzas for groups on the Democratic left and Republican right, and therefore may be good short-term politics.
But the resultant ideological fights have created a divisive atmosphere at a time when cooperation and conciliation may be the only way to solve a budget crisis, one that will require tough choices about massive, popular programs, including Medicare and Social Security.
"The things that really matter in the federal budget are the tough ones, not the symbolic ones, yet the public is nowhere near adequately informed about the reality," said former California Rep. Vic Fazio, a Democrat.
The opening acts of the 2011 budget fight have included emotional testimonial ads from women who say their lives have been saved by Planned Parenthood services. There were secret tapings of NPR executives by conservative activists posing as representatives of a radical Muslim group that led to the firing of two top NPR officials. But together, the two programs involve annual spending levels — about $363 million for Planned Parenthood and $50 million for NPR — equal to roughly six hours of deficit spending under the current fiscal year deficit estimates of $1.6 trillion.
The government has been operating under a series of short-term budget resolutions, as Democrats and Republicans and President Barack Obama have been unable to come up with a spending blueprint to last through the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. Looming much larger is the 2012 budget fight.
As House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan prepares to unveil a 2012 budget proposal that he hints will include trillions of dollars in proposed cuts over the coming years and changes to Medicare, some Republican strategists say they worry that the ideological fights that have already taken place have not helped prepare the ground for what could be a tough and long process.
Some also think the Republicans, by trying to cut or eliminate programs they don't like, have blunted the credit they should be getting for cutting about $10 billion from the current year's budget already.
"I am concerned that they have allowed a few, big, symbolic issues to drown out in part this message that we have not made our own case for our success," said former Minnesota Rep. Vin Weber, who is close to Republican leaders in Congress. "We have cut spending for the first time, maybe ever, and yes it is a drop in the bucket compared to the big budget. But it is getting lost in the arguments about all these high-profile, emotional issues, and it does worry me."
Many of these side skirmishes have come through "riders" attached to overall spending proposals. Weber said he does not agree with Democrats that there should be no riders, and that he understands why the fights are important to some representatives on his side. But the focus on them, he said, has allowed Democrats to use well-honed tactics of attacking Republicans as uncaring and extreme.
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute last week, Fazio said Republicans would have been far better off proposing percentage cuts across the board.
"It certainly has been helpful to the Democrats," Fazio said, "‚Ä1/8and I think it has stimulated a counter action on the Democratic side that has been lacking. Their base hasn't been energized.
"But the bottom line here is that Republicans would have been better off doing across-the-board cuts," he said. "They are always hard to pinpoint where the impact will be. Everybody thinks government is so big (that) we can reduce it in size. But when you get into specifics and start talking about ... (relatively minor) amounts of money just to make a political point, I think you are way off message."
But the single-issue budget fights continue. On Monday, the anti-abortion political action committee Susan B. Anthony List released statements from four potential GOP presidential candidates supporting the elimination of funding for Planned Parenthood. That statement was made the same day Obama, a defender of Planned Parenthood, announced he would seek a second term in 2012."
http://www.statesmanjournal.com/art...9/opinion/Ideological-cuts-could-backfire-GOP
The GOP could be heading for a swing and a miss.
