Senate majority leader warns: Shutdown won’t help the GOP
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is on the stump again.
He's not campaigning for re-election, but for the preservation of government programs and services he says are vital to Nevada's endangered quality of life and fragile economic recovery.
He's also attempting to send the message that Democrats in Washington are willing to trim the budget responsibly, but they won't allow Tea Party Republicans to set the agenda.
The fact Reid is working so diligently to raise the profile of the budget debate, appearing Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation," says much about the precarious position of House-divided Republicans on this issue. As the April 8 budget deadline approaches and the threat of a government shutdown looms, Reid's rhetoric has grown tougher.
Just last Wednesday, he sounded almost sorry for House Speaker John Boehner as he described the Ohio Republican's challenge of presenting a measured conservative approach to the budget cuts while keeping House Tea Party loyalists on a leash. The trouble for the Republicans is, a little compromise isn't what the Tea Party agenda is about. It's about no compromise and the promotion of an ideological agenda that worked in the last election cycle -- Reid's race in Nevada was an exception -- but isn't likely to prevail in the Washington spin cycle.
President Barack Obama announced Monday he would meet today with Reid, Boehner and other congressional leaders to try to forge a solution and avert a national emergency. A shutdown might appease uncompromising Tea Party loyalists, but it won't do a thing for the Republican Party.
If Reid seemed understanding last week, by Sunday on "Face the Nation" he was firing with both barrels. Message: The Tea Party has the Republican leadership afraid of its own shadow despite the fact its recent rally barely cast one.
"The Tea Party, you see, they spent weeks organizing here," Reid said. "The day came for their demonstration a couple days ago. They didn't have thousands of people there. They didn't have hundreds of people. They had tens of people. If you really stretch it, you might have had 150 people there. ...
"The only attention they get is in the House of Representatives. They shouldn't be getting that attention. The Republican leadership in the House has to make a decision whether they're going to do the right thing for the country or do the right thing for the Tea Party."
During my interview, Reid countered his critics, who say the Democrats' $33 billion budget-cutting proposal is too lightweight, by asserting the Republican plan to cut
$61 billion would cost an estimated 700,000 jobs through 2012, according to Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics. Zandi, Reid noted with no small sense of satisfaction, is the former economic adviser to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
"It would kill 6,000 jobs in Nevada," Reid said, including approximately 600 in the senator's pet solar and green-energy programs.
Even the deepest cuts in federal discretionary spending -- including slashing all the funding to operate the gargantuan government machine Tea Partiers claim to despise -- wouldn't balance the budget because discretionary spending makes up only about 12 percent of the total.
"We could eliminate everything federally involved, and it still wouldn't be enough," Reid said. "This is all a big game that they're playing."
Fact is, both sides play games. But their time is almost up.
"We've made some cuts," Reid said. "And I believe that, in the spirit of compromise, we're willing to do more. But you can't solve this problem by eliminating Head Start and eliminating homeless veterans' programs."
The federal deficit is daunting today and dangerous in the long term, but I have difficulty determining which government program recession-wracked Nevadans would be better off without.
John L. Smith's column appears Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail him at Smith@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0295. He also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/smith.
