GOP on the Sequester: It's a Great Win For Us and it's All Obama's Fault

     This is why the GOP has such a hard time putting forth constructive legislation: even it's own thoughts are confused. Right now they are pinning the delays in air traffic control on the President. However, they have been trumpeting how the sequester is a great victory for the Tea Party and, when Obama talked about the threat of such delays back in February, they accused him of playing the Cassandra to "scare the American people" and score points politically. 

    "The latest attempt by the Republican Party to blame the consequences of sequestration on the president quickly followed reports Monday of lengthy delays at airports."

    "The delays, which were attributed to the furloughing of Federal Aviation Administration employees, forced waits of more than two hours at New York City and Washington D.C. airports. Mark Duell, vice president for operations at FlightAware, a flight-tracking service, said that staffing shortages and weather were contributing to afternoon delays on inbound flights into airports in Florida (with an average delay of 53 minutes) as well as Charlotte, N.C. (with an average delay of 17 minutes)."

     "Before some morning flights could even land, Republicans were quick to place the blame on President Obama. On Twitter, GOP aides pushed the hashtag#ObamaFlightDelays. Calls came from several top offices for the president to use his authority to redirect the cuts, and some members and campaign committees accused the administration of trying to make a political point at the inconvenience of everyday travelers."

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/faa-flight-delays_n_3134411.html?1366667315

     They argue that the cuts are:

      1). No big deal

      2.) A good thing by reducing the deficit

      3). A victory for them

      4). However any particular cut is derided and blamed on the President's alleged political games. 

      In a way, the GOP position on the sequester and on cuts in general is more in line with the American people, it's true. Republicans love cuts in the abstract, but any particular cut is blamed on political games. It's the classic philosophical conundrum of the Universal vs. the Particular. 

      The GOP wants to argue that somehow the President could easily apply the $85 billion in scheduled cuts in a totally painless, costless way. 

     Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), told The Huffington Post that his boss believed the president and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood could save money elsewhere in the FAA budget without unnecessarily delaying air travel.

    "The FAA budget has more than doubled in the past 15 years, so finding 5 percent savings in other areas of the agency should be doable," Cooper said. "It’s hard to understand why the president chooses to take it out on air travelers instead."

     "But specific programs that could be cut as a replacement for the money saved by furloughs are hard to pinpoint. Numerous Republican staffers noted that the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has identified over $2.7 billion in non-personnel operations costs that the FAA could reduce, including contracts, travel, supplies and consultants. The FAA, they say, paid nearly $500 million in annual consultant costs and $325 million for supplies and travel."

    "The administration has some flexibility to implement the sequester," said Justin Harclerode, a spokesman for the House Transportation Committee, "but has chosen the course of action most painful to the public."

     "But the fat isn't all that easy to skim, as LaHood noted in a statement. According to the Transportation secretary, the FAA had already shifted funds within accounts to avoid furloughs while still protecting air travel safety. The agency had cut contracts, stopped funding for low traffic towers and reduced the amount of traveling among its officials. Even then, LaHood added, "the FAA still needs to furlough its 47,000 employees to achieve these congressionally required cuts. Only Congress can stop these delays from continuing.”

     "The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler looked into how the sequester would affect the FAA's budget during a fact-checking column back in late February, and sided with LaHood. The House Transportation Committee, Kessler wrote, was not taking into account that consulting contracts were for telecommunication and weather radar assistance, or that travel services were being done to conduct on-site equipment repair. These too were important functions that couldn't be slashed."

     It's the old argument that we should just cut waste, fraud, and abuse while cut our foreign aid from 29% of the federal budget to 10%-this is what large parts of the public believe. As Greg Sargent points out, these mandated cuts actually mean you have to do: cuts. 

     "The Republican strategy on sequestration has been clear for months now: sequestration is terrific because spending cuts are good…and every specific program cut by sequestration is a terrible injustice that Barack Obama should have avoided.

    "The first round of complaints were about White House tours, of all things. That was actually useful, in a clarifying sort of way; if Republicans couldn’t support cutting spending on White House tours, it’s highly unlikely that there were any specific cuts they could defend. Certainly not cuts that could affect middle class Americans or wealthy contributors (who are presumably a lot more likely to be Washington tourists than, say, the people whose Head Start or housing assistance has been cut)."

     "Today’s GOP complaint is about cuts to the Federal Aviation Administration, which in turn lead to cuts in air traffic control, which in turn means airport delays. More cuts are on the way."

     "Be careful — you’re going to hear people blaming “both sides” for these cuts, but that’s absolutely wrong. For example, James Joyner notes that Obama resisted a measure which would have given him more flexibility to choose which cuts to hit, and claims:

The result is this kind of nonsense: Deep and stupid cuts to areas of the budget where we all agree that spending makes sense. Not even the most die-hard Tea Partyer wants to do away with air traffic control. And, yet, here we are.

     "But that’s really wrong. It may be true that no one specifically wants to shut down air traffic control, or the FBI, or food inspections, or the military…but once you start really looking at that list, what you find is that the level of cuts involved mean that something that “nobody” wants to cut will in fact have to be cut."

     "The truth is that sequestration cuts — which are significant enough already — already represent significantly lower levels of cutting spending than what House Republicans wanted. Some Tea Partiers in the House voted against them because they were not severe enough. And don’t forget: the budgets that Republicans have been voting for, year after year, promise to entirely wipe out non-defense discretionary spending over the long term. All of it."

     http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/04/22/yup-cutting-spending-means-you-have-to-cut-spending/

      So there's we have the ultimate schizophrenia: we should wipe out discretionary spending except for anything specific you can possibly name. If White House tours are too hardcore where does that leave us? This is why I think the progressives bugging out of Obama proposing Social Security chained CPI are overly alarmist. As has been pointed out, it's unlikely that anyone in Congress will ever have to vote on it.