The budget battle’s broader goals

It is difficult to remember, as the world watches the United States and
its allies join a civil war in Libya — not to mention the devastation an
earthquake and tsunami continue to unleash upon Japan — that the U.S.
government is still operating under a temporary spending measure set to
expire on April 8. It’s easy to focus on the drama of the Arab League
equivocating in its support for the air attacks in Libya and NATO
nations bickering among each other, but with President Obama in Latin
America and Congress in recess there has been little news about progress
in the stalled budget negotiations. Resolution must be reached in
little more than two weeks, or the government could shut down.
 
What has progressed is the pressure from Republicans and Democrats to put entitlement reforms on the table when considering spending cuts for the remainder of fiscal 2011, a call as yet unanswered by the Obama administration. The president’s strategy thus far on the battle over spending cuts is to avoid the debate at all costs. Vice President Biden led a high-profile meeting on Capitol Hill on the budget weeks ago, then went to Russia and hasn’t been seen up there since. The Democrats, having watched the Tea Party-backed freshmen protest the continuing resolution not once but twice in the process, are clearly hoping House Republicans overreach and shut down the government over the remaining $51 billion they want to cut out of the rest of this year’s budget. Republican leaders got $2 billion in cuts from each week so far in the standoff, but 54 Republicans decided last week that wasn’t enough. Music to the Democrats’ ears.
 
Those ambitious, conservative cutters should take a moment to read some advice from a Capitol Hill veteran who worked for former Rep. Bob Livingston (R-La.) about legislative battles versus wars. In a piece he recently wrote in the American Spectator, Hillyer warned Republicans
“it is important a revolution not eat its own,” and reminded those hard-charging fiscal hawks eager to reach their goals that a “stalemate after gaining all the presently gainable ground is an honorable stalemate, not a dishonorable one.” Hillyer, who watched Republicans get blamed for the last shutdown in the 1990s, defended the strategy of House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) to rack up small victories as “anything but cowardly.”
 
With Democrats controlling the Senate and the presidency, and waiting for Republicans to fight each other off a cliff in the budget negotiations, Hillyer wants conservatives to stay focused on the fact that they disagree only by degree and not in principle. More importantly, that they remember the “adversary is the political left, not the Republican leadership.”
 
The broader goals, he writes, are “to position conservatives to balance the entire budget within a few years, and save a crushing debt burden from smothering unborn generations. A series of little victories, in one skirmish after another, can build a winning psychology, keep the pressure on the big-government bad guys, earn credibility with and trust from the public, reassure investors that big debts aren’t necessarily forever, and save the taxpayers at least some money in the process.”
 
Can conservatives take the long view? We will know in two weeks.
 

COULD TIM PAWLENTY BE THE LAST MAN STANDING IN 2012? Ask A.B. returns Tuesday, March 29. Please join my weekly video Q&A by sending your questions and comments to askab@digital-staging.thehill.com. Thank you.