Writhing out of Norquist's embrace, Part V

Here we go again: Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Georgia, one of the Quixotes of the Senate Gang of Six, is writhing out of Grover Norquist's embrace, almost exactly as in March 2011 when the Gang first got in gear to try to reincarnate, or rather fully incarnate, Bowles-Simpson.*  In this iteration, Chambliss says, "I care more about my country than I do about a 20 year-old pledge"; Norquist shoots back that Chambliss's oath is to the people of Georgia, not to him. Then Norquist revives a nonsense claim from the prior round:

Norquist also highlighted a letter Chambliss signed with fellow Gang of Six members Mike Crapo of Idaho and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma where the three said they hoped for a plan with “lower individual and corporate tax rates for all Americans.”

Writhing out of Norquist's embrace, Part IV

You have to respect a conservative Republican who tells his colleagues that the only way they're going to get a deficit reduction deal is to raise tax revenue, no matter what contortions he has to twist himself into to cover himself.

Tom Coburn has separated himself from current GOP orthodoxy, and specifically from a fundamentalist interpretation of Grover Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge, by degrees.  Now, even as he withdraws (temporarily, he implies) from the Gang of Six purporting to negotiate a tax reform/deficit reduction deal, he's completed the clarification. And incidentally, effectively told Norquist to go fuck himself.

Running behind the Gang of Six

On the theory that presidential advocacy on a given issue polarizes the parties on that issue, I have more than once suggested half-seriously that when Obama decides to put forward a deficit reduction plan, we will know that he's thrown in the towel on a deficit reduction deal. The corollary to date has been that if there's any hope at all for such a deal before the 2012 election, it lies in the negotiations of the Senate Gang of Six, who are using Bowles-Simpson as a baseline. GOP Gang of Six members Saxby Chambliss and Tom Coburn have been bucking GOP orthodoxy by acknowledging that any deficit reduction plan will have to increase Federal revenue.  What they don't need is Barack Obama to make that case for them.

So  now Obama is primed to lay out a plan, and word is that it is to be based (to what extent?) on Bowles-Simpson and the Gang of Six negotiations.  Predictably, the very senators who a month ago were begging for presidential participation are now warning that a presidential endorsement could be the kiss of death:

Is Obama his own Grover Norquist?

As David Brooks noted in the midst of the 2008 campaign, Obama has put himself in a box on taxes. Here's David Plouffe on Meet the Press today:

DAVID GREGORY:
--bring up taxes, though. Is-- in the President's plan as he envisions tackling the deficit, do taxes have to go up? Does that have to be part of this equation across the board?

DAVID PLOUFFE:
Well, this is part of his budget for next year. He has said he believes-- taxes on the higher income, people over $250,000-- should eventually go up.

Time to throw in the towel and 'lead'?

In my last post, I suggested that Paul Ryan's extremist, intellectually dishonest long-range budget plan is a sideshow -- that if there's any chance at all of a long-range tax/budget agreement, it rests with attempts by Chambliss, Coburn and perhaps Crapo to convince fellow Republicans that tax reform will have to increase federal revenues.

Now, though, Ezra Klein relays some intelligence that suggests that Ryan's plan may kill that admittedly distant hope:

Two days ago, I predicted that Ryan’s budget would sell a lot of Democrats on the Simpson-Bowles plan. But James Pethokoukis says it’s also doing the reverse. “I hear what GOP support there was for Obama/Bowles/Simpson debt panel plan is collapsing thanks to Ryan Plan,” he tweets. If that’s true, then Ryan, by yoking Republicans to a radical and polarizing proposal that stands no chance of passage, may have set the deficit-reduction effort a very long way back. 

Forget Ryan -- watch Coburn and Chambliss

For those who believe that Obama has failed a s test of courage by not rolling out a detailed tax reform/deficit reduction plan early this year, a thought experiment: had he done so, would Tom Coburn have said this on the Senate floor? (link is to Greg Sargent; emphasis is his.)

Well, the message for America today is every program’s going to get hit. The Defense Department’s going to get hit, every program’s going to get hit. My taxes are going to go up. Sorry, they’re going to go up. This country cannot get out of this mess with the behavior that we’re exhibiting in this body, and if we fail to do what is necessary for our country at this critical time in our juncture, history will deem us absolutely incompetent. With that, I yield the floor.Maybe...I admit that the thought experiment yields no clear results.  But if Obama and Dems really do want a tax reform/deficit reduction deal, it's Coburn Chambliss & Crapo who are carrying the ball. Because this can't happen unless Republicans sign on to tax reform that raises revenues.  Which is almost to say that it can't happen, period.

The sine qua non for a bipartisan long-range budget deal is for Republicans to acknowledge that taxes will have to be raised, albeit as part of a deal that lowers marginal rates while drastically reducing targeted tax breaks. The bipartisan Senate Gang of Six currently negotiating the outlines of a deal is allegedly using the Bowles-Simpson plan as a baseline. While Bowles-Simpson was  criticized from the left for achieving too high a percentage of its projected deficit reduction from spending cuts (two thirds) as opposed to taxes (one third), the plan did envision raising Federal revenue by about $1 trillion over nine years.  Grover Norquist, meanwhile, is waving his bloody-sheet "no tax increases" pledge, signed by (he claims) 95% of House and 87% of Senate Republicans.

Can a president reduce partisan division?

Repetition, repetition, repetition.  In trying to discern Obama's intentions and strategy regarding long term tax/budget reform, I have referred repeatedly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to Frances E. Lee's demonstration that presidential advocacy on a given issue, particularly when put forward in the SOTU, increases partisan division on that issue.  While the theory makes intuitive sense, and is demonstrated in Lee's Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles and Parisanship in the U.S. Senate by thorough statistical analysis of roll-call votes from 1981--2004, one caveat is in order. Tax policy is already so polarized by party that there's not that much room for a President to worsen the division:

Presidential involvement has little influence on partisanship on votes dealing with social issues and the distribution of the tax burden...These are clearly party-defining issues regardless of whether a president demands action on them. Generally speaking, taxes and abortion sparked partisan division in the Senate at approximately the same levels regardless of their presidential agenda status (p. 83).

According to Lee's tabulations, party division on Senate roll call votes from 1981-2004 concerning distribution of the tax burden was 66 overall, and 71 on tax legislation in which "presidential leadership" was exerted. That's in contrast to nonideological issues, where party differences are relatively small until a president advocates a specific policy, at which point the parties usually divide. Partisan division on votes concerning space, science and technology, for example, averages 30.5 points higher on votes over legislation on which the president has exerted leadership than on votes on which he has not.

One might conclude that in the pre-polarized tax/spending arena, the president has little to lose by drawing the battle lines clearly and fighting it out in the arena of public opinion.  Why shouldn't Obama lay out a tax/deficit plan somewhere left of the Bowles-Simpson plan and throw his energy into hammering the devastation to be wrought by the GOP's wholly unnecessary cuts to discretionary domestic spending -- and to the decimation of Medicare and Social Security required by the "no new taxes" pledge that over 90% of Congressional Republicans have signed? What's he got to lose?

The art of grilling a tax/budget deal

A dozen or more years ago, I wrote a press release announcing the opening in Manhattan of the Greek seafood restaurant Milos Estiatorio.  The owner, Costas Spiliadis, explained to me that in cooking fish, timing is everything. At Milos they keep it simple, and concentrate on getting it off the grill at the right instant.*

Perhaps that is the Obama theory of bipartisan budget negotiation? The WSJ's Damian Paletta and Naftali Bendavid, reporting on progress in Senate bipartisan "Gang of Six" negotiations toward a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal, has this to say about the White House posture:

 The success of the senators' efforts will depend on whether it is endorsed at some point by President Barack Obama. White House officials have been briefed on progress but have mostly stayed on the sidelines, people familiar with the matter said.

 White House budget director Jacob Lew said, "We think it's a good thing to have members looking for bipartisan conversations where they are exploring ideas."

Writhing out of Norquist's embrace, part III

Grover Norquist is insisting on his bond with the trio of conservative Senators that have begun negotiations on a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal. But Chambliss/Coburn/Crapo are looking for a "pound of flesh/not one drop of blood" loophole.

Shakespeare's merchant had a perfect legal right to claim a pound of flesh from Antonio, who had pledged it to him if he could not repay his debt on time. But Shylock, it was decreed in court,  had no more right than anyone else to shed blood.

In the past two days, Chambliss and Coburn have argued, in effect, that while they promised never to raise taxes, they did not promise to reduce the United States to insolvency. To reduce the deficit to a manageable level, "“We’ve got to close the revenue gap," as Chambliss put it on Monday. 

First, though, they've got to close the rhetoric gap, embodied in Norquist's no-new-taxes pledge. To recap: when reports broke that the conservative 3Cs were working with three Democratic counterpart on a bipartisan budget deal that would include some combination of spending cuts and revenue increases, Norquist sent an open letter reminding them of their pledge never to raise taxes. As I noted at the time,  CCC's carefully-worded response promised to lower marginal rates but most pointedly did not promise that offsetting those reductions by closing or reducing various tax breaks would not result in a net increase in revenue. The letter pitted the "special interests" who would lose tax breaks in an imagined future deal against  the 'taxpayers' whom they were pledged to protect. What it did not note is that most of us are both (see: Chambliss, Coburn, Crapo to Norquist: Kowtow or brush-off?)

Saxby Chambliss seizes the freedom to acknowledge that 2+2 = 4

When the Wall Street Journal reported that a new Senate gang of six was beginning negotiations toward a comprehensive tax/budget reform deal, Grover Norquist put the screws to the Republican half of the gang, publicly reminding Saxby Chambliss, Tom Coburn, and Mike Crapo of their pledge not to raise taxes.  I noted at the time that the trio's carefully worded response letter seemed to leave the door open to tax reform that, lowering marginal rates while closing loopholes, would raise revenues as a percentage of GDP:

Chambliss et al may defend me as a "taxpayer" while clobbering me as a "special interest" (mortgagee, donor).

Now Chambliss has embarked on a bipartisan roadshow with Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. According to the New York Times, he is unequivocal: taxes must be raised.

While Republicans are adamantly antitax, Mr. Chambliss said, “We’ve got to close the revenue gap.” 

And, breaking another GOP taboo:

A questioner pointed out the importance of military spending in Virginia, home to the Pentagon, bases and shipbuilding, but Mr. Warner and Mr. Chambliss agreed that it must be cut, too.

Chambliss, Coburn, Crapo to Norquist: kowtow or brush-off?

No question, Ramesh Ponnuru is far more attuned than I will ever be to linguistic code of true-blue GOP supply siders. So perhaps I should accept at face value his report (via Sullivan) of this little tax-pledge tango between Grover Norquist and the Republican half of the new Senate gang of six currently in early-stage discussions of a comprehensive tax reform/deficit reduction deal:

After yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reported on work toward a bipartisan deal on the budget, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform sent three Republican senators a letter noting that the deal, as outlined in the Journal article, would violate their pledge not to raise taxes. The response letter from Senators Chambliss, Coburn, and Crapo strongly suggests that the senators will not support a deal that raises taxes on net. Instead they want a bill that raises revenue only by increasing economic growth.

If you read the letter, though (link above), you might wonder whether Chambliss et al have really promised not to raise taxes "on net."  They do say that the Journal article, which reported that the six were contemplating an (apparently erroneously low) boost in tax revenues, should not be taken at face value. They do intone,  "Like you, we believe that tax hikes will hinder, not promote, economic growth." And they do plead that "we do not believe that our efforts to avert tax increases on hardworking Americans violates any pledge we have taken..." Of course not!  But...

Paging Tina Fey

Those feeling a little wistful about not having George W. Bush around to rough up the English language, take heart: looks like we'll always have Sarah Palin. Here's Sarah, campaigning for Saxby Chambliss today in Perry, Georgia:

We want to make sure we have at least 41 Republicans in the United States Senate to make sure that we shape bad legislation, or kill bad legislation.

Where would we be without enough Republicans to shape bad legislation?

Or kill...Sarah for Senate! She can shoot legislation from a helicopter.