Deal shows tea party is dead
Ah, memories. Remember how presidential candidate Donald Trump grandly promised to eliminate the federal debt in eight years? That's a memory he apparently hopes we forget.
You could hear that in the absence of “debt” or “deficit” in the high praise he enthusiastically tweeted (“I am totally with you!”) for the two-year budget deal that White House and congressional budget negotiators reached last week.
Unmentioned in the president's tweet is how much the national debt has grown on Trump's watch to a record, more than $22 trillion in February for the first time.
The deal worked out by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will raise spending by $320 billion.
The deal blows right through the spending caps put in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act. That law, once seen as the crowning Republican achievement of Democratic President Barack Obama's years, set strict caps and enforced them with automatic spending cuts.
This major push for fiscal prudence was imposed on the Obama administration by the rise of the tax-fighting tea party movement, which popped up early in Obama's first term and helped Republicans win back the House in 2010.
Where are they now? The grassroots movement seems hard to find these days, except
in fundraising emails and the resumes of conservative House Freedom Caucus members.
Trump, as he has shown us before, isn't much of a deficit hawk. Quite the contrary, his promises cover all that he figures his base is looking for — a Mexican wall, a “better and cheaper” replacement for Obamacare, etc. — and virtually no details about how to pay for it all.
Of course, somewhere along the line, the debt must be paid, or at least that's what the conventional Washington wisdom has told us.
With the launch of his re-election campaign, Trump is nudging aside the deficit hawks. His own chief of staff and budget chief Mick Mulvaney said “nobody cares” about the deficit anymore.
Well, not quite nobody. Americans still care a lot about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense, among other government programs that are called “third rail” — touch them and you die.
Yet if there is any consistency we see in the long-running debt and deficit debate, it has been how much more important it has been to Republicans than to Democrats, especially when Democrats are running the White House. Look how much less heat Trump has received from his base for running up the red ink, especially in comparison to the heat that deficit hawks put on his predecessor.
Bottom line: As a political matter, the national debt means less as an actual hazard than as a symbol for what it represents to our evaluation of political candidates: How much do we trust this person to have our interests in mind when they govern?