Budget theater

WASHINGTON-Congress finished yet another round of budget debates this week. And if no summer movie released so far has caught your fancy, then you could find a fair amount of drama and action by spending your Memorial Day weekend going over C-SPAN's video archives of the last five days on Capitol Hill.

But be forewarned: The characters and events depicted in these videos are not fictitious. Yes, America really has reached its federal borrowing limit of $14.3 trillion. And yes, entitlement spending is eating 100 percent of tax revenue. Sadly, watching what congressional lawmakers did about those things this week will make you laugh until you cry.

This week's budget battle shenanigans prove that nothing-not even the dire straits of the nation's finances-can deter lawmakers' efforts to turn nearly every issue into political theater in advance of the next general election.

"We have a trillion dollar deficit of common sense in Washington and a we have an excess of common sense outside of Washington," was the way Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., described the situation on the Senate floor Thursday afternoon, just before senators recessed for a long Memorial Day break without doing a thing to address the spending crisis. But lawmakers did put in plenty of hard work toward prepping for the next round of campaign commercials.

Democrats have seized upon the House's approved budget proposal and its Medicare reforms as the golden ticket to help liberals regain at least some of the congressional losses they incurred last November. Known as the Ryan budget after its author Paul Ryan, the GOP lawmaker from Wisconsin, this fiscal plan addresses the problem by cutting nearly $6 trillion in federal spending over the next decade. It also gradually transforms elements of Medicare in a voucher-like program to subsidize the purchase of private insurance plans.

Soon after the House passed the Ryan plan earlier this spring on a party line vote, Democrats launched an offensive, telling seniors that Republicans wanted to take away their entitlement benefits.

"The president and his party have decided to shamelessly distort and demagogue Medicare," Ryan said Wednesday on MSNBC's Morning Joe. Ryan added that lost in the rhetoric is the fact that Medicare is more than $30 trillion in the hole: "If you can scare seniors, yes, it's demagoguery. It can be a powerful political weapon."

Never mind the fact that Ryan's plan, if approved, would not make any changes to entitlement benefits for anyone 55 years old and older. Many congressional Democrats lost their jobs last November after supporting an unpopular climate change bill, and those liberals left standing see this budget plan as the albatross they can hang around the necks of Republicans.

The media, for the most part, has run with this narrative-blaming the budget and its Medicare reforms for the GOP's loss in Tuesday's special congressional election in a typically conservative New York House district. While the attack commercials that bombarded the district did play a role, this conclusion ignores the fact that the three-way race included a Republican and a Tea Party candidate. Together they won 52 percent of the vote while the Democratic winner took just 47 percent.

"I believe the House of Representatives is in play," said Rep. Steve Israel, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who then went on to explain how Democrats can do it: "Medicare. Medicare. Medicare."

So that is why, one day after the special election, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid forced a vote on the Ryan budget plan in the Senate. Facing the challenge of defending 23 Democratic seats in a Senate where he holds a slight three-seat majority, Reid's goal was to get the names of as many Republican senators as possible attached to the Ryan measure. Just five Republicans voted against the Ryan budget, which failed on a 40-57 vote.

But that was not as big of a defeat as another budget proposal also voted on by the Senate Wednesday: Senators voted a unanimous 97-0 against moving forward with President Barack Obama's own $3.7 trillion budget. Such shutout votes are rare in the bitterly divided Senate.

But to date, Obama's plan remains the only Democratic budget proposal that senators can even vote on. Lost in the vilifying of the Ryan plan is the fact that Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D- N.D., has said he would defer work on a budget. Reid, Conrad's leader, backed up this decision in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: "It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage."

So while Democrats stay busy blasting Republican budget plans, they conveniently don't have any plans of their own for voters to examine and criticize. This is likely because tax increases are the primary method Democrats would use in any attempt to balance the federal budget sheet. A vote favoring tax increases is not something rank-and-file Democrats want to defend to voters heading into November 2012.

Even though that election is more than a year and a half away, a large chunk of the campaign narrative seems to have been set: Republicans running for offices from the U.S. House to the White House will have to defend their party's efforts to tackle the nation's fiscal crisis through entitlement reforms.

"To jettison the plan now would be politically calamitous, giving the GOP the worst of all worlds," writes conservative commentator Peter Wehner. "Having cast a difficult but principled vote and then backing away from it or refusing to defend it would embolden Democrats, dispirit the GOP base, and disgust independents."

Republicans say they will remain unified and get the facts out. But educating Americans about the wonky details of Ryan's Medicare tweaks will be much more difficult to achieve than frightening seniors using 30-second campaign advertisements that mischaracterize the proposal.

But already, conservative lawmakers and candidates are not shying away from either the Ryan plan or the reality that unsustainable entitlement spending cannot be ignored.

"I think Paul [Ryan] should be applauded," said former Minnesota governor and newly minted presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty in New Hampshire Thursday.

"I really like his courage and leadership in getting a plan out there. I like the general direction of his plan," Pawlenty added before-in typical campaign fashion-qualifying his statement by promising that he'd have his own plan soon.

But one can't blame Pawlenty too much for not going as far in his praise as former Vice President Dick Cheney: "I worship the ground Paul Ryan walks on," he said Wednesday.

Such extreme idolizing of Ryan and his budget plan may not be necessary for the current crop of GOP lawmakers. But conservatives need to pray that Americans will look at the entitlement math and agree that the status quo is not an option.