This budget deal is what GOP surrender looks like

These charges, in my view, were often not fair. I argued that the debt ceiling had to be raised, government had to be funded, and that it would have been impossible to extend all of the Bush tax cuts following President Obama’s re-election. As much as I’ve opposed Obamacare, I disagreed tactically with Obamacare opponents who believed it would be possible to stop the program without control of the White House through a “defunding” push. In other words, I’m not one to use the term “surrender” loosely.

But now that I’ve had a chance to dig through the details of the budget deal Boehner announced Tuesday morning, I’m comfortable saying: This is what Republican surrender looks like.

Republican leaders have agreed to unravel progress they made in hard fought budget battles to pump more money into government in the short-term in exchange for modest reforms, many of which can and likely will be easily undone by future Congresses. After spending much of their time in the minority in 2009 and 2010 poking holes in Obama’s budget gimmickry, they have dug deep into a Mary Poppins-like bag of gimmicks and thrown them all into this deal.

The deal, in addition to suspending the debt limit until March 2017, will increase spending in a number of ways. It will undo the limits on discretionary spending put in place by the 2011 budget deal, representing an increase in $80 billion over the next two fiscal years, split between defense and non-defense spending.

To help pay for this, they’re theoretically extending the time that sequestration will be in place for two additional years, from 2023 to 2025. On paper, the idea is that spending cuts in 2024 and 2025 will help make up for the increased spending in the next two years. But this is a fantasy.

It’s worth keeping in mind that they used this trick before. In the 2013 Ryan-Murray budget deal, Republicans and Democrats agreed to breach the caps and make up some of the shortfall by extending the sequestration period from 2021 to 2023. In other words, if this deal goes through, Congress will have twice avoided enforcing a deal that many of the same key players negotiated and voted for in 2011. And yet, we’re supposed to believe that a decade from now, a new president and a drastically different Congress that had nothing to do with current negotiations will feel bound by the limits being placed on them by this current deal. It’s pure fantasy.

There will also be an additional $16 billion in defense spending increases into an overseas contingency operations fund and the deal would spend more money by avoiding scheduled increases in Medicare premiums.

The deal then relies on more jiggery-pokery, to use a phrase popularized by Justice Antonin Scalia. It dips into the strategic petroleum reserve, makes modest changes to crop insurance and adjustments to physician payments through Medicare (often Congress has voted to avoid such payment cuts when push came to shove). Plus there are some small reforms, such as allowing the use of automated calls to cell phones to collect government debts.

In addition, there’s a minor tweak to Obamacare, repealing a requirement that larger employers automatically enroll workers in their healthcare plans. It’s a provision that’s a small annoyance to big businesses, but its elimination will do little to ease the burden that the law places on individuals.

As I detailed in a previous post, there’s more chicanery when it comes to Social Security. The fund that finances the Social Security disability program is expected to run out of money at some point next year. Democrats led by Obama have been proposing diverting a portion of the payroll taxes that are intended to finance Social Security’s retirement benefits to help shore up the disability program.

“The last thing Congress should do is raid the retirement trust fund,” the GOP’s own budget, released in March, read. As Republicans rightly pointed out, when this trick has been used in the past, all it’s done is delay the problem and worsen the finances of Social Security’s retirement program. But the Boehner deal relies on this kind of reallocation to put off the immediate crisis from 2016 to 2022.

Though there are some worthwhile reforms to the disability program in the deal aimed at reducing fraud, in no way do those justify kicking the can down the road in this manner.

I’ve acknowledged, in the past, that sometimes there’s a need to compromise and recognize the art of the possible. But this isn’t compromise. This is utter capitulation.

Boehner said this deal is intended to “clean out the barn.” He hopes to go out as a martyr for the establishment, clearing the decks for likely incoming speaker Rep. Paul Ryan and essentially swearing off any combat with Obama or Senate Democrats during the 2016 elections. In reality, this is a betrayal of everything Republicans ran on in 2010 — fittingly negotiated behind closed doors and rammed down members’ throats.

Boehner ran out of gas, he was worn down by Obama and Democrats and is leaving office with no fight left in him. A damning way to punctuate his time as leader, and a validation of his conservative critics. If you want to understand how Republican voters could have become so distrustful of Republicans that half of them are lining up to support presidential candidates who never held elected office, look no further than this embarrassingly bad deal.

UPDATE: One careful reader noted that sequestration involved caps on both mandatory and discretionary spending. The reader argued that this was an important distinction in this case, because it’s the discretionary caps that have been breached by the Ryan-Murray budget deal and the current budget deal, whereas mandatory sequestration has remained in effect, and that’s what’s been extended, first to 2023 and then to 2025. So, was it really fair of me to call it fantastical to think that the mandatory savings would remain a decade from now given that they have thus far held up? I still think it’s a fair statement. The overwhelming bulk of the original sequestration caps involved discretionary spending, and, while there were indeed cuts to mandatory spending, 70 percent of mandatory spending was exempt from such cuts, including Social Security, Medicaid, and much of Medicare. So, what this deal would do is trade more discretionary spending now for future promised cuts to mandatory spending. I still don’t think a new president and Congress will feel particularly bound by those spending limits.