By Christi Parsons and Kathleen Hennessey, Tribune Washington Bureau –
VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — It is the deal that won’t die, a zombie stalking Democrats and Republicans alike as they run for political safety, stumbling over debt, taxes and budget cutting.
On Friday, Republicans tried to use the Budget Control Act against President Barack Obama, as he launched a two-day campaign tour through Virginia, a key state in November’s election. The budget law, which both parties created but neither takes responsibility for, would gouge defense spending starting Jan. 1 — an unpopular idea in a state steeped in military culture and economically dependent on defense contracting.
(PHOTO: President Obama greets supporters amid a campaign stop at Phoebus High School in Hampton, Virginia, on Friday, July 13, 2012.)
The economic effect would reach beyond Virginia. Although the automatic budget cuts would shrink the federal deficit — the reason Congress and the White House put them in place last year — some economic estimates suggest the cuts to defense contractors alone could lead to 1 million lost jobs nationally.
Republicans argue Obama could stop the cuts if he wanted to, and they pressed their case as the president held a rally in a high school gym in the heart of the state’s military-heavy southeastern region.
White House officials and Democratic leaders shot back, noting that Republicans who now decry the cuts voted for them last year.
Beyond the political back and forth is a deeper tale of dysfunction. Last year, Obama and Congress created the monster — huge automatic spending cuts hitting defense and domestic programs — to scare each other into a compromise to lower the deficit. It hasn’t done so yet, and isn’t expected to at least until after the election.
But along with the automatic tax increases that are also scheduled to take place Jan. 1, the spending cuts may have scared businesses into cutting back investments. Economists say the double-hit of much less spending and higher taxes — if it takes place on schedule — probably would be enough to tip the country back into recession. That prospect may already have slowed the economy as employers wait to see what might happen.
But with virtually no hope of landing a deal to dodge the bullet before November, both sides continue to search for ways to use the issue for political advantage.
For Republicans on Capitol Hill and the Mitt Romney campaign, the president’s trip to Virginia set off a rare coordinated messaging campaign focused on the defense cuts. Republicans have been searching for a way to undermine the president’s generally solid approval ratings on foreign affairs and military issues. The defense cuts put them on familiar ground, casting Democrats as threatening to gut the military.
Romney, the Republican presidential contender, welcomed the president with an open letter in the Virginian-Pilot, suggesting Obama actually supports the cuts.
“Your insistence on slashing our military to pay the tab for your irresponsible spending could see over 200,000 troops forced from service,” he wrote. “It will shut the doors on factories and shipyards that support our warfighters, take a heavy toll on the guard and reserves, and potentially shutter Virginia military bases.”
Obama and Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta repeatedly have said they oppose the cuts and have urged Congress to find other ways to reduce the deficit that would forestall the automatic reductions.
Administration officials have refused to release any detailed list of cuts, arguing that the budget reduction — the “sequester” in Washington speak — is not intended to be enacted but is merely an “action-forcing mechanism,” in the words of White House spokesman Josh Earnest.
“Nobody is in support of — at least certainly the administration is not in support of — the pretty significant cuts that have been proposed by the sequester,” Earnest told reporters on the flight to Virginia Beach. “But that’s why the president believes that we need to take action on a balanced approach to do something serious about our deficit challenges.”
Under the budget deal by which Republicans agreed to increase the federal debt ceiling last year, Congress agreed to form a special “super committee” to come up with a deficit-reduction plan. Both parties agreed that if the committee failed, the across-the-board cuts would take effect. To no one’s surprise, the committee failed.
Democrats have so far blocked Republican attempts to undo the budget cuts, preferring instead to keep them as leverage in the grand fiscal bargaining session that will occur at the end of the year. Also in the mix is the expiration of the George W. Bush-era tax cuts and another debt-ceiling vote.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., scoffed this week at a fresh push from House Republicans to roll back the cuts in advance of an overall deal and blamed ideological extremists in the party for not agreeing to raise taxes as part of a compromise.
“Sequestration was designed to overcome such ideological extremists,” Reid wrote in a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif. “I am convinced that, in time, it will.”
Republicans argue they’ve offered compromises, and the time is up.
“In defense of our men and women in uniform I am guilty of ideological extremism,” McKeon responded, accusing Reid of taking service members as “political hostages.”
The back-and-forth charges of extremism and negligence are by now the familiar political shorthand of the dysfunction in Congress. And many voters are likely to receive it with eye-rolling and exasperation, said Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a former GOP strategist.
“Even though most voters don’t know what a sequester is, the prospect of such deep spending cuts is going to become a huge issue over the next several months, but it’s an issue that probably is going to end up damaging both parties equally,” he said.
