Eroding the Social Contract
Jules Witcover

The political version of the British musical of the 1960s, "Stop the World: I Want to Get Off," is being performed here in the mindless determination of the no-new-taxes crowd on Capitol Hill to weaken the social safety net that has held the country together since New Deal days.

The flat embargo was often honored in the breach by anti-tax icon Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes a reported 13 times during his eight White House years. The phony feint was then repeated by his successor, the first President George Bush, in his famed "Read my lips: No new taxes" caveat. He too later raised them when his chief economic advisers, James A. Baker and Richard Darman, persuaded him he had no option if he wanted to keep the ship of state afloat.

Now the influx of tea party tax-slashers who helped put John Boehner and Eric Cantor in control of the House are demanding to stop the world as we know it so they can depart from reality. Boehner apparently would rather not jump into the abyss, but Cantor keeps pushing him.

Trying to come to the rescue is old-timer Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who seems to have grasped the political peril for his party in going over the cliff. He has injected a stopgap scheme that would allow President Obama to raise the federal debt limit, the immediate catalyst for the current impasse, essentially on his own hook.

Another Republican old-timer with a clear memory of what can happen when a Republican leader tries to bluff a Democratic president is Sen. John McCain, who lost to Obama in 2008. He recalled on Bloomberg TV the other day how then House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted it with President Bill Clinton in the 1995 budget fight that ended with a brief government closedown, for which the Republicans were blamed.

McCain defended Cantor as "carrying out the mandate of last November, which was to stop mortgaging our children's future, while the President keeps talking about spending more money." But the Arizonan added that the McConnell proposal "is the last option after we have explored everything else and, frankly I hope my colleagues have not forgotten what happened in 1995."

Obama, for one, obviously has not forgotten in his willingness to go the brink in the current fight. He has repeatedly offered to take Boehner up on earlier proposals for much more ambitious spending cuts, including to the Democratic-cherished entitlement programs that are the heart of the social safety net.

At the same time, the president has hammered at Cantor's refusal to budge on any tax increases, including eliminating the Bush tax cuts on the rich that have been Obama's choice line of attack on grounds of fairness. In this approach, the polls indicate voters are on his side.

The president has continued to call for a "balance" of Democratic spending cuts and Republican agreement to some offsetting taxes, but Cantor has insisted GOP agreement to raise the debt limit would itself be a concession providing that balance.

The debate and the White House-driven negotiations have dealt mostly with numbers. But at the core of the impasse has been the ideological combat over the role of government: how big and how expensive it must be to pay for the social contract that is the safety net of federal entitlement programs for seniors, the poor and middle-class Americans.

Obama observed in a CBS News interview last week that the timely mailing of Social Security checks would be jeopardized the debt-limit fight is not resolved by Aug. 2. The warning was a shot across the bow of Cantor and other advocates of deep cuts in the safety net.

Some Republicans have accused Obama of scare tactics, and Rep. Michele Bachmann, head of the House Tea Party Caucus and now a declared 2012 presidential candidate, has said she would exempt members of the military under fire from the paycheck cutoff if the debt limit were not raised. Meanwhile, McConnell and, less conspicuously, Boehner are trying to step back from the brink before it's too late.

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