Shutdown Again? Forget About It : Ideology, not compromise, is enemy of people

There they go again. Congress, still a house divided on the budget, and the President, still threatening to shut down the federal government again at week’s end if a budget accord isn’t reached. When will it end?

Maybe not before the November congressional elections, sad to say.

Shutting down Washington a weekend ago may have narrowed the political gap between President Bush and Congress over how to cut the federal deficit. And it certainly got everyone’s attention. But the gap actually widened again Tuesday, despite White House hints that Bush would veto a new Democratic budget plan. So even his own party’s leaders in Congress think he should forget about closing down the federal government again. The joke’s growing stale--and the trick just isn’t going to work.

THE PROBLEM: The urgency of hammering the deficit down by $40 billion in the next budget remains. That is still Congress’ job. A poll last week suggested that by about 2 to 1, people thought Congress would do better at cutting the deficit than Bush. Four months of summit meetings between Congress and the White House have at least settled the question of whether deficits can be cut deeply enough without a combination of higher taxes and lower spending. They cannot.

Congress rejected the summit version of a budget because the mix of tax increases and spending cuts did not suit the members, and they’ve been searching for a new mix ever since. But if Congress misses the new Friday deadline for a budget Bush can live with, its failure will involve ideologies and politics so rigid that leaving federal government at half-mast into next month probably would not budge anyone much.

Common Cause, a citizen’s lobby in Washington, is right about one thing. Because campaign financing laws tilt so far in their favor, incumbents leave only when they die or get a better job offer. But for most members Congress becomes such a career that their fear of offending voters and losing their jobs borders on paranoia.

THE SOLUTION: For House Republicans, the greatest fear lies in raising taxes, so they put together their own budget of spending cuts without tax increases Tuesday. It fell one-third short of its deficit target and did not make it to a vote.

Democratic paranoia stems from cuts in spending for social programs, increases in Medicare premiums and tax increases that fall more heavily on middle-income Americans than on the wealthy. They, too, put together a package, and while they have the numbers to pass it despite their Republican colleagues’ objections, they may not have enough votes to get it past Bush’s putative veto.

But for Washington to get a budget before election day, it must split the difference between Tuesday’s diverse approaches. As we’ve argued before, a practical budget deal will involve some give on both sides of the aisle--Republicans will have to accept new taxes and Democrats will have to give Bush and the GOP a capital gains tax cut, or some such concession that they require.