GOP budget plan will force Dems to react

Opinion: April 8, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

Only one thing is certain about the dramatic long-term budget plan that the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee presented Tuesday: It won’t pass.

But enacting it is presumably not Rep. Paul Ryan’s sole intent in putting forward a controversial, multitrillion-dollar plan that would revamp the Medicare system, reduce Medicaid growth, scrap President Barack Obama’s health care law, place stricter limits on domestic spending and lower upper tax rates.

It might well pass the House, despite the inherent political risks for vulnerable GOP members in embracing some of Ryan’s proposals, but it won’t pass the Senate or be acceptable to Obama.

Still, Ryan’s “path to prosperity” plan does lay the basis for some future action.

First, it puts some burden on the Democrats to present their own plan for dealing with the long-term deficit. While the White House has refused so far to do so, largely because it believes Republicans would automatically reject any Obama proposal, Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said he and other House Democrats would offer an alternative to Ryan’s “rigid ideological agenda.”

Balanced budget

Otherwise, Republicans could make a political case that they are addressing the deficit problem and Democrats aren’t. That’s what Senate Republicans are doing by pushing a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget as their price for increasing the legal ceiling on the national debt.

Second, and more important, Ryan’s plan could start a process leading to enactment of a more balanced plan that cuts the deficit without including the Wisconsin Republican’s more controversial proposals.

As Ryan noted on MSNBC, “You can’t start talking about compromise until you put ideas on the table.”

Already, a small group of senators from both parties is trying to develop a debt reduction plan like the package of spending cuts and tax increases proposed last year by Obama’s bipartisan debt reduction commission.

But though the White House indicates Obama would join in developing a balanced plan when that would help achieve its enactment, nothing will be possible as long as the House GOP continues to reject any tax increases.

And while some sort of bipartisan negotiation still seems like the best way to reach a long-term solution, some Republicans suggest Ryan’s underlying intent is to make the issue a principal battleground of the 2012 presidential election.

“It’s the first cannon blast to 2012,” Republican consultant Mike Murphy noted Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

With most prospective GOP presidential candidates likely to endorse the plan’s basic thrust, Ryan may hope that voter concern about the deficit and debt will enable Republicans to make the 2012 election a major challenge to the federal government’s role in setting national priorities.

That is a big task, considering that role has developed over the past 80 years — with at least the acquiescence of every recent president — and the Ryan plan would cut federal programs most Americans want to maintain.

A recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed overwhelming majorities believe cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are unacceptable ways to reduce the deficit. It showed strong support for higher taxes on the wealthy.

National consensus

And it indicated little diminution of the national consensus about the federal government’s role in protecting low- and middle-income Americans or the view that rich and poor must share the burden of solving the country’s fiscal problem.

Ryan and fellow Republicans seem to be gambling that, when the dust settles from the current squabble over this year’s budget, Congress and the country will be willing to make these cuts, despite these poll numbers.

Alternatively, they hope pressure to act will override resistance to many specific changes and prove to be a plus, rather than a minus, in helping the GOP win the Senate and the White House in 2012.

But current attitudes suggest either GOP gamble could easily backfire.

Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.