Where the media sees a congressional failure, Jerry Nadler sees leverage
Jerrold Nadler. From Jerry Nadler's Flickr stream.
9:15 am Nov. 22, 2011
Representative Jerrold Nadler thinks there's a "disconnect" between how the public will react to yesterday's news that the Republicans and Democrats on a congressional deficit-reduction panel failed to reach an agreement, and how much the public will actually care.
"Congress has got a 9 percent approval rating, now it will probably have a 3 percent approval rating, because it failed in its major job," said Nadler, who had been openly rooting for the committee to fail in its charge of finding $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction. "[People] will think that it failed in its major job because the newspapers and everybody will tell them that. People don't really think that it's the major job. The major job is jobs. So there's a disconnect. And I'm not sure how long that that disapproval lasts, or how important it is, over the supercommittee. What's important is who is seen to be doing something about the problem the electorate really feels, and that is jobs."
Nadler, a liberal Democrat, took the minority view that what happened with the panel was not some epic failure of deliberative democracy, but instead was a "positive" outcome.
"Because all of the things that were under discussion in the supercommittee would have resulted in large budget cuts during the middle of a terrible recession, and that would have deepened the recession, thrown a lot more people out of work and raised the unemployment rate," he said. "That's not what you want to do during the recession. Period."
Nadler said Democrats went "too far" in his opinion, offering large budget cuts, but that they weren't met halfway, and there was very little President Obama could have done to bridge the impasse.
"Democrats went very far, [Republicans] didn't," Nadler said. "They probably, given the composition of their party, say they couldn't. So how could the president have affected that? What was the president supposed to do, strong-arm Democrats into accepting everything the Republicans want? Or strong-arm Republicans into giving up what they weren't about to give up?"
The challenge for liberal Democrats, in the wake of the committee's announcement that they had failed to reach an agreement by a Nov. 21 deadline, is to extend unemployment insurance and the payroll tax cut, without allowing Republicans to exact more spending cuts as part of a deal.
But the most contentious issues will be pushed to next year, with the Bush tax cuts scheduled to expire and $600 billion in military cuts triggered by the committee's failure scheduled to begin in 2013. Nadler thinks that gives Democrats the upper hand, since the lack of a compromise would result in two outcomes Republicans would prefer to avoid.
"There's going to be real pressure on them to make some kind of a reasonable deal," he said. "There wasn't right now at all. The effect of this is that we're not going to have huge budget cuts right away, deepening the recession and throwing a lot more people out of work. We will have to make some sort of an agreement on extending the current things, but the biggest fight is kicked down the road a year into a situation in which, I think, Democrats will have somewhat more leverage.
"Although, you also have an election. And whatever happens will ultimately be determined by what happens in the election, I assume."
