Day 5 of Give-Us-We're-Not-Sure-What-Or-We-Shoot-The-Economy, bka the Federal shutdown of 2013:
We hear from sources as unlikely as Tom Friedman that in refusing to concede anything to the GOP merely to reopen the Federal government,
President Obama is not defending health care. He’s defending the health of our democracy. Every American who cherishes that should stand with him.
We hear that the President himself feels strongly that legislative hostage-holding by the Foster Sons of Anarchy in the House must not be allowed to stand.
We hear that Orange Julius, Weeper of the House, has been trying to resurrect the notion of a "Grand Bargain" in order to extricate something--anything--from the wreckage of his Tea-soaked America-Held-Hostage government-shutdown maneuver.
With this in mind, I can see the vague outlines of a "Grand Bargain" that the White House might offer the GOP. It isn't at all along the lines of GBs previously floated, and it isn't something that progressives are going to like at all--but it fits neatly into the way Obama has consistently conducted his Presidency, & it may be necessary to preserve constitutional government and restore some degree of sanity in the give-and-take between Congress and the Executive.
Come with me to the cash bar, below the vermillion doodly-thingie, as I lay out my reasoning.
Preamble: Soft Landings & President as Community Organizer.
Obama is the master of the "soft landing." By which I mean that as President, he has consistently maneuvered to achieve incremental improvements in the majority of Americans' lives while not threatening the financial status of those invested in the status quo.
The health insurance issue--& the Affordable Care Act as an imperfect response to it--is a prime example:
Most of us would have loved to see a single-payer national health insurance system implemented back in 2009, when the Democrats held the Presidency & both houses of Congress.
The problem was (& is) that if you put that system in place, a lot of investment (in everything from insurance corps to Big Pharma to individual doctors' long, hard work to earn a degree & establish a profitable practice) immediately loses most of its value.
If Obama had tried to force that through, those "stakeholders" would have had no reason not to fight it to the last dime of their hedge fund accounts.
The ACA essentially says to current "stakeholders" Change is needed; change is coming. But we'll structure the process to let you extract your investment while it still has value, so that your optimal policy is not to "die in the last ditch" but get out while the getting out is good.
I see this same pattern in everything from military spending to intelligence gathering to energy policy: Changes in the system must be structured and phased in so as to allow those invested in the current system to be "kept whole".
The incrementalism drives us nuts. The notion that those who have profited hugely from past & present inequities in the system should be allowed to keep those profits mortally offends our sense of fairness & justice.
But as I read recent history, the Obama Administration believes it's the only way to make progress--to get something better for the majority of Americans than what they have now.
Keep in mind that our President started his working career as a community organizer, representing people with little power against powerful interests. A community organizer's job is to get something more for his community than what they would have otherwise. Demanding everything at once--expecting the powerful to simply give up their power via appeals to decency, fair play, equality etc etc etc--achieves nothing. Success comes in the form of incremental concessions, frequently obtained via a negotiating strategy that combines appeals to decency etc with a search for win-win (or at least non-zero-sum) outcomes: Let's find things you can concede that will help my people, make you look good, & won't cost you very much.
The Grand Procedural Bargain
Whatever "moderate" (i.e., non-batshit-insane) GOP House members are left (pardon the expression ;) ) are completely in the thrall of the Tea Party. They cave to them in cases where they know the Teahadis are wrong because they're afraid of losing their seats via a primary challenge from 6 parsecs starboard of Genghis Khan (or Wrath-Of-Khan, whichever comes first amongst tyrants).
I envision that the Democrats will approach the (relatively) sane remnants of the Republican Party and offer them a "soft landing" equivalent to that provided other entrenched interests:
Help in protecting their seats from TP insurgency.
Crossover voting in primaries wherever allowed in order for these officeholders to survive Teahadi challenges. "Non-compete" agreements from the national party in the general election (essentially a lack of top-level financing & technical support to whatever candidates the Democrats field in those districts). Et cetera.
In return these lawmakers would combine with Democratic House & Senate members to enact
a series of laws that would prevent budget & debt ceiling disputes from ever again threatening to shut down the Federal government.
I don't know what form such laws would (or could) take but they would have to be pretty ironclad--& resistant to nullification by the 5 Scumbags of SCOTUS.
(I would hope the White House would also hold out for redress on the gerrymandering House districts. I realize this has to work through the state legislatures--then let's cast about for a way to bring those into the bargain as well. In the short term the Democrats might lose some seats--e.g., my home state of Maryland might swing from the current 7D-1R to 5D-3R--but the demographic trends are with them in the long run. We would still have non-proportional representation in the Senate, but that's enshrined in the Constitution.)
Affording non-BSI Republican Congresscritters a "soft landing" would be a bitter pill for progressives to swallow. At best it would dampen the D-ward swing of the electorate for an election cycle or two; at worst it would freeze the imbalances in place for a generation. But it may be the price that has to be paid so that a functional government that (at least on occasion) looks out for the well-being of its citizens does not perish from this country.