Democratic President Obama and Republican House Speaker John Boehner have not reached an agreement on a spending bill to fund the government for the rest of the year according to a statement from Boehner’s office.
“While there was a good discussion, no agreement was reached,” the statement says.
A three-week spending bill expires April 8 at which point the government will shut down.
It has been clear for a week or more that the Democrats want a shutdown. They’re partying like it’s 1995 under the mistaken assumption that history will repeat itself and President Obama will get his mojo back in a shutdown as Clinton did leading up to the 1996 election. To believe that shutdown lightning will strike a second time, though, the Democrats have to ignore polls showing that the voters don’t much care about a shutdown, and would blame both parties pretty evenly if one happens, and would actually support a shutdown if it leads to larger cuts in government spending. They also have to ignore the simple fact that the Democrats themselves are mostly to blame for the present circumstance for two reasons. One, when Democrats had supermajorities, they didn’t pass a budget at all, and that failure has led directly to Congress having to pass continuing resolutions to get by a few weeks or months at a time. And second, it’s Obama’s own spending profligacy that has put the nation behind the debt 8-ball. The Democrats really have nowhere to hide. They had the power, they failed, and here we are.
Also, around this point in his first term, Clinton was well on the way to a balanced budget (thanks to the GOP Congress) and was weighing and eventually signed the welfare reform bill. That budget and the GOP bill gave Clinton moderate credibility that, so far, Obama hasn’t even attempted to earn. Perhaps the president thinks the shift of terrorist trials back to military tribunals is his welfare reform. But Attorney General Eric Holder, in his surly defense of his fringe stance to hold those trials in civilian courts Monday, took a lot of the wind out of that argument. The only way for Obama to capitalize on that, supposing that he even wants to, would be to fire Holder. But that opens him up to serious criticism from his left — his base. So he’s unlikely to do that.
Bottom line: It’s not 1995-96. Obama is not Clinton. This shutdown, if it happens, probably won’t play out like the last one did.
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