Why Democrats Are Dug in on Shutdown Impasse - Party Believes It Must Break Cycle of Budget Crises Or See Obama's Agenda Sink Away

Gerald Seib writes in The Wall Street Journal:
 

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Republicans have several, sometimes conflicting goals in the current government-shutdown impasse. Democrats, by contrast, have just one. It's called "break the fever." 

Breaking the fever is code for ending the cycle of recurring, last-minute crises over spending bills and increases in the nation's borrowing limit—the debt ceiling. The White House believes these crises give outsize power to a minority of conservative House Republicans who don't have the strength to push their agenda into law but can, in a crisis, stop the action. 

More important, Democrats are convinced they must break the cycle now, or see much of the Obama second-term agenda sink away. 

"The only way for us to go forward is to all make clear that the era of threatening default is over," Gene Sperling, head of the White House National Economic Council, said Monday at a breakfast organized by Politico.  

This view explains the current White House position that it won't engage in negotiations with Republicans. That position is politically problematic, to be sure, and isn't quite what it seems. Down deep, Democrats know they will have to negotiate a spending deal eventually. They merely hope to establish the principle that negotiations won't involve anything that might cripple the president's signature health-care initiative and won't take place when the time left to fund the government has ticked down to or below zero.

 

Many don't accept this characterization of the standoff, of course. For one thing, it isn't unusual for Washington to be compelled by deadlines and crises. As Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma puts in, "In this town, deadlines are like alarm clocks."
 

Still, just as understanding the impasse requires seeing how House Republicans view things, as discussed recently in this space, it's also necessary to understand the forces motivating Democrats.

 

The most striking aspect of this fight overall is that neither party's leaders picked it. One Republican member of Congress likens the situation to a legend surrounding the Battle of Gettysburg, which holds that Confederate soldiers went on a mission to find shoes for the troops, stumbled upon a big deployment of Union troops, and accidentally opened the door for an epic battle.

Similarly, Republican leaders never planned to fight this particular fight. They didn't intend to battle over whether to fund the government past Oct. 1 and didn't intend to make Obamacare, the president's health-insurance program, the subject of the fall debate.

Instead, their plan, nurtured all summer long, was to focus on continuing their long campaign to hold down spending, where they have had some success. And they didn't intend to use as a lever the legislation to keep funding government, but rather the bill needed to raise the country's debt ceiling.

That all changed when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and the tea-party movement spent August whipping up grass-roots sentiment to force the GOP to assume as its principal cause the defunding of Obamacare, and to use continued government operations as leverage. Eventually, House Speaker John Boehner acquiesced.

By picking that fight, the GOP rebels chose to battle over the one issue on which they don't have the votes in Congress to prevail, and on which the Obama administration was least likely to bend. That threw Republican strategy into a cocked hat, and it has created uncertainty over whether the GOP's principal goal is defunding Obamacare, or delaying it, or attacking deficits and debt.

But the shift also affected Obama administration thinking. It further convinced many Democrats that the most extreme elements of the Republican House caucus really had taken charge and that the White House had to react.

Initially, Democrats thought they had positioned themselves to claim the public-relations high ground in a budget fight because, unlike in some past budget showdowns, they proclaimed they weren't actually asking for anything new—no demands for more tax revenue, no insistence on new spending or social programs. They planned only to ask that the government stay open and the debt ceiling go up.

In fact, Democrats calculated they would make their main concession up front, accepting for now the lower level of domestic and defense spending for the current fiscal year that House Republicans set instead of attempting to move toward the higher level Democrats prefer. That, they thought, would trump GOP demands for other concessions.

But the tea party swamped both parties' plans. Now Democrats are convinced that the cycle of budget brinkmanship will only recur if it isn't stopped now—which explains why heels are digging in at the White House.

The White House problem is that the president's "we won't negotiate" position will be difficult to maintain politically with Americans who expect solutions, even to tough problems. Mr. Obama's real position is that he will negotiate once Republicans reopen the government, even temporarily, and ensure bills will be paid, and you can expect to hear more from him on that in days to come.