Conservatives and the Pretty Good, Better than Expected, Not Too Shabby At All Budget Deal

I am now going to write something I never thought I’d write: I’m proud of John Boehner for beating Barack Obama and the Democrats.

I know. Wait a moment to let the shock settle in and read this.

Barely more than an hour before a midnight deadline, officials announced a deal to avert a government shutdown.

“We will cut $78.5 billion below the president’s 2011 budget proposal, and we have reached an agreement on the policy riders,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said in a joint statement.

The real cuts come to about $39 billion dollars, which, when added to the $10 billion the GOP already have (so far as I know, that’s not included in this total), brings the total to $49 billion. Federal funding for Planned Parenthood is out of the bill but not out of the question. The Senate must hold a separate vote on that and on Obamacare funding in the near future.

Seems like a loss, doesn’t it? We conservatives really wanted that $100 billion dollars for which the GOP asked back in February when this whole thing started. We wanted that we wanted to cut federal funding for Planned Parenthood, public broadcasting, and Obamacare and if we couldn’t get the whole package, we’d just shut down the government until we got them. But tonight we’re like a kid who didn’t get the entirety of his Christmas list — sad and angry and on the verge of a nice little tantrum that’ll show Mommy and Daddy that they’d better listen to us next time.

I get it. I wanted a long and bloody government shutdown, too. I’m tired of watching Washington hand my money to a bunch of corrupt rich donor groups who end up handing most of that money right back to the Democrats as campaign contributions. I’m sick and tired of my tax money being spent to kill babies every day. I wanted to padlock the government doors until we got every penny of what we wanted, plus a few more for good measure.

Except there was no chance — not even the faintest ghost of a chance — I was going to get my wish. Here, instead, is what would have happened.

On Sunday, every single morning talk show would have featured Republicans defensively explaining why they weren’t really responsible for the shutdown and both Democrats and the anchors asking them loaded question after loaded question. Monday morning, every newspaper and cable network (save, perhaps, Fox, and I’m none too sure about Shep Smith of Bill O’Reilly) would have run story after interminable story about Boy Scouts locked out of the Washington Monument and poor federal government workers scrambling to rearrange their middle class budgets to weather a couple or three months without paychecks. Soldiers wouldn’t have gotten paid either, and you can bet that not a soul in the MSM would have pointed out the simple truth that the Democrats has chosen to support Planned Parenthood over our men and women in the military.

Now imagine day after day of those stories for weeks on end. One month. Two months, perhaps. Republicans were never going to win that fight and I never saw a hint of an idea how they could.

On the other hand, what do we have now? Well, let’s look at where we started back in January. Thanks to Democratic fecklessness, we had no budget and needed to fund the government to the end of June. Republicans put an offer on the board that was $100 billion less than expected. The Democrats countered with an offer of no cuts at all plus a $20 billion tax increase that would have jacked gasoline prices even higher than they are right now. Those were the opening positions — $100 billion against “Screw you and the Tea Parties you rode in on”.

Republicans backed down to $61 billion and Democrats ponied up a counter-offer of $6 billion (which they then blew up to $50 billion thanks to some funny budget tricks). Those were basically the positions of both parties until tonight, until Speaker John Boehner released this blockbuster of a deal.

Ponder that a moment. John Boehner got the Democrats to move from $6 billion in cuts to $39 billion in a month. Yesterday, Harry Reid was adamant that a cut of a fraction of that amount was unconscionable, and Eleanor Holmes-Norton called a cut in DC abortion funding the equivalent of bombing civilians. Tonight, they accepted all of that and more. Four months ago, we were looking down the barrel of spending increases and now we’ve actually cut a federal budget — a real cut, not one of those fake cuts that cut the rate of increase instead of the actual amount.

And you know the best part…the very best part of the whole thing? Tomorrow morning and for weeks after, Harry Reid and Barack Obama are going to have to explain to the mob of howling lunatics they call their base why they gave the hated Republicans this deal. Remember, no Democrat anywhere ever expressed even the faintest scintilla of interest in giving up more than $20 billion. I can’t imagine the ire they are going to face from those progressive blogs and MoveOn and all the rest who had to watch Obama and Reid stand there and praise this deal to the heavens.

And what of Planned Parenthood? Well, that vote is on the way and we conservatives will be able to show America how its clinics eagerly give advice to pimps on how to get abortions for their under-aged whores without the clutter of dozens upon dozens of sad government shutdown propaganda pieces. Four months ago, that was simply not going to happen. Now, it can, and it’ll happen while the Democrats are still fighting the anger from their base over the deal.

No, this deal isn’t everything I wanted. It’s not the pretty thoroughbred pony and the iPad and the fancy car on Christmas Day. There is a big fight ahead. We still have one whale of a deficit to tackle over the next couple of months and the Ryan budget plan to get passed. But, tonight was a win. We conservatives ought to pat the GOP leadership on the back, give them an atta-boy, and get them ready for the larger fight to come.

Tags: Big Government, Economics, John Boehner