The politics surrounding the infamous 'sequester' are so convoluted that they merit a brief unraveling. Where to begin?
Let's start with what each party actually wants. Both parties want to reduce the budget deficit. The Democrats want to do so by closing tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy. Republicans want to do so by cutting government programs and expenditures.
Now let's look at what the sequester does and does not do. The sequester cuts government programs and expenditures. The sequester does not close tax loopholes that benefit the very wealthy.
You've certainly heard both sides blame the other for the sequester and its effects. Republicans argue that Obama and the Democrats failed to provide the leadership to avert the sequester. The Democrats argue that Republicans in Congress failed to compromise to avert the sequester.
Here's the thing about blame: you don't blame someone for doing something awesome. You blame someone for doing something bad. So when Republicans blame Obama for allowing to happen precisely what Republicans wanted to happen, you have to scratch your head.
Despite the fact that ordained Republican budget champion Paul Ryan has long since argued in favor of sequester as a means to reduce the deficit, Ryan and other Republicans are now wagging their fingers at the president for allowing the sequester to happen.
Now, you might argue, sequestration brings about cuts abruptly, rather than over a planned, controlled period; so it's not hypocritical to want to reduce government programs and expenditures but also to oppose sequestration. That's true; but then again, Republicans have been campaigning on slashing entire government departments for years. These are the same politicians who held the US government credit rating hostage, who held the operating budget of the US government hostage, who held the US economy hostage in a series of hostage-taking scenarios called things like 'fiscal cliff.' Nobody in their right mind should believe for a second that 'sequestration' is any different: Republicans filibustered (which is to say prevented a vote on) a Senate bill to avoid sequestration that had a majority vote in pocket. For Republicans, sequestration is not a catastrophe to be avoided, but a deliberate plan to force the very government spending cuts that they've wanted all along. This is not a party that's above risking economic tumult or even economic ruin in order to further its ideology about what, and on what, the government should or shouldn't spend.
I'm actually not convinced, as so many Democratic politicos are, that sequestration will wreck the US economy, just as I wasn't convinced that the 'fiscal cliff' or the downgrading of our credit rating would either. People will lose jobs and will struggle for it, but it will be nothing like the economic havoc wrought by the private sector in recent years. The greater concern, I think, is the fact that a majority of legislators supported a plan to avoid sequestration, and yet the vote never happened. There are a number of very easy solutions to the problem of the abuse of the filibuster, yet no one on either side of the aisle seems interested in fixing our Congressional rules such that the legislature can actually have up or down votes on bills, which is to say so that the legislature can proceed with the business of legislating.
The filibuster should be the big story here; not how much both sides hate each other, nor some general and ineffectual condemnation of a synecdoche, Congress, and its effect on an abstraction, the economy.
