Remem­ber over last year or two, how Repub­li­cans repeat­edly threat­ened finan­cial dis­as­ter? Like high school drama queens in some teenage soap opera, they man­u­fac­tured one cri­sis after another. We’re on the verge of another series of show­downs. Get your score­cards ready.

Grover Norquist at a political conference in O...
High School Diva

To recap the story so far…

We had the debate over extend­ing the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2010. Repub­li­cans insisted we needed to main­tain those tax cuts, espe­cially for the wealthy, or else in a fit of piqué the spoiled rich kids would pick up their mar­bles and stop cre­at­ing jobs. Part of the deal for extend­ing the cuts included expan­sions of Pell grants for col­lege stu­dents and a tem­po­rary reduced pay­roll tax for America’s work­ing people.

Then, in April of 2011, Amer­ica found itself on the verge of a gov­ern­ment shut­down. 800,000 fed­eral work­ers came within a hair’s breadth of being tem­porar­ily out of work. The spend­ing appro­pri­a­tions finally passed, after an unnec­es­sary soap-​​opera-​​like drama. Then we had the debt ceil­ing debate the fol­low­ing sum­mer. Repub­li­can reluc­tance to raise the debt limit to finance the spend­ing they’d already approved resulted in the first-​​ever down­grade of the US credit rat­ing. The even­tual deal included the cre­ation of a “Super­com­mit­tee” charged with find­ing nearly two tril­lion dol­lars in addi­tional debt reduction.

The Super­com­mit­tee failed, due to Repub­li­cans refusal to con­sider even one dime in addi­tional taxes. (Thank you, Grover Norquist, the de facto czar of America’s tax pol­icy.) This means we have mas­sive auto­matic bud­get cuts set to kick in begin­ning in January.

Many of these bad deals are com­ing back to haunt us. The sequel approaches.

Wit­ness the fore­shad­ow­ing: at the end of 2011, the pay­roll tax hol­i­day expired. Repub­li­cans dis­played a strange reluc­tance to extend this tem­po­rary tax cut for the mid­dle class, with­out attach­ing a Christmas-​​bag full of far-​​right social agenda wish­list items. Pres­i­dent Obama stared them down, and Con­gress passed a two-​​month exten­sion. Then in Feb­ru­ary of this year, Con­gress enacted a rel­a­tively clean fur­ther exten­sion until the end of 2012, end­ing a con­vul­sion of irra­tional drama and angst, which had been cre­ated sim­ply to oppose the President.

The pat­tern will con­tinue. At the end of this year, a num­ber of things are sched­uled to hap­pen. They will all be fod­der for high drama.

Official portrait of United States House Speak...

A stretch for Lind­say Lohan?

  • The pay­roll tax hol­i­day again expires. We can expect there to be another fight on whether to extend it yet again. Oddly, Repub­li­cans don’t seem as happy about this tax cut as they are with cuts for the immensely wealthy. Part of the pay­roll tax deal involved exten­sions to Pell grants. Expect Repub­li­cans to put their oppo­si­tion to edu­ca­tion on dis­play by seek­ing to make cuts to this program.
  • The debt ceil­ing is going to be reached again in the spring of 2013, and must be raised some­time before that. House Speaker John Boehner has already sig­naled that he’s going to dig in his heels and demand mas­sive spend­ing cuts and tax cuts as black­mail for allow­ing Amer­ica to pay its bills.
  • The Bush tax cuts, extended at the end of 2010, will again expire at the end of 2012. These tax cuts are esti­mated to cost over $300 bil­lion annu­ally. For some rea­son, Repub­li­cans who claim to be con­cerned about the deficit insist on extend­ing these tax cuts. Boehner says this will be part of his demands for rais­ing the debt ceil­ing again.
  • The auto­matic spend­ing cuts result­ing from the fail­ure of the Super­com­mit­tee are sched­uled to kick in begin­ning Jan­u­ary of 2013. These cuts are split between mil­i­tary and domes­tic spend­ing. Repub­li­cans in the House are mak­ing plans to pre­vent the mil­i­tary cuts from tak­ing place, and to sub­sti­tute even more domes­tic cuts in their place. (The point of split­ting the cuts between mil­i­tary and domes­tic spend­ing was to do things nei­ther Repub­li­cans nor Democ­rats like, thus encour­ag­ing com­pro­mise in the Super­com­mit­tee. Repub­li­cans appar­ently don’t think they need to com­pro­mise, despite their ear­lier agreement.)
  • The fis­cal 2012 year ends Octo­ber 1, and spend­ing for fis­cal 2013 has to be approved. Last year we nearly had a gov­ern­ment shut­down in the bat­tle over spend­ing. Does any­one expect there to be more comity in an elec­tion year?
  • House Repub­li­cans intend to tie all of the above issues to a demand for addi­tional tax cuts, which of course will increase the deficit still more unless addi­tional spend­ing cuts are also enacted. Expect more Tea Party antics and demands for Greek-​​style aus­ter­ity mea­sures to be imple­mented here.
  • Speaker Boehner is sig­nalling that cuts to Social Secu­rity (which has noth­ing what­ever to do with the deficit) and Medicare are in the works, and will be part of the demands he intends to make this fall while assem­bling all of the above issues into a sin­gle enor­mous fis­cal nightmare.

Many of these issues could be addressed in a lame-​​duck ses­sion after the elec­tions. Some can wait until the new Con­gress is sworn in next year. Of course, putting off hard choices is not nec­es­sar­ily a good thing — but cre­at­ing par­ti­san talk­ing points in an elec­tion year in pref­er­ence to sane gov­er­nance isn’t much better.

Official photo cropped of United States Senato...

Rachel McAdams plays Yer­tle the Turtle

It seems to me that forc­ing all of these issues before the elec­tion — all except spend­ing pri­or­i­ties for fis­cal 2013, which is the one that actu­ally has a hard dead­line before Decem­ber 31 — is an act of des­per­a­tion. Boehner and Sen­ate Minor­ity Leader Mitch McConnell have both said that defeat­ing Pres­i­dent Obama is their sin­gle great­est pri­or­ity. We should take them at their word. The com­ing crises they will man­u­fac­ture in this elec­tion year are all intended to advance that one goal.

The rhetoric we’ll hear about bal­anc­ing the bud­get or reduc­ing the debt is belied by the con­flict­ing and con­tra­dic­tory insis­tence on fur­ther tax cuts, cou­pled with spend­ing cuts to pro­grams that don’t affect the deficit, or that don’t con­tribute to it with any sig­nif­i­cance. This is about social engi­neer­ing and polit­i­cal pos­tur­ing, mas­querad­ing as fis­cal responsibility.

Repub­li­cans have reduced them­selves to a soci­ety of Mean Girls whose only rea­son for being is to do bad things to the despised new kid, heed­less of the destruc­tion and pain and dam­age they cause. It doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s time we start elect­ing peo­ple who put coun­try before pol­i­tics. Enough of the drama queens. Let’s make this Novem­ber the time that Amer­ica demanded its elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives start gov­ern­ing again. As if some of them were adults.