Over the Cliff: Shoddy Compromise Reflects Well on Nobody

As I write this, the latest news from Capitol Hill is that even if the Senate votes before midnight on the last-minute deal that Senators Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell have put together, the House definitely will not. Thus, the country will go over the fiscal cliff, at least for one night. Still, the betting in Washington is that a bill will be agreed upon tomorrow, or maybe the next day. Assuming it passes both chambers of Congress—a non-trivial assumption—there won’t be any great cause for celebration. It’s a shoddy compromise that does credit to nobody involved, and it raises questions, once again, about President Obama’s willingness and ability to face down the Republican extremists.

About the best that can be said of the deal is that it avoids a hasty shift towards big spending cuts, which could endanger the recovery. But that’s only because the deal punts most of the big questions about federal spending into 2013, when the G.O.P. ultras will be eager to exploit the fact that the Administration once again needs their support to raise the debt ceiling. Anybody who was hoping that the fiscal-cliff negotiations would settle the issue of deficit reduction for the next ten months, let alone the next ten years, will be disappointed.

Come February or March, when the debt ceiling will be breached, we could well be back to the summer of 2011, with the G.O.P. holding the economy hostage and demanding big cuts in Social Security and Medicare. The President has said that he won’t negotiate with the Republicans over the debt ceiling, but will he have any choice? Even before that showdown, there will be questions about the concessions that his negotiators made to reach this deal.

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