| Looks like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has found a new hostage to ransom. Medicare. He says there must be substantial cuts to Medicare as part of any spending and deficit package before he will agree to raise the debt limit.
My quick take is that McConnell is willing to endanger the credit standing of the United States in order to force Democrats to cut Medicare. Thats' because McConnell believes it's the only way to rescue Republicans from election disaster in 2012 and beyond now that Speaker John Boehner was stupid enough to let Paul Ryan and virtually the entire Republican House vote to destroy Medicare.
It will do no good to appeal to McConnell's patriotism. Neither can Wall Street convince McConnell to back down. Holding the full faith and credit of the United State hostage in order to blackmail Democrats to take the politically immunizing vote on Medicare cuts is the only way McConnell thinks it's possible to rescue the GOP from the fix it's currently in with seniors now that virtually every Republican, in both the House and Senate, voted to kill a Medicare program that is extremly popular with the elderly, who tend to vote and are now about a third of the electorate.
According to Talking Points Memo, earlier today McConnell said unspecified Medicare cuts are on the table in bipartisan debt limit negotiations, led by Vice President Joe Biden. He also expects they'll be part of the final deal, reports TPM.
Tellingly, he told TPM that Medicare cuts must be part of that deal to get his support -- even if negotiators "manage to find trillions of dollars in savings elsewhere, and even if his other priorities are met," says TPM.
"To get my vote, for me, it's going to take short term [cuts, via spending caps]... Both medium and long-term, entitlements.," McConnell said. "Medicare will be part of the solution."
That makes it clear to me that McConnell is going after Medicare not because he's concerned about the program's impact on the deficit or on future federal spending, but because he's desperate to find some way to drag Democrats down into the Medicare-cutting mud along with Republicans in order to neutralize the political impact of the GOP's earlier votes against the program.
After the wake-up call Republicans got from their defeat in the New York 26th race, the entire 2012 election for Republicans might hinge on McConnell's blackmail succeeding. |
