The earmarks in the omnibus bill account for $8 billion in spending. It is possible that all of this spending is unnecessary and horrible, but it constitutes just six-tenths of one percent of the entire bill. All of this could be stripped out, and there would still be 1.192 trillion dollars left in the bill. Naturally, it is this minuscule, irrelevant portion of the bill that has received all of the attention:

“The American people said just 42 days ago, ‘Enough!’ . . . Are we tone deaf? Are we stricken with amnesia?” Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a leading earmark critic, said on the Senate floor, flipping through the 1,924-page bill as he pounded his desk.

If the public isn’t opposed to the gargantuan $860 billion tax deal that McCain’s party leaders just agreed to add to the debt, and apparently they aren’t, why would anyone suppose that the public would be outraged over spending that is less than one percent of the value of the tax deal? The only thing more tiresome than the charade of pretending that opposing earmarks is proof of fiscal rectitude is the mindless repetition of the claim that earmarks represent some sort of betrayal of the public trust. The omnibus bill includes earmarks added by Senate Republicans, and because of the silly earmark moratorium Senate Republicans wanted to adopt the presence of their earmarks has become news. However, possibly the only thing more ridiculous than having politicians complain about the evils of earmarks is complaining about members’ earmark hypocrisy. Instead of harping on members’ inconsistency on this point, we should welcome it as proof that the fixation on earmarks is a ridiculous distraction from the real causes of our current fiscal mess.

As the Senate prepares to take up President Obama’s new arms control treaty with Russia on Wednesday for the first time, a Republican opponent of the pact plans to force the entire text to be read in hopes of keeping it from being approved in the lame-duck session.

The reading of bills and other measures is usually dispensed on the Senate floor but because that requires unanimous consent, a single senator can block it. Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina, declared that he would object, meaning that clerks will have to read the full text of the so-called New Start treaty and protocol, which could take 12 to 15 hours. ~Peter Baker

One thing that you can say about Jim DeMint is that he follows through on his threats. Earlier in the month, he had suggested that he might use delaying tactics to slow down and block the treaty during the lame-duck session, and he is going to do just that. DeMint has at least twenty-one colleagues on the Republican side that will probably join with him in these blocking maneuvers, and the more that the hard-line treaty opponents stall the easier it will be for the equivocating members of the leadership to repeat their claim that “there is not enough time.” After Kyl caused the treaty’s consideration to be delayed until after the election, it will make it that much easier for anti-treaty irreconcilables to drag out the process over the next nine days and make sure that there really won’t be enough time. The less time for actual debate on the treaty, the easier it is for Kyl to complain that the majority was trying to “jam” the treaty through. Kyl has already said that he will organize votes against the treaty if it is brought to a vote before Christmas:

He did not rule out a vote this year, but set conditions that might be hard for the administration to meet, including a long floor debate. “If they try to jam us, if they try to bring this up the week before Christmas, it’ll be defeated,” he said. “If they allow plenty of time for it, and I think it will take two weeks, then it’s a different matter.”

DeMint’s delaying maneuvers help make the long floor debate impossible, and that makes Kyl’s threat more meaningful. Kyl also reiterated this threat yesterday in very plain terms: “And if he [Reid] does bring it up, I will work very hard to achieve that result, namely that the treaty fails.” To the extent that the omnibus bill meets with similar resistance, which DeMint has also promised to lead, that helps eat up more time, and it gives Kyl another excuse for his opposition to voting on the treaty this session.

Jennifer Rubin is already busily trying to spin all of this as the fault of the Democratic leadership:

Will Russian “reset” cheerleaders, gay activists, and Hispanic groups feel aggrieved? If so, they should take it up with the Democratic House and Senate leaders who had two years to get their business done.

As far as New START is concerned, that is simply false. The treaty wasn’t even signed until April, and consideration of the treaty has been delayed until now to satisfy the “concerns” of Senate Republicans. Almost all of the time since the treaty-signing has been wasted by the minority’s delaying tactics in the form of Kyl’s demands for ever more money. Having wasted all of that time and held up consideration of the treaty for the sake of these bogus “concerns,” the minority has continued to throw up as many obstacles as possible. Assuming that New START is not ratified, most of the Senate Republicans are the ones responsible.

Update: Josh Rogin reports that several Republican Senators (including Kyl and DeMint) have won a procedural battle that will make it easier to wreck the ratification process:

To prepare for the coming debate, several GOP senators asked the Senate parliamentarian to give an official ruling on whether the preamble to the treaty is open for amendments.

Treaty supporters object to amending the preamble, because any changes would force the treaty to go back to bilateral negotiations with the Russians, which could take months and possibly even scuttle New START entirely [bold mine-DL].

This is why treaty supporters refer to such amendments as “treaty killers.” The negative effect that amendments would have on the process is likely far greater than the effect the amendments would have on the agreement itself.

On Tuesday, the parliamentarian ruled in the GOP’s favor, stating that yes, the preamble to the treaty is amendable. We’re told that several GOP senators are preparing to try to amend it to take out the language that acknowledges the link between offensive and defensive missile capabilities.

What is extraordinary about this is that the language in the premable is non-binding. The language these Senators want taken out has no effect on missile defense. Acknowledging the relationship between defensive weapons and strategic arms is a statement of the obvious. As Fred Kaplan has described it before, it is “Arms Control 101.” It entails no substantive commitments or limits on the part of the U.S. For the sake of deleting this unremarkable, non-binding language, GOP Senators are prepared to kill the entire treaty. Of course, that is the real purpose of the exercise.

In an interview today in the New York Times (page A1, no less!), Ron Paul states that “it’s at least 50-50 that I’ll run again,” meaning that he thinks there’s at least a 50% chance he’ll run in the 2012 Republican Presidential primary. Combined with the increasing likelihood that former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson will also be running in that primary, this creates the strong prospect of two more or less proud libertarians running in the 2012 primary. This leads Matt Welch to ask of libertarians “Which of the four possible scenarios (Paul & Johnson both run, neither of them run, or one of them runs) would you prefer, and why?”

I think the answer here is pretty clearly that libertarians are best off if both run. There is, to be sure, a virtual guarantee that Johnson and Paul would split the libertarian vote within the GOP primary such as it exists. But let’s be honest here: neither of them are going to come remotely close to winning the nomination under any conceivable circumstances.

What both Johnson and Paul running would accomplish is that it would double the rather minimal attention paid to libertarians and libertarianism during the primary process. It would mean twice as many questions directed towards libertarian candidates during the tedious debate process. It would also mean significantly more national television appearances for libertarian candidates. ~Mark Thompson

No one has asked me, but I’m inclined to agree with Thompson that it would largely help to have more competitors in the Republican primary defending civil liberties, arguing against unnecessary wars, and presenting an uncompromising challenge to Republican enabling of government profligacy and debt. Instead of being limited to the strengths and weaknesses of just one of them, both would be competing. In so doing, they would be providing natural alternatives for voters sympathetic to their overall message that might have otherwise ended up rejecting one or the other.

Speculating on a scenario in which Johnson ran and Paul didn’t, Jim Antle worried that Johnson would be “a less effective messenger in the primary process than Paul.” If Paul is also campaigning, he could continue to deliver his message and build on the movement from 2008 and after, and Johnson’s effectiveness or lack of it would not be as critical for advancing or sinking the coalition. If Johnson proved to be equally effective in putting across the message, that could only help expose more Republicans to their ideas. Dan McCarthy was concerned that “Johnson might sidetrack Paul into discussions that would make it easier for the party establishment to marginalize both of them,” but my guess is that neither of them wants to carry on such dead-end discussions. Instead of the usual 7 or 8-against-1 odds that prevailed during the Republican primary debates in 2007 and 2008, Johnson and Paul would be a ready-made pair of allies criticizing the other candidates and presenting their alternatives in turn.

There is the possibility of another round of the usual fratricidal bickering that often drags down libertarian and traditional conservative causes, but I suspect that even if this were to happen it would be limited to arguments between supporters of the two campaigns.

People keep quoting this line from Charles Krauthammer:

While getting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he [Obama] gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, Tea-Party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

This is a good example of the confusion that results from believing that a) the public is deeply worried about government debt and b) that the GOP ever intended to follow through on its election-year rhetoric by cultivating “this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.” If the former were true, it would be foolish for Republicans to follow up their midterm success by adding hundreds of billions in new debt. Caldwell made a similar mistake when he asserted that “the long-term deficit is now a great, galvanising issue in the electorate.” If that were true, Republicans would be mad to indulge in deficit expansion just weeks after a major electoral victory, but their leaders understand that it is not a great or galvanizing issue. The public’s reaction to the deal seems to confirm this.

Republican leaders are no more serious this time about fiscal responsibility than they were before 2007. Why would they be? These are the same leaders who presided over Bush-era irresponsibility. These are the same leaders who told the public very clearly before the election that they had no intention of addressing long-term fiscal imbalances. We are seeing “the Pledge” in action, or as much of it as the minority party can manage in a lame-duck session.

Having pointed out previously that the tax deal only makes sense in connection with a plan for reining in debt, Ross observes that the tax deal creates incentives for both the administration and the GOP “to postpone any deficit compromise until after 2012.” Looking at public opinion, they have strong incentives to keep postponing any such compromise for even longer. According to another Pew survey from late last week, the public claims to see deficits as a “major problem” that must be addressed now (70%), and approximately two-thirds of Americans understand that tax increases and spending cuts are needed, but they are resistant to deficit reduction in almost all its specific forms:

Most of the major deficit reduction proposals under discussion meet with public disapproval. Particularly unpopular are provisions that would tax the health insurance people receive from their employers (72% disapprove), raise the national gasoline tax (74% disapprove), and reduce federal funding to states for things like education and roads (71% disapprove). Of 12 ideas tested, just two meet with majority approval: increasing the amount of earned income that is subject to Social Security withholding (64% approve) and freezing the salaries of government workers (59% approve); the latter proposal is supported by President Obama and many Republicans.

The Simpson-Bowles commission proposal meets with 48% disapproval and just 30% approval. Notably, of those who have heard about the proposal, disapproval is highest among Republicans, where it runs 58-16% against. Going through the list of the 12 ideas, we see that there is relatively less Republican support for six of them, majority support among Republicans for only two (raising the Social Security contribution cap, and the federal pay freeze), and relatively greater Republican support for two (raising the retirement age and reducing funding to states for roads and education). Why did anyone expect Republican leaders to become dedicated to fiscal responsibility when their voters aren’t and presumably don’t want them to be?

P.S. In fairness to Tea Partiers, the survey lists their responses as well, and it appears that a substantial percentage of those identifying with the Tea Party take getting debt under control a bit more seriously:

Tea Party supporters are more likely to favor addressing the deficit mostly by cutting major programs (39%) than are Americans generally (16%). Yet Tea Party supporters do not flatly reject tax increases as part of the deficit solution; roughly half (51%) believe that the best way to address the deficit is through a combination of major program cuts and tax increases.

However, the more specific the questions, the more muddled the Tea Partier response becomes. Of the 12 ideas tested in the survey, a majority of Tea Partiers supported just two (the federal pay freeze, and reducing Social Security for high income seniors). They were significantly more likely to support three others, but significantly less likely to support raising the contribution cap, taxing employer-provided health insurance, eliminating the home mortgage interest deduction, or making any cuts to military spending and/or the size of the military. While 51% of Tea Partiers claim to support deficit reduction through tax increases and spending cuts, there are not nearly that many that will back any specific efforts to raise new revenues.

Andrew:

It [the tax deal] could also lead to a spectacular black eye for the GOP establishment. Does anyone believe that the Tea Party campaigned so hard in order to have the Congress pass a second stimulus – as pricey as the first, and borrowed entirely from the Chinese [bold mine-DL]? Think what happens after the deal is passed, and the truth of it sinks in with the base. The GOP civil war will begin in earnest – especially if Obama outflanks the GOP on long-term debt reduction in the SOTU.

One thing that Tea Partiers definitely did campaign for was tax cuts. Once you add up the extension of all the Bush-era rates, the temporary payroll tax cut, the AMT provision, the estate tax provision, and the various tax credits included in the deal, there isn’t much left that really qualifies as stimulus spending. What I have seen so far from members of Congress associated with the Tea Party movement is hostility to the deal because it does not make all of the tax cuts permanent and fails to abolish the estate tax. Assuming that the deal is passed, what will “sink in” with the Republican rank and file is that approximately 93% of the deal took the form of tax breaks, tax credits or tax holidays. Looked at this way, the deal was designed almost perfectly to avoid making any difficult, fiscally responsible decisions and to indulge the fantasy that there is no economic or fiscal problem that cannot be solved by reducing taxes.

Inasmuch as these Tea Party-aligned politicians primarily care about lowering taxes, the huge deficit expansion that the deal represents will not trouble them, because they are openly calling for expanded deficits for years to come. One reason that there is no strong resistance to the deal among House and Senate Republicans is that almost all of them see the deal as a significant win for their side and for their policy preferences. Even most of the parts of the deal that can be described as new stimulus do not seem to be objectionable to Tea Partiers in Congress.

Maybe the newly-elected Republican members take a different view, but I have a hard time seeing a Republican civil war erupting over the concession on unemployment benefits. Democratic supporters of the deal have been emphasizing what little spending there is to make the best of what they see as a lopsided deal whose stimulative effects will be very inefficient. This is an exercise in positive spin more than it is a fair description of the entire deal. As many others have pointed out already, the Democrats’ “almost epic attempt at political suicide” was before the election when the Democratic leadership chose to do nothing on taxes, which is part of what put them in their current predicament. Some of them are not yet resigned to oblivion and have started struggling against the inevitable, but it is probably too late for them.

P.S. Bearing all this in mind, things are not completely hopeless on the Republican side. As Ross points out in his column today, Sen. Tom Coburn has objected to the deal for the right reasons.

Mr Obama’s short-term deal makes it more likely that the long-term equilibration of income and outgoings will be done on Republican terms. ~Christopher Caldwell

This is certainly what many Democrats fear, but this seems to be a case of Democrats’ putting more faith in conservative “starve the beast” rhetoric than many conservatives actually do. I noticed that Jim Pinkerton was recently insisting that this was the real reason why Republicans support the tax deal, but I doubt that they really believe this. My impression is that this is the line Republicans always use to reconcile their refusal to control spending with their professed interest in keeping spending under control. In practice, the beast never starves. The beast simply starts devouring the wealth of future generations. This is the result of the very American and extremely un-conservative conviction that we can have it all, which means that we don’t need to make any serious trade-offs.

Caldwell argues that the deal will increase pressure for deficit reduction, and presumably we are supposed to believe that deficit reduction on “Republican terms” implies drastic spending cuts. If that were the case, liberal dissatisfaction with the deal would seem even more reasonable, and any conservative opposition to the deal would seem short-sighted, but this is not what will happen. As Caldwell outlines very well, the tax deal is an embodiment of “centrist” and bipartisan government at its worst:

The two parties have connived to kick every single difficult budget decision down the road. They have collaborated only to give away money. If this were part one of a larger plan to get the country’s fiscal house in order, it might be welcomed. But it is an exercise in wishful thinking. It damps hopes that America can reform before the markets bring it to heel.

As the leaders of both parties have made clear in the last few months, sacrificing anything significant for the sake of fiscal responsibility is out of the question right now. The new guardians of the sanctity of Medicare in the Republican leadership are not going to throw away the advantage among elderly voters they have acquired by hinting at anything that might appear to threaten Social Security or Medicare. Trusting in newly-elected members of Congress to change this will most likely lead to disappointment. To take one example, Marco Rubio is not going to start speaking truth to the power of retirees. If we put aside their campaign rhetoric, we can see that the party of insolvency has no interest in austerity budgets. As the tax deal has shown, no amount of establishment consensus or elite panic about debt will force political leaders to stop expanding the deficit at every opportunity. If it comes to a point where the fiscal imbalance absolutely cannot be ignored any longer, it will be relatively easier to raise taxes than it will be to reform entitlements. It won’t be very popular, but it will only be after this that entitlement reform becomes politically possible as the public begins to identify what the real cost of government services is. Starving the beast doesn’t work, and in all likelihood it creates all the wrong incentives if the goal is to reduce the size and scope of government.

Last week, Peggy Noonan wrote:

He should confound everyone, and give a headache to his foes, by bowing to the spirit of 2010 and accepting the Bush tax cuts, top to bottom. It would be electrifying. It would seem responsive, and impress the center. And it would help Mr. Obama seem credible, not ideological or partisan but reasonable and moderate, when he weighs in on taxing and spending in the future.

This is more or less what he did. It did not create a headache for his foes. On the whole, they have been celebrating his embrace of their position. All of this created a problem for Noonan. How could she find a new angle for mocking Obama when he did the “startling” thing she advised him to do? This is how:

The president must have thought that distancing himself from left and right would make him more attractive to the center. But you get credit for going to the center only if you say the centrist position you’ve just embraced is right [bold mine-DL]. If you suggest, as the president did, that the seemingly moderate plan you agreed to is awful and you’ll try to rescind it in two years, you won’t leave the center thinking, “He’s our guy!” You’ll leave them thinking, “Note to self: Remove Obama in two years.”

In other words, it is not enough that Obama capitulate and accept a position he has specifically, publicly rejected on many occasions. He must also pretend that his capitulation is the result of a genuine change of heart. I am reminded of one of the interrogators from an episode of Babylon-5 when he says, “We don’t just want a confession; we want conversion.” It isn’t enough to break Obama. He must also admit that he was wrong all along. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t receive any of the benefits of “startling” and “electrifying” the public by his abject surrender.

She had also said:

This would further damage his relationship with the more leftward part of his base, but that can hardly be made worse [bold mine-DL], and a compromise would leave them angry anyway.

Instantly, after doing what Noonan recommended Obama’s relationship with the left was made worse. Having insisted that capitulating on the tax cuts couldn’t do much to worsen his relationship with the left, Noonan now marvels at the unprecedented spectacle of Obama’s core supporters turning on him:

You’re not supposed to get a serious primary challenge from the people who loved you. But that’s the talk of what may happen with Mr. Obama.

Last week, Obama’s relations with the left were about as bad they could be. This week, they have worsened so much that Noonan has never seen anything like it. Last week, capitulating on tax cuts was Obama’s path to political revival. This week, after he did exactly what Noonan called for, he is in such sorry shape that she has no idea how his political future can be saved:

Some Democrats will try to bring him back. How? Who knows. But that will be a great Democratic drama of 2011: Saving Obama.

Of course, it is no surprise that Obama is in worse shape now by taking the “advice” of Noonan than he was before it.

Responding to my post, Dave Weigel offers an explanation for why conservatives remained solidly behind Bush until at least 2006:

1) War. There was no serious conservative opposition to Bush from September 11 2001 to some point in 2006. The Medicare Part D vote was held two months after the Iraq War began. When your base supports you on a war, you can get away with some disappointments on other issues. Barack Obama simply doesn’t exploit his commander-in-chief role the way Bush did. (If you think that’s unfair to Bush, I have video of a certain pilot landing on an aircraft carrier you should see.)

2) Winning/Losing. The Medicare Part D vote was sold to conservatives as a more market-friendly version of a Democratic idea, which would take their idea off the table for the 2004 election. The tax cut deal looks like sad president bowing to Republican obstruction in the Senate and giving in to “hostage takers.” Bush’s successful feints to the left were always sold as ways to grab voter-friendly Democratic ideas to benefit Republicans. Democrats don’t see what they’re getting with the tax deal — it affirms, as Jim DeMint says, what conservatives spent 10 years saying about tax cuts.

These account for some of the reasons why Bush did not face a rebellious conservative movement until the 2007 immigration debate. The degree of uniformity and lockstep support for the administration that the Iraq war created does help explain why Bush could run much more to the left than Obama has moved right without provoking a backlash. The war largely dominated the politics of 2004-2007, Bush and the movement were united on the same side, and outside Washington the movement and his party’s rank and file were the only ones who were still with him when he proposed the “surge.” It is possible that the sheer unpopularity of both Bush and the war forged a connection between Bush and conservative war supporters that would not have otherwise endured. As long as the war remained the defining issue, it bonded the movement to Bush to an extent that has never happened with liberals and Obama. Conservatives might reflect on that and consider whether waging an unnecessary, costly war that harmed U.S. interests was worth the massive expansion of the welfare state before and after 2006 that it enabled.

As the movement became convinced of the success of the “surge” and Iraq faded into the background, the movement became a bit more willing to challenge Bush when they found his policies unacceptable. Obviously, many of Obama’s core constituencies haven’t responded to Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan in anything like the same way because many of them are ambivalent or openly opposed to the decision. Where support for the “surge” became the single-most significant litmus test on the right, Obama’s decisions on foreign policy and national security have generated mixed reactions at best on the left because of significant continuity of many Bush and Obama policies.

The timing of the two episodes also makes a big difference. When Bush pushed through the prescription drug benefit, it wasn’t just that he was making it seem like a Republican win on a traditional Democratic issue, but he was also still relatively popular both within and outside his party. He was coming off the unusual post-9/11 “Khaki” election of 2002 in which his party gained seats, and there will still illusions among some activists on the right that an enduring Republican majority was there for the taking. Indeed, according to the fashionable ideas of some “big-government conservatives” and “compassionate conservatives,” it was supposed to be the prescription drug benefit and things like them that would make the GOP into the dominant party in the future. All of that proved to be false, but it wasn’t immediately clear that it was false. At the time, it was tempting for some on the right to see it as a major partisan victory. Obama’s capitulation comes on the heels of a major electoral defeat and resulted from Democratic avoidance of the tax issue until after the election. Despite the best efforts of David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer, it is difficult to spin this as success. Instead of theoretically poaching on the other party’s territory, it represents a policy setback coming in the wake of a significant political setback. It also serves as confirmation in the minds of liberal critics that Obama will not “fight” and will accommodate the opposition, whereas Bush’s gargantuan entitlement expansion was more or less in keeping with what conservatives had come to expect of Bush. Perhaps one of the most important differences is that many of Obama’s liberal allies see the deal as a failure of leadership, and Bush’s conservative allies saw the prescription drug benefit as evidence of successful leadership, albeit in the service of expanding the welfare state. This is probably why the reaction to the tax deal is as strong as it is despite the comparatively smaller concessions that Obama made.

“Every one of these people is either deeply flawed or irredeemably polarizing, and that’s why a guy like Santorum is going to get a look.” ~The Washington Post

It’s not so hard to believe that Santorum will “get a look” because of the flaws of the rest of the likely 2012 GOP field, but as soon as people look most of them will conclude that he, too, is “deeply flawed and irredeemably polarizing.” More precisely, he is virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the field on most issues, except that he is widely (and somewhat unfairly) perceived as an authoritarian fanatic on social issues and a dangerous jingoist on foreign policy. No doubt he will steal John Bolton’s thunder when he delivers ringing condemnations of the Venezuelan missile threat, but if his presidential bid is anything like his 2006 re-election campaign he will be quickly dismissed by most primary voters. I suspect they will dismiss him not because he is excessively hawkish, but because he has had a habit over the last few years of talking about nothing else. Especially when voters are going to be anxious about the economy, Santorum’s fixation on “America’s enemies,” which he has been focused on since his ’06 defeat, will become tiresome. In a 2012 field that is likely to include more than candidate interested in demagoguing foreign policy issues, Santorum will become an echo rather than a clear alternative.

Santorum’s natural constituency of religious and social conservatives is likely to be split so many different ways that he will not be able to take advantage of his deserved reputation as a dedicated opponent of abortion and proponent of Catholic social reform. Meanwhile, the things that might make Santorum stand out and could make him a more interesting and attractive candidate, such as his effort on debt relief or his reflections on our obligations to serve the common good, do not resonate with the rank and file or appear to be a threat to individualism.