Alex Pareene at Salon has written a great piece about the revival of the Grand Bargain in his inimitable style that’s well-worth reading. I just want to pull out on little piece that I don’t think many people really understand:
Here’s a fun secret: Tax reform (in this case referring to eliminating or scaling back “tax expenditures”) is technically a conservative policy priority, even if elected Republicans refuse to ever support it for real. This is a compromise in which conservative policy is being offered in exchange for conservative support for a conservative policy. The sequester and Obama’s Bargain quest mean that Republicans can choose between allowing a Democrat to “take credit” for cutting the two most popular programs in the country or they can just live with the already-passed government spending cut that they are also able to blame on the president.
Period. Sequester is the new normal.