The GOP Is Against Entitlement Cuts Now That Obama Is For Them

by evanmcmurry

Obama finally proposed a budget containing the entitlement cuts Republicans have been demanding for years. His reward:

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Greg Walden touched a nerve Wednesday when he savaged the entitlement changes in President Barack Obama’s budget as a “shocking attack on seniors.”

The NRCC is openly frothing at the chance to use chained CPI against Democratic opponents in 2014, despite the fact that the GOP has been pounding the table for these cuts—indeed, holding debt ceilings hostage and causing unnecessary economic crises just to get them. And now that Obama has finally offered them, the GOP will use it against him. As Sargeant put it:

Mark April 11th, 2013, down on your calendars as the day that the GOP’s fiscal ruse was finally unmasked with total clarity: Republicans don’t actually want entitlement cuts. Or, to put it another way, they say they want entitlement cuts, but they want Dems to own them.

[…] This reflects what Steve Benen, Jonathan Bernstein, Jed Lewison, and others have been describing as a kind of “post policy” Republican Party. As Rachel Maddow recently asked, is it really an exaggeration to argue that today’s Republicans are  “just positioning themselves vis-a-vis the president, and they’re not actually invested in any particular outcome for the country?”

Here’s your  now-requisite disclaimer that all of this is gratuitous, as the deficit is shrinking on its own, thanks to an improving economy.