Ezra Klein:
Most think the likely compromise is a trigger that would impose automatic, across-the-board cuts in spending if the committee fails in its mission. But Senate Democratic leadership isn’t so sure. They worry that a spending-cuts only trigger is heads, Republicans win; tails, Democrats lose. “The idea of triggers with just cuts is a non-starter. Republicans would just deadlock the committee and get the cuts they want,” continues the aide. “If there is a trigger it would have to be balanced.”
The White House proposed a balanced trigger in April: It would have automatically cut taxes and increased spending if America wasn’t on a path to balanced budgets by 2014. In his remarks on Friday morning, Obama reiterated that support. “if we need to put in place some kind of enforcement mechanism to hold us all accountable for making these reforms, I’ll support that too if it’s done in a smart and balanced way.”
But privately, they’re less concerned about a spending-only trigger, which was seriously considered during their negotiations with Boehner.They point out that Republicans might want to cut spending, but they don’t want the blame for automatic, untargeted spending cuts that slash away at Social Security, Medicare and defense during an election year. But that’s cold comfort to some Hill Democrats who listened to Boehner’s Tuesday interview with Rush Limbaugh.
The issue here goes to the big difference between the Reid proposal announced earlier this week and the Boehner bill as it was originally drafted (before inclusion of the Balanced Budget Amendment provision): the Reid bill raises the debt limit by $2.7 trillion all at once, while the Boehner bill initially raises it by just $900 billion. A second installment of $1.6 trillion is contingent on Congressional passage of between $1.6 trillion and $1.8 trillion in additional spending cuts, which Boehner has said would not include revenues and would be focused on entitlements.
The idea of adding a trigger to the Reid bill is to give Republicans some sort of assurance that those cuts would still happen. If you're asking yourself what the difference is between a bill with a trigger and the Boehner bill, you're asking a good question: the answer is that there's basically no difference. It would be slightly better to have a trigger with revenue increases, but unless we're talking about massive tax hikes (beyond repealing the Bush tax cuts which will expire anyway), you're whistling past the graveyard. Absent that, the only real reason for a trigger is politics, because it takes the debt limit fight off the table. But it does so by completing the capitulation.
Democrats have already gone a long way toward giving Republicans what they want. Accepting any kind of trigger that Boehner could support would be pure, unadulterated insanity, especially a spending-only trigger that cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. It would wreak political devastation on the Democratic Party for years to come and would be worse than the original Boehner bill.