NYT editorial: The Party of Nope

Here is the latest from the Grand Old Party: After years of eagerly enabling the Bush administration’s deficit spending and record debt, Republicans in Congress are dusting off their budget hawk costumes and suddenly demanding fiscal responsibility for the nation. In this scenery-chewing role, they are not just denying their own profligate history, but they hardly seem to be serious. Take their reaction to President Obama’s proposal for a bipartisan commission to tackle debt and budget threats.

“It’s a nothing-burger,” said Senator Judd Gregg, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Budget Committee. He said he finds the proposal for a commission of 10 Democratic and eight Republican experts de facto partisan, and prefers any panel be created and controlled in Congress (where Senate Republicans feast on serial filibustering). Representative John Boehner, the House minority leader, suggested Republicans would simply boycott posts on the commission, asking why provide political cover for panicky Democrats.

Unabashedly feckless, the Republican Party aims to rise from the Congressional minority by brandishing a political agenda of just saying no. As in no to health care reform. (Their new senator-elect from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, ran outright on a promise to be the latest to shoot down health care.) No to global warming repairs; no to real reform of Wall Street; no, in fact, to any act of creative opposition.

The proposed commission would make recommendations for facing the most politically painful decisions about how to rein in programs and raise revenues as the national debt rises. The proposal is occasioned by an election-year fight that’s heating up over the current deficit, a good part of which is because of Bush administration spending on such wasteful exercises as the Iraq war. Don’t expect the No Party to own up to their past red ink.

(More here.)