HAPPY IN MINNESOTA, DEPRESSED IN DC

Republicans in Minnesota mostly have won a budget showdown with Democrat Gov. Mark Dayton.

By waiting until June 30 — the day before Minnesota law requires a budget to be in place — to veto nine spending bills the GOP-controlled legislature had passed in the middle of May, the governor provoked a shutdown of state government.  He then rejected a request by Republicans to call a special session so the legislature could pass a stopgap measure to keep the lights on while negotiations continued.

Mr. Dayton needed something dramatic to persuade Minnesotans to support much higher spending and new taxes, said Minneapolis Star-Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten.

"A government shutdown could do the trick, if it were broad-based and painful enough, and if the public could be convinced that Republican legislators had refused to compromise and so were to blame," she wrote.

But last Thursday (7/14), it was Gov. Dayton who blinked.  He’ll accept essentially the budget the legislature passed in May, the governor said in a letter to GOP leaders.

"Republicans have won a pitched battle with a Democrat governor on spending and taxes in a liberal state," said Minnesota blogger Scott Johnson (Power Line).  "If Republicans can make it here, they can make it anywhere."

Maybe not.  President Barack Hussein Obama has gained the upper hand over Republicans in Congress in their showdown over raising the ceiling on the national debt.  A conservative senator National Review Editor Rich Lowry talked to "believes time is on the president’s side in this debate, and is very depressed," he wrote Saturday (7/16).

Why are Republicans in Washington losing while Republicans in Minnesota were winning?

Media bias has a great deal to do with it, thinks columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Mr. Obama claims to have offered $1.7 trillion in spending cuts over ten years in closed door negotiations with Republicans.  Journalists have accepted that claim as fact without asking for proof.  This has helped Mr. Obama portray himself as a centrist who is willing to compromise.

And journalists didn’t challenge the president when he said failure to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 would put Social Security in jeopardy.  There’s more than enough tax revenue to service existing debt and pay Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits in full, the Treasury Department says.

"We now have a completely compliant, pliant, supine press accepting every leak out of the White House," Mr. Krauthammer said Friday on the "Inside Washington" program on PBS.

When the other journalists on the panel took umbrage at this, Mr. Krauthammer asked them to name a single specific cut to entitlement programs Mr. Obama has proposed.  None could.

But the journalistic deck was stacked against Republicans in Minnesota, too.  The state’s leading newspaper never reported the governor sought the shutdown, Mr. Johnson said.

The "very depressed" conservative senator to whom Mr. Lowry spoke thinks the big mistake Republicans made was failing "to set out early on a clear alternative around which they could unify and counter President Obama."

Republicans in Minnesota passed a balanced budget that permits state spending to rise six percent over the biennium without a tax increase.  This did more than give Republicans something around which to rally. 

It made the GOP position so clear it was difficult to distort.  And it contrasted sharply with the governor’s insistence upon a 24 percent increase in state spending, financed by raising taxes on wealthy Minnesotans.

House Speaker John Boehner has said Republicans would be willing to raise the debt ceiling by a dollar for every dollar spending is cut.  That is a position so simple and clear it is difficult for Democrats and their friends in the news media to distort.

But so far it’s been easy for them to ignore, because House Republicans haven’t passed a bill that would clarify that Republicans are not simply opposed to raising the debt ceiling under any circumstances.  Why not?

Because House GOP leaders fear so many Republicans are opposed to raising the debt ceiling such a bill might not pass, wrote Yuval Levin in National Review.

If so, the zeal of these conservatives exceeds their judgment.  Their intransigence has converted a problem for Mr. Obama into a trap for the GOP.  We’ll soon know if their plan to escape the trap works with passage of the Cut, Cap, and Balance Act.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.