Small Potatoes

These are all important points. They are, however, not points that we should be dwelling on concerning a budget that is half over. The 2011 budget is a red herring. The 2012 budget is what we should all be agonizing over now.

Shutting down the federal government over what is, frankly, a pittance (and possibly just a social agenda) is pathetic. I am all for the current Republican trend to reduce the size and scope of the federal government, but their digging in the heels over something like Planned Parenthood will do them no good in the long run. The Democrats are preparing to go to war over protecting Planned Parenthood, a government program which actually serves a cause and for which the Republicans’ only objection is based in conservative Christian values, not the law.

This is small potatoes. This is not what the Tea Party movement’s meteoric rise was about. Even if many of the members of that movement do push the GOP’s atavistic social agenda, they were not sent to Washington to institute theocracy. They were sent to Washington to end the reckless spending of an utterly bankrupt (in both the fiscal and managerial sense) federal government.

A few brave souls, like Paul Ryan and the poor men and women that President Obama put on his much-vaunted and entirely ignored Debt Commission, have dared to venture into the waters of 2011 and beyond. Ryan’s earth-shattering budget concept, which doesn’t actually eliminate government deficit spending but comes much closer than anyone else’s plan, is being roundly denounced by Democrats. The Republicans should be circling their wagons around Ryan and those like him, instead of duking it out with the Democrats over pennies in a budget for a fiscal year that’s half over.

If Republicans are really serious about changing the way the government works, they need to look to the future. The past is full of fiscal mistakes that are, quite frankly, as much their fault as the DNC’s. The future begins with 2011.