The Democrat’s Waterloo

David Freddoso at National Review Online says the Democrats, through a combination of the absolute ineptitude of their leadership, extraordinarily bad timing and a frankly disastrous plan of putting politics above policy have managed to set themselves up to hand the Republicans five major legislative victories in a week. This is precisely why I have been predicting that Reid and Pelosi will end up being reviled by the rank and file.

1) The first and biggest Republican victory comes in the form of the omnibus spending bill, which funds nearly every government agency. Not only does the bill, which was handed down yesterday morning, match President Bush’s funding levels, but it also contains none of the so-called “policy-riders” that Republicans had most feared, such as the abolition of the government’s Mexico City policy and even an expected expansion of union-backed “prevailing wage” rules. Democrats had no choice — they simply ran out of time, mostly because they thought it to their advantage to run down the clock (on this and the issues that follow). The best they seem to have come up with is a cut in abstinence education funding and money for needle exchanges in the District of Columbia. They are even patting themselves on the back for keeping out certain Republican provisions (English in the workplace), as though they were in the minority.

Conservatives have complained loudly (and rightly) that the bill is something of a “Christmas Tree,” containing more than 9,000 earmarked pork projects and $11 billion in so-called “emergency funding” (actually a widely used accounting gimmick to make the final number appear closer to the president’s request). The bill has other defects as well, yet Republicans are amazed at what they have gotten. They can’t believe it, and they are making heroic (if unsuccessful) efforts not to crow too loudly before it passes. This summer, Republicans could not have imagined negotiating Democrats down to this funding level — $933 billion in regular discretionary spending, right at the level of President Bush’s request.

I know that is a huge victory, but the others, I think, will sting even more. A massive capitulation on war funding will enrage the left wing, the collapse of the SCHIP political puppet show, a failure to get any meaningful energy bill passed and the absolute disaster of the failure to patch the AMT are going to leave bruises. Even if they somehow pull out the AMT fix, they will have delayed millions of tax returns in the process.

Some little bit of these victories can be credited to maneuvering by the Republicans, but mostly these are self-inflicted wounds for the Democrats. They look like total incompetents at the moment, and rightly so. They actually could have accomplished quite a few things but for their bumbling leaders. The steadfast refusal to negotiate or give an inch led them right into a box canyon. (Pelosi appears to have been mostly to blame for errors of commission, Reid just appears to be virtually clue proof, although he has had his moments of utter ineptitude as well.) Read the whole thing. It is a catalog of failure that is amusing if just for the Schadenfreude value.