Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.
McCarthy is having trouble uniting his caucus behind any budget proposal, so the speaker has pushed aside governing in favor of theater. And the production is not even worthy of a high school gym. (I apologize to high school thespians who take their work more seriously.)
It is truly astonishing, as my Post colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman wrote on Friday, that any Republican operating under labels such as “moderate,” “mainstream” or “problem solver” would vote for a McCarthy proposal that hides its ferocity behind sanitized budgetary gobbledygook. McCarthy would cut federal spending back to 2022 levels and limit its growth to 1 percent a year.
What this means in plain English, as The Post’s Tony Romm reported, are “massive spending cuts,” but without having to specify them. Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, helpfully translated the impact to particular programs. If Republicans exempted defense spending from their ax, as they seem inclined to do, all other programs would suffer 22 percent cuts, she said, which “would grow deeper and deeper with each year of their plan.”
