Harry Reid’s very bad week

The first week of 2013 wasn’t exactly the best for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

First, Reid’s hardball negotiating stance on the fiscal cliff was undercut by the White House, which made a deal Reid advised against. To make matters worse, House Speaker John Boehner invited Reid to “go f- yourself” – in the White House of all places! – after Reid on the Senate floor called Boehner a dictator who cared more about his gavel than his country.

It certainly wasn’t the way Reid wanted to ring in the new year. Not only did he become Nevada’s longest-serving member of Congress, he also was celebrating his continued leadership of a Democratic caucus that expanded its numbers against the odds. This was supposed to be a happy time.

Right-wing blogs delighted in the meme that Reid looked weak and ineffective, and mainstream publications pointed out the loss of face.

But buried in the fiscal cliff negotiations, Reid made an important and overlooked point, one that may come back to haunt President Barack Obama and the Democrats.

Negotiations between Reid and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had produced an agreement on tax rates not too dissimilar to the final version. But they were far apart on some other aspects: Reid wanted at least a one-year delay in the so-called sequester cuts, automatic spending decreases that would hit the defense budget especially hard and perhaps cause economic havoc. And he wanted an agreement to allow an increase in the debt ceiling, which would allow the government to borrow money to pay its bills.

McConnell and Reid traded offers until finally Reid would bargain no more. (According to The Washington Post, Reid and Obama disagreed on strategy between themselves.)

That’s when McConnell called Vice President Joe Biden, who, with the president’s blessing, began to negotiate directly with McConnell. They hammered out a deal that didn’t include the debt ceiling increase, and it delayed the sequester cuts for only two months.

That’s when Reid raised an interesting point to the president, according to the Post and confirmed by a Democratic source: What happens in two months, when the government runs out of borrowing authority and the automatic cuts are scheduled to go into effect? Republicans obviously will demand spending cuts unacceptable to Democrats in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and erasing the sequester.

“Mr. President, we’re setting ourselves up,” Reid said, according to the Post. (The newspaper quoted Reid aides, obviously with the senator’s consent.)

So while Reid may have been shunted aside in the fiscal cliff negotiations, he’s not wrong in seeing yet another created crisis, two months hence. And while the president assured Reid he wouldn’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, history and common sense suggest Obama will have little choice. Without the authority to pay bills, the government will shut down. And while that tactic has never worked out well for the Republicans, there is a GOP contingent that sees government with “closed” signs on the doors as the best possible outcome.

We’ll never know if Reid’s hardball tactics would have forced a Republican surrender, however, because the White House benched him for the critical play, winning the game but setting up another match in two months with much dimmer chances of victory.

But more important, amid the political maneuvering, there’s the issue of spending cuts. An across-the-board sequester is a monumentally stupid approach; cuts need to be targeted as much as possible. And intelligent reforms of Social Security and Medicare need to be part of the package if we’re serious about reducing deficits and debt. And we should be, Democrats and Republicans alike, because the way we’ve been doing it up until now won’t work forever.

Reid may not have had a very good week, but in two months, his fears of another partisan standoff will be realized.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.