11. Talking peace, preparing for war

Time supposedly waits for no man, not even an American politician. So in an ideal world the House and Senate would present an agreed proposal for next year's budget by the statutory deadline of April 15^th. There would then be good-humoured, well-intentioned debate with the administration and, just in time for the fiscal year, beginning this October 1^st, the country would know exactly how much its federal government was going to spend, and how it was going to raise the money.

So much for the ideal. The reality is that the election cycle is inexorably turning and catching President proposed $1.8 trillion budget in its spokes. In other words, for all the promises of bipartisanship, for all the determination of the speaker of the House (where all spending bills originate) to make the trains run on time, Republicans and Democrats are still at odds.

Moreover, both parties have their squabbling factions, and everybody knows that legislative deadlines can come and go without everyone necessarily dying. The April deadline, for example, has been met only three times since 1975; and last year, thanks to the electorally mistaken obduracy of the tax-cutting zealots among the House Republicans, Congress failed for the first time in 24 years to pass a budget resolution even after the deadline.

Political deadlines are another matter. In just under a year from now the primary season – for a new president and a new Congress – will come into bloom. To be ready for that season, all candidates need to start raising money now. That in turn means they must be careful in what they do and say in this political cycle.

The worst problems are for the Republicans. With a budget surplus now expected by the Congressional Budget Office to be around $133 billion, the party's instinct is to return the excess to “hard-working Americans” in the form of a tax cut. But tax is low on most people's list of concerns (even though the right-wing Heritage Foundation points out that this year's federal tax take, 20.5% of economic output, is the highest peacetime level ever), whereas saving Social Security is close to the top. So House and Senate Republicans agreed last week to a plan from the Senate Budget Committee: taxes would be cut by up to $900 billion over the next decade, but the cuts would not be taken from the surpluses in the Social Security trust fund.

The plan neatly blunts the Democrats' charge that Republican tax cuts would be at the expense of Social Security. But since next year's overall surplus is expected to be mostly, if not entirely, accounted for by the Social Security surplus, it also means tax cuts later rather than sooner – which is not what the Republican faithful really want.

Meanwhile, the party risks looking mean to the electorate in its professed determination to keep the budget within the spending caps agreed in the balanced budget legislation.

Last year Congress approved an omnibus spending bill that broke through the caps to the tune of $21 billion – which was conveniently deemed “emergency” spending outside the law's scope. Doubtless the same will happen this year (the President's budget proposals, even with the most favourable arithmetic, will break the caps by at least $18 billion) unless the ceiling is raised. Given bipartisan enthusiasm for more spending on education and the armed forces, that would seem a plausible solution, but one that will annoy Republican conservatives, involve haggling over other spending programmes, and strain the unity of the Republicans' six-seat majority in the House.

All this highlights the perennial Republican rift between ideologues and pragmatists, and leaves the Democrats chortling at the prospect of regaining the House and even the Senate. But not all Democrats are encouraged. The triumph of the current presidency was the triumph of the “New Democrats”, adopting Republican notions of fiscal responsibility. Yet the administration's travails over illicit campaign finances have made it more dependent on “old Democrats”, notably organised labour and minorities.

And in the meantime? With the Republicans trying hard to avoid the label of another “do-nothing Congress”, optimists have trailed the notion of bipartisan cooperation on Social Security, education, defence and health-care. Some hope. This week a supposedly bipartisan position on federal aid to the states for education fractured into partisan wrangling, and there will be more of the same. After all, because gridlock in Congress hurts the Republicans, it helps the Democrats.

But that is a zero-sum game for now, not the future. One well-known Democratic strategist, speaking sensibly off the record sees only a Pyrrhic victory ahead: a protectionist-inclined Democratic Party with outdated regulatory instincts that will trap minorities in poverty.