Against grandfather-clause politics

By: Michael Kinsley
Politico.com
November 16, 2010

Even before the co-chairmen of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission released their draft report, with detailed proposals for reforming Social Security and Medicare, triumphant Republicans were being surprisingly frank about the need to touch the putative “third rail of American politics.” Everyone knows something has to be done, but the parties have been playing Alphonse and Gaston (“After you. No, after you.”) for decades. At this point, there isn’t much ideology in it. Both sides claim to be the biggest defender of these benefits and accuse the other side of actions (or inactions) that threaten them. The major domestic legacy of President George W. Bush, a Republican, was the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and he didn’t even make a pretense of paying for it.

But there was Rand Paul, the tea party/Republican senator-elect from Kentucky, on ABC’s “This Week” the Sunday after the midterm elections, saying, “Congress should consider raising the age of eligibility for retirement benefits under Social Security and apportioning those benefits on the basis of a means test.” Means testing? Raising the retirement age? Yikes. These traditionally are things you accuse your opponent of secretly intending, not things that you propose yourself. Paul, scion of the first family of American libertarianism (his father is Ron Paul, the Texas Republican congressman and former Libertarian Party presidential candidate), has the libertarian’s characteristic delight in brutal frankness, but he learned how to suppress it pretty successfully during the campaign. It’s good to see it back.

Rand Paul does not speak for the Republican Party. The inevitable Eric Cantor does — or hopes to. Yet in his 22-page job application for House majority leader, Cantor is almost as frank. He writes: “Getting our long-term deficit under control will require that we address major entitlement reform.” Even that vague an endorsement of fiddling with entitlements by a party leader is something new. Of course, Cantor also says, bizarrely, “Over two-thirds of Republican voters believe the budget can be balanced without reducing spending on Social Security and Medicare.”

(More here.)

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