Robert Reich: budget agreement is being hailed as the start of a new era of bipartisanship shows how low our expectations have fallen

Robert Reich

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That yesterday’s budget agreement is being hailed as the start of a new era of bipartisanship shows how low our expectations have fallen. It’s a minor agreement that puts off the worst of the sequester cuts for two years but doesn’t extend unemployment benefits, or close tax loopholes for the rich, or invest in new jobs. As the House goes home for the holidays, the 113th Congress has accomplishing nothing on immigration reform, gun safety, the minimum wage, the environment, campaign-funding disclosure, or the nation's crumbling infrastructure.
Tea-Party Republicans got slapped down yesterday by House Republican leaders but they’re still calling many of the shots, allowing John Boehner and Paul Ryan to play good cops to their bad cops and thereby pushing American politics ever further right. Tea Partiers in Republican-led states, meanwhile, are doing what they can to undermine the Affordable Care Act – allowing insurance companies to violate it, hobbling enrollment, and refusing to expand Medicaid even though the federal government will pay almost all of it. Right-wing groups such as the Koch-funded “Generation Opportunity” are actively trying to dissuade young people from signing up.

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