As you pull yourself out of the rubble, set your broken limbs, fight crowds for a scarce radiation suit, search desperately to locate your loved ones, and fight off zombies now that the sequestration is upon us, take heart in the fact that this catastrophic crisis has a silver lining: It presents a great opportunity for Republicans to score political points.
We all know that President Obama and his allies in Congress and the news media are portraying the sequester as a crisis of biblical proportions. In order to maximize this effort, the heads of every federal agency are making the required cuts from places that will hurt the most people in order to score PR points, knowing with metaphysical certainty that their loyal news media will blame the evil Republicans.
It’s time for a little political jui jitsu. The Republicans who control every committee in the House of Representatives should schedule a series of hearing that force the federal departments heads, up to and including Cabinet secretaries, to appear before congressional panels and explain why they furloughed thousands of federal employees but are still funding parties in Las Vegas and studies of why certain species of ants walk backwards. They should make Secretary of Defense Hagel and Secretary of State Kerry explain why we are going forward in giving $1.3 billion of fighter jets to Islamist Egypt but cannot deploy the USS Truman as scheduled. They should make congressional Democrats and President Obama explain why they insist on extending unemployment payments to help people avoid finding work while we are furloughing thousands of federal employees because we can’t afford to pay them.
Even Obama’s loyal news media could not long ignore a series of daily congressional hearings featuring the highest-ranking officials in the Obama administration being exposed for sacrificing their own workers’ ability to support their families for the crass and cynical purpose of trying to score political points.
I’m skeptical that the House Republicans will have the backbone to take on Obama in such a frontal manner, but maybe I’m wrong.
