News Journal: What can we expect from Washington’s next meeting?

“Do you think they’ll be stupid enough to do that again in Washington?”

They’re asking about another government shutdown, and that’s the question I get asked most often these days by people who think I might know something about how Washington works.

I tell them no, it won’t happen again, and I’m 99 percent sure I am right. Yes, there is a band of zealots in the House of Representatives who probably would do it again, no matter what the damage. But the majority of Republicans in Congress know the shutdown was a disaster and, no matter how loudly Sen. Cruz berates them, aren’t about to go down that path again.

The more difficult question about the immediate future of the federal government is what will happen by Jan. 15, when the stopgap-funding bill that ended the shutdown expires. Right now, 29 members of a joint House-Senate conference committee are meeting to settle the differences between the two very different budgets their respective bodies passed earlier this year.

They’ll come up with something to prevent another shutdown, but the odds are it will be short-term and unlikely to settle any of the significant differences that have prevented us from making badly-needed long-term decisions and investments in our future.

Speaking for the House Republican majority, Paul Ryan has already repeated the Republican mantra that no increase in taxes is on the table, and the central challenge is to decrease entitlement spending on Social Security and Medicare. Sen. Patty Murray, the lead negotiator for the Senate Democratic majority, has called for the conference to concentrate on replacing across-the-board sequestration with targeted cuts. As for entitlement reform, she says, it will be considered only if it is tied to additional revenues.

Stalemate. It looks like nothing has changed in Washington since President Obama was reelected. But I wonder. Eventually, something has to end the gridlock. What will it be?

Bear with me. One of the most consistent media narratives about Washington is that all the major decisions are made by politicians who slavishly follow polls. But how can that be true, when there is such an obvious disconnect between what the politicians are proposing and what their constituencies want?

I thought about this as I read an analysis by Ron Brownstein in a recent issue of National Journal. “Republicans increasingly depend on support from older whites even as Democrats rely more on youthful-tilting minority groups,” he points out, and goes on to say, “the GOP presidential nominee has carried most white seniors in four consecutive presidential elections and by greater margins each time. In 2012, whites over 45 supplied Mitt Romney with nearly three-fifths of his votes even though they made up only two-fifths of all voters.”

This voting pattern persists even though polls of white voters over 45 show they overwhelmingly reject any cuts in Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Meanwhile, Democrats, while defending programs that help the main Republican voting block, are seeing a dramatic shift of federal funding away from their “youthful-tilting” constituencies. By freezing entitlements and taxes, a significant part of the budget cuts to date have been made to domestic discretionary spending in programs that help the young, including the Head Start program, nutrition assistance, education, and child welfare.

In 1960, children and seniors received essentially equal amounts of the federal budget. Today children receive less than one third of what seniors receive and the gap will increase if the projected budgets remain in place.

What to make of this? Despite what seems like an eternity of gridlock and stalemate in Washington, the truth is that attitudes and political positions can sometimes change very quickly. Just look at how a majority of Americans have changed their minds about gay marriage in a matter of months.

I don’t anticipate any major changes in what the two parties advocate coming out of the pre-Jan. 15 budget talks. But in the not-too-distant future, I will be surprised if we don’t begin to see changes in their positions that more closely reflect where they get their political support.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware,

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