Will the Much Heralded Budget Deal Pass?

Maybe not.  Liberals already didn't like it for lots of reasons (and especially the restrictions on abortion funding in Washington D.C.), but after the news came out that the spending cuts were not as advertised, many conservatives are leaning against passage too:

A report from the Congressional Budget Office that says a compromise spending deal between President Obama, Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would cut but $352 million from this year’s deficit has cast deepening doubts on the prospects for its passage.

The current emergency-funding bill on which the government is operating expires at midnight Friday. If the House and Senate can’t both pass the legislation by then, the government shuts down.

Liberal Democrats remain opposed to the plan because of its trims and because of policy points, like its restriction of abortion subsidies, but a rebellion is spreading among conservative members of the House and Senate.

The problem is that in heralding the deal, Obama, Boehner and Reid played up $39 billion in cuts, which were assumed to be for the current fiscal year. But those cuts include some gimmicky accounting and the savings obtained from not tapping reserve funds for programs like Medicaid.

When the CBO crunched the numbers on how the deal would affect the projected $1.65 trillion deficit for this year, the result was a reduction of .02 percent.

“It’s worse because of the expectations,” an aide to a conservative House member who is on the fence on the vote told Power Play. “We knew that not all of the $39 billion would be real cuts, but to find out that almost none of it was real was very disappointing.”

Obama's petulant speech didn't make this deal any more palatable for Republicans, either.  This president's concept of bipartisanship is getting Republicans to go along with him and then mocking them in high profile speeches.

Time for a do-over. Dump the deal and make them do it over correctly. Get real cuts, real restrictions on spending for things like Planned Parenthood, a real decrease in the size of government...or shut it all down until Democrats go along.

The numbers reported by the CBO certainly explain Obama's victory lap after the deal was announced. He rolled Boehner and the GOP, and there are a lot of Republicans who will face primary challenges in 2012 if they don't fix this and do it right.