Juan Williams: Will House Republicans push granny off a cliff or cut Pentagon waste?

Granny is going over the cliff, again, apparently.

During the 2012 campaign, Democrats’ allies ran political advertisements showing a grandmother-like figure in a wheelchair heading for the big fall — along with everyone else on Social Security and Medicare — under Republican proposals to cut government spending.

The advertisement worked. President Obama won a second term, and Democrats added two Senate seats and eight seats in the House.

Then, in 2018, former President Trump blocked a federal budget deal over his demand to build a border wall. That led to chaos as federal workers stayed home and airports went without full air traffic control during a partial government shutdown for 35 days.

That stumble came years after a Tea Party-inspired 2011 delay in increasing in the debt ceiling which resulted in Standard & Poor’s downgrading of the nation’s credit rating for the first time in U.S. history.

Now, with the 2024 presidential election approaching, House Republicans appear ready to play the same losing game. They are threatening damage to the economy and their chances in the 2024 elections by insisting on budget cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

This is political malpractice.

Democrats would be fools not to run more of those “Grandma going over the cliff” political advertisements. Doing so would boost their chances of regaining the House majority in two years.

It would give a lift to President Biden’s chances at a second term, too. Biden is soon to be hailed as the hero of seniors for his coming defense of Social Security and Medicare, if Republicans continue to target those programs. (Don’t forget that he already has taken steps to lower the cost of prescription drugs, limit the cost of insulin, and allow over-the-counter sales of hearing aids.)

Seniors may walk slowly, but they’ll get to the polls.

The House GOP’s decision to launch a rerun of a failed political strategy grew out of the rules package passed by House Republicans last week. It handcuffs House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to cuts for Social Security and Medicare before he even begins negotiations with Democrats on a new budget.

“To win over holdouts in the House Freedom Caucus [in the 15-rounds of voting he needed to become Speaker], McCarthy struck a series of concessions that include opening debate on spending bills and vows not to raise the debt limit without major cuts to the likes of Social Security and Medicare,” The New York Times reported last week.

Here is a breakdown on federal spending: In 2022, the federal government spent 21 percent of its budget on Social Security, 25 percent on health programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, and 13 percent on national defense.

It’s simple arithmetic: For Republicans to make good on their pledge, they are going to have to cut one or all of them.

But for much of the House Republican caucus, cutting money to defense contractors and shrinking the bloated Pentagon budget is a non-starter.

“I’m all for a balanced budget, but we’re not going to do it on the backs of our troops and our military,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.), a former Army Green Beret, said last week on Fox. “If we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it’s the entitlements programs.”

That led Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, to write that “they are going to try to cut Social Security and Medicare, it could not be clearer.”

In fact, the Republican Study Committee unveiled a budget plan last week that would raise the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare but not cut into the benefit formula for people over 54 years old.

Over the weekend the Washington Post reported the House GOP plans that if no debt deal is reached, they will propose making a priority of payments to Social Security, Medicare and the military while leaving Medicaid, air traffic control, food security and border security without funds. This is political and practical nonsense.

The new Congress could protect Social Security and Medicare by undoing some of the tax cuts passed by Republicans and President Trump. But revenue-raising measures like removing tax breaks for the rich are a non-starter with the McCarthy-led House Republicans. They’ve already introduced plans to make permanent the historically regressive Trump tax cuts of 2018.

One of the first bills introduced by Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) would eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and the federal income tax. The House passed a measure to defund the so-called “army of 87,000 new IRS agents.” That number has been fact-checked by several news outlets and declared wrong.

Reuters reported in August that the IRS said the new hires will replace “50,000 IRS employees who are on the verge of retirement and that the majority of new hires would serve in customer service roles like … answering calls.”

What about cuts to defense spending? Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) told Fox News that “defense hawks” in the House Republican conference will “put up a fight” against any military spending cuts.

Last year, of course, brought news that the Pentagon failed a congressionally mandated audit for the fifth year in a row. And military brass and civilian analysts have testified to Congress for years that useless, money-pit weapons programs often are in place only because members of Congress are afraid that eliminating them will lead to job cuts in their congressional districts.

If Rep. Boebert and other GOP hardliners want to have that debate over wasteful defense spending in good faith, a lot of Democrats would say, “Great!”

So, let’s have that debate and cut the fat out of the Pentagon budget to slow the gravy train to defense contractors before we get ready to push granny off the cliff.

House Republicans, give granny a break!

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.