Who's the Extremist Now?

Who's the Extremist Now?

Wall Street Journal ^ | 04/12/11 | William McGurn

Posted on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 5:55:02 PM by MissesBush

The senior senator from New York was on to something when he complained about ideology getting in the way of spending cuts. Just not in the way he would have us believe.
Appearing on MSNBC on Friday before the budget deal was finally cut, Sen. Charles Schumer launched a pre-emptive blame strike. "We are on the one-yard line," he complained, "but Republicans in the House are making a goal-line stand on women's health, which has nothing—nothing—to do with the budget." The reference was to a GOP bid to strip Planned Parenthood, America's largest abortion provider, of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars.
Mr. Schumer was not alone. Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) advanced a similar argument. "[W]hat they are saying to us today," she declared, "is that if you want to keep the federal government open, you have to throw women under the bus." Ditto for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who kept insisting that the only thing between a shutdown and a deal was GOP social ideology.
Whoa there! Might there be another way to read this?

In the end, President Barack Obama was the one who refused to blink on Planned Parenthood. Another way of saying it is this: The president was willing to shut down the entire federal government rather than see Planned Parenthood's federal funding cut.
According to press accounts leaked by Democratic aides, House Speaker John Boehner argued for the funding cut late into the evening.

The president answered, "Nope, zero." He then said, "John, this is it." Mr. Boehner accepted the budget deal without that cut.
A Republican aide confirmed more or less the same account to me. He said it was "chilling" to see how inflexible Mr. Obama was. You might call it ideological.

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