Is compromise always meeting in the middle?

As we await the results of today's powwow at the White House between the opposing sides on the debt limit debate, I constantly am reminded of the hackneyed refrain that in good settlements each side wins and each side loses.

I have gone through a few mediations and been trained to be a marital mediator. I have worked a lot of settlement agreements for clients. I can say categorically this hackneyed idea of each side winning and losing is ridiculous in more times that I care to mention.

Think of it this way: a gangbanger has your hand pinned down with an axe hovering over your hand. He tells you that he is going to cut off your hand. If you can persuade him to cut off just a finger, you have tried to compromise. Did you win? Is it winning if you lose a body part?

In my way of thinking this is not compromise. It is minimizing losses. When your opponent defines the battle field, your job is often to minimize losses. In this case, the gangbanger defined the battlefield as loss of body parts. The scope of the loss is all that matters.

In the budget debate we have a loggerheads. For the first time in decades the Republicans have come into the debate claiming a real demand for budget cuts with no tax rate increases. They know that cutting spending will improve the economy and lower tax rates will produce more profit and more tax receipts for the government.

The Democrats are demanding slower spending increases and higher tax rates.

If the spending increases one penny, the Democrats win.

If the tax rates increase one tenth of one percent, the Democrats win.

In both cases the battle for whose principles win is to the Democrats.

How do the Republicans win anything in a "compromise"? Slower spending growth? What if the Democrats had overinflated their spending demands just to make sure that they get some increase in the end? (Which they did.)

In the last round, the Republicans beat themselves when they came out saying that tax rates were not increasing and they got spending cuts. Later the spending cuts turned out be less than 1/10th of one percent. They got egg on their face because they accomplished nothing.

The only real solution to the current problem is a settlement that addresses no changes in taxes or spending. Lock both in place. Then legally require that debt service be paid first and that no new contracts can be let out for bid without the money on deposit. Further remove the stupid Democrat Congress law from the Nixon era that removed the president's ability to withhold payment of Congressionally authorized funds.

Obama will abuse that privilege to no end. He will refuse to pay for DOD expenditures and starve Republican favored programs. Fine. He will set the precedent.

With the Democrat blessing on that stupid law's repeal and the Democrat precedent, the next Republican president can move aggressively to fix the problem while Congressmen run for cover in their home districts.

That is the nature of separation of legislative and executive function. It is not Congress's privilege to order money spent. It is to authorize it and set rules of its expenditures. But the president's branch is more than the check writer. It is the oversight and administrative assurance of money well spent at an acceptable price.

Giving the president back this power will have some of the effect of a line-item veto, except with a wider scope.