Both parties privately agree that Washington has been desensitized to crisis. | JAY WESTCOTT/POLITICO Hill ignores fiscal cliff warnings

Hello, Washington. It’s the real world calling. A disaster is coming. Can you do something — anything — to stop the bleeding?

Crisis after crisis this year, Washington has responded with a simple shoulder shrug.


Farm bureaus, financial credit rating agencies, Wall Street, the defense industry, chambers of commerce and postal groups have all sounded the alarm bell warning D.C. about all manner of debt, spending and tax crises. They’ve largely failed to spur the action they were seeking.

The latest get-it-together moment came Tuesday, when Moody’s — one agency that has not downgraded the nation’s credit — warned that it could lower the rating unless Washington came together to agree on a budget package in 2013 that significantly cut the nation’s debt. The agency’s caution signal came ahead of the so-called fiscal cliff — a massive package of tax increases and spending cuts set to go into effect after this year unless Congress reaches an agreement to avert it.

Moody’s, one of the three main ratings agencies, also warned that it would most likely keep its “negative” outlook on the nation’s debt — a move that could precede a credit downgrade — if the United States fell off the fiscal cliff.

Here was House Speaker John Boehner’s reaction.

“I’m not confident at all,” Boehner (R-Ohio) said about the prospects of the deal, noting that the House has done one-third of the work that needs to be done to stabilize the debt.

Cast aside the blame because Republicans and Democrats privately agree that Washington has been desensitized to crisis and is ungovernable.

Lawmakers have heard the repeated threats from the outside — but it’s unclear whether they’re actually listening. Top congressional players aren’t engaged in serious talks over resolving the fiscal cliff while Capitol Hill is all but resigned to the fact that no movement on the cliff will occur until after the Nov. 6 election.

“It’s interesting that both the downgrade and the threatened downgrade don’t address our economy, they address our political system,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told POLITICO. “They basically said it’s time for members of the Senate and the House to get it together. … I agree with them. There’s no excuse left at this point.”

But there’s not even agreement on whether an agreement is possible.

Hours after Boehner’s words of pessimism, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) rebutted him.

“I was disappointed when my friend John Boehner said today that he has no confidence on a budget deal,” he told reporters. “I think we have to look at the glass being half full, not half empty all the time. I’m confident that we will reach some kind of an arrangement.”

Some are just incredulous. Count moderate Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) in that bunch.

“I don’t understand it,” Snowe said Tuesday. “I cannot conceive that we could be dismissive in any way of the traumatic effects this potentially could have, creating enormous upheaval both in the financial markets, personally with Americans … as well as the political consternation among the American people about the lack of ability to solve these problems.”

Snowe, however, won’t have to live with the outcome of whatever Congress does — she’s parachuting out of the Senate, retiring in part over frustration with gridlock.

For those left behind in Washington, there’s still a hefty distrust of institutions.

“When I was a young captain, we were heading out to Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein said this would be the mother of all battles, everyone was concerned the United States military would not be able to fight open-desert warfare,” Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) said. “I think it was 96 hours before we were done. My history is I don’t sit around listening to all the external influencers. I just try to make things happen.”

But Washington doesn’t exactly appear as if it will charge into fiscal cliff negotiations ready to compromise.

Instead of working vociferously to solve automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) says are “sending tremors” through his home state, this week has become a shouting match over whose idea it was to institute that so-called trigger.

The finger-pointing came even as top executives from several defense companies — such as Lockheed Martin, EADS North America and BAE Systems — warned in letters released Monday that they’ll distribute tens of thousands of layoff warnings due to uncertainty caused by the budget sequester.

Meanwhile, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said he won’t pass a bill to reform the near-bankrupt U.S. Postal Service because he sees “no opportunity for any compromise with the Senate based on the anti-reform bill that they passed.” Issa said he is waiting for presidential leadership. The postmaster general earlier this month, facing billions of dollars in losses, said Congress must act because the agency can’t stay afloat for long.

The farm bill is also a problem. The House still hasn’t passed its update to national agriculture policy. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has tried to pressure Congress, and this week, that consternation hit the Elected Leadership Committee — the small power circle atop House GOP politics. Rep. Kristi Noem, a South Dakota freshman at the leadership table, made a stink about Congress’s inaction on the bill, according to several sources. As did other farm state lawmakers, including Rep. Rick Berg (R-N.D.). The National Farmers Union plans a rally Wednesday morning on Capitol Hill to urge Congress to pass a farm bill.

“I got a letter [on Monday] signed by approximately 20 of the leading farm organizations in the country. … And they said, ‘Please don’t do anything but the bill that passed the Senate,’” Reid told reporters on Tuesday, referring to the bill the upper chamber passed but the House ignored. “We’re at a stage now where it’s been a total failure — I’m sorry to use this term again — of the leadership in the House just to walk away from this, and that’s what they’re doing. There is no bill that’s come from the House. Nothing.”

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would only say it is his “intent” to get the bill done “as soon as possible,” declining to entertain whether that would be during this Congress. Boehner was asked about the farm bill as he exited his press conference Tuesday and did not answer.

Senate Democrats are more than eager to note that their chamber has voted to reauthorize the five-year farm bill and overhaul the financially ailing Postal Service. Both measures passed with more than 60 votes — a notable number in this continuously gridlocked Senate, members say.

“If you pass anything on a bipartisan basis, it has some credibility,” Durbin said. “What [House Republicans] are doing is jamming through one political message after another.”

Boehner and his Republican troops have repeatedly argued that the GOP-led House has already moved to pull back the nation from the fiscal cliff — putting the onus on the Democratic-led Senate and the Obama administration.

“In the House, we’ve been way ahead of those warnings,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said Tuesday. “The reason the House already acted to deal with the fiscal cliff, the automatic spending cuts and the tax issues is because we don’t want to wait until the end of the year. They’re confirming what I think we already have been preaching for quite some time.”

Democrats don’t think much of House-passed plans, dismissing them as red meat for the party’s base. House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said he hadn’t “read Moody’s observations,” but credit rating agencies are afraid that Washington lacks intellectual honesty to deal with big issues.

Rep. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said he doesn’t think Washington is deaf to outside warnings.

“I think we all should care about what Moody’s says,” Scott said. “Our disposition, or the lack thereof, on the financial cliff is going to cost us. If we were not the reserve currency of the world, what would it look like? Literally, we keep throwing money into the economy, and all that really does is cause the stock market to go up and you have a jobless recovery because more money in the economy only goes to the market because there’s no other place to go.”