“A Losing Gambit”: Ted Cruz Is A Wacko Bird Of His Party’s Own Making
For his 21-hour floor speech decrying Obamacare, Ted Cruz is catching heat from a lot of his fellow Republicans. In the Senate, they disdain his not-quite-filibuster as grandstanding. “This is not a situation where you dig your heels in and Obamacare gets defunded,” said Senator Ron Johnson. “[The tea party] just want anybody who offers them a path, whether it’s realistic or not.” Said Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, “To be told we’re not listening by somebody who does not listen is disconcerting.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page, usually on board for any assault on Obamacare, blasted Cruz’s maneuver as baldly ineffective.
The sum of all these reactions is yet more widespread Republican exasperation with Cruz. But while the GOP usually has good reason to treat Cruz like a wacko bird, this time, the GOP broadly has plainly laid the groundwork for his gimmicky Obamacare opposition. The Ted Cruz who completed that 21-hour Senate floor marathon is a wacko bird of the party’s own making.
Many of the same conservatives who are now denouncing Cruz’s tactics have strong claims to paternity over the GOP’s destructive obsession with Obamacare. They may see the specific tactic of shutting down the federal government in order to undo the Affordable Care Act for what it is: a losing gambit. And they may recognize that Cruz’s grandiloquent speechifying isn’t going to change minds in the Senate, where lawmakers planned to stripped a provision to defund Obamacare from the House budget as soon as Cruz stopped pleading on behalf of the bill. But odds are they will continue to relentlessly endorse defunding Obamacare, just as they have before.
This, even though the party’s obsession with defeating the president’s signature achievement is laying waste to the GOP’s long-term prospects. As my colleague Noam Scheiber argued in June, the Republican fixation with the Affordable Care Act harms their standing with Latino voters at a historical moment when they need to expand their favorability, and fast. It detracts from their ability to build an economic platform that aims for something besides massive spending and welfare cuts. And despite the GOP’s intentions to make defunding their banner 2014 issue, despite dozens of votes to defund the law and their broad failure to leverage the law in the last election cycle, Obamacare is really, seriously unlikely to go away.
So for someone like Senator Lamar Alexander to imply that Cruz’s grandstanding feeds impressions of the GOP as a do-nothing party is pretty rich. The Tennessee lawmaker has cast 23 purely symbolic votes against Obamacare that now comprise a major plank of his reelection campaign. For the Wall Street Journal editorial board to scoff at Cruz is even more absurd. Their columns have never missed an opportunity to promulgate even the most absurd and fact-free arguments for dismantling Obamacare—a moniker that the board on Monday took credit for inventing. Johnson has called Obamacare “the greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.”
With all that hyperbole fueling the modern-day GOP, it’s no wonder Cruz calculated that a day-long verbal assault on Obamacare would be a homerun with his base, and worth the headache that it would cause Republican leaders. Their troubles, after all, began long before Cruz showed up, when they bet their future on their ability to defund Obamacare, no matter the cost.
By: Molly Redden, The New Republic, September 26, 2013
“Elections Don’t Have Consequences”: In His Warped Mind, Jim DeMint Is Essentially Declaring A Mistrial
Remember the 2012 elections? The one in which Republicans ran on a platform of repealing the Affordable Care Act, and then lost?
If you’re Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, helping lead the anti-healthcare crusade, the apparent answer is no.
DeMint thinks the election results don’t accurately reflect national sentiment and therefore can’t be used to argue against his desire to move the party to the right. True conservatism never got a hearing — particularly not in regard to Obamacare, which was, after all, modeled after a Massachusetts law signed by Romney. “Because of Romney and Romneycare, we did not litigate the Obamacare issue,” he says. Essentially, DeMint is declaring a mistrial.
So while John McCain and I — there’s a pairing I didn’t expect to write about — agree that elections have consequences, we nevertheless have Jim DeMint sticking up for the “these elections don’t really count” contingent.
And they don’t count, he argues, because that darned Republican presidential candidate just didn’t push the health care issue. Sure, if you have the memory of a fruit fly, you might not recall Romney promising in every speech for a year and a half to repeal the health care law, the ads promising to destroy the law on Romney’s first day in office, or the central role the anti-Obamacare message played in the Republican pitch in 2012.
But for the rest of us, it’s getting increasingly difficult not to just laugh out loud when Jim DeMint starts talking.
In fact, the closer one looks at this, the more hilarious DeMint appears.
I suspect he’d prefer that we forget, but in 2007, DeMint, then a U.S. senator, endorsed Mitt Romney’s presidential candidacy, citing — you guessed it — Romney’s successful health care reform law in Massachusetts.
And yet, at this point, DeMint no longer remembers his affinity for Romney, his support for Romney’s health care plan, or Romney’s platform from last year’s campaign.
This guy’s the head of a once-relevant think tank?
On a related note, Molly Ball has a great new piece in The Atlantic on Heritage’s dwindling credibility under DeMint’s leadership.
[T]here is more at stake in Heritage’s transformation from august policy shop to political hit squad than the reputation of a D.C. think tank or even the careers of a few squishy GOP politicians. It is the intellectual project of the conservative movement itself. Without Heritage, the GOP’s intellectual backbone is severely weakened, and the party’s chance to retake its place as a substantive voice in American policy is in jeopardy.
As the right embraces a post-policy role in American politics, Republicans can thank DeMint for helping lead the way.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 26, 2013
“Being Crazy Isn’t Enough”: The Greedy Once-Ler Gets All The Way To The End Of “Green Eggs And Ham”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who’s still talking to hear himself talk, raised a few eyebrows last night by reading, among other things, from Dr. Seuss. Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, the far-right Texan read “Green Eggs and Ham” with great earnestness from the Senate floor. (He can’t hold a candle to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s version, but let’s put that aside for now.) Cruz continued to reference the book after having put it down, insisting it “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate.”
He added, “The difference with green eggs and ham — when Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare, either. They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”
There is, however, a small problem with Cruz’s choice of literary references: he apparently didn’t understand the story.
In “Green Eggs and Ham,” our protagonist thinks he dislikes food he hasn’t tried. By the end, the character discovers green eggs and ham really aren’t so bad after all. Indeed, he comes to regret criticizing something he didn’t fully understand, and ends up celebrating the very thing he’d complained about so bitterly.
Cruz thinks this “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate”? What a coincidence; I think it has some applicability, too.
Indeed, the larger point helps underscore why the right is fighting so furiously to defund, delay, sabotage, impair, malign, and otherwise undermine the federal health care law right now, before it’s too late. Unhinged Republicans aren’t worried Obamacare will fail; they’re worried it will work and Americans will discover they quite like green eggs and ham after all.
Eugene Robinson had a good piece on this yesterday, published well ahead of the theatrics on the Senate floor.
Republicans scream that Obamacare is sure to fail. But what they really fear is that it will succeed.
That’s the reason for all the desperation. Republicans are afraid that Obamacare will not prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare — that Americans, in fact, will find they actually like it.
Similarly, Josh Marshall referenced one of my favorite health care stories yesterday. Bill Kristol wrote a strategy memo as the Clinton-era health care fight was getting underway, urging Republicans to destroy reform at all costs. The conservative pundit said at the time that if Clinton succeeded, Democrats would be seen as the “protector of middle-class interests,” and it would be politically impossible to take away the health care benefits once they were in place.
What the GOP had to do, Kristol said, was put the party’s interests over the country’s needs, stopping the reform effort before Americans discovered they like it. Republicans, of course, agreed.
Nearly two decades later, the script hasn’t changed much, except now the green eggs and ham are on the plate and the public is poised to discover how much they like the very thing they’ve been told to complain about.
Why Ted Cruz thinks this story is helpful to his cause is a bit of a mystery, but maybe later today, one of his friends from Harvard or Princeton can have a chat with him about literary interpretation and the potency of metaphors.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 25, 2013
“Wal-Mart Returning To Full-Time Workers”: Obamacare Not Such A Job Killer After All
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer, announced Monday that 35,000 part-time employees will soon be moved to full-time status, entitling them to the full healthcare benefits that were scheduled to be denied them as a result of Wal-Mart’s efforts to avoid the requirements of Obamacare.
While some analysts believe that the move comes as Wal-Mart is attempting to deal with the negative view many Americans have of its worker benefits program, a closer look reveals the real reason for the shift—
Wal-Mart’s business is going south due to the company’s penchant for putting politics and the squeeze on Wal-Mart employees ahead of the kind of customer satisfaction that produces prosperity over the long-term.
In fact, Wal-Mart’s unwillingness to pay most of their workers a livable wage, while avoiding enough full-time employees to properly run a retail outlet, has led to the company placing dead last among department and discount stores in the most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index—a position that should now be all to familiar to the nation’s largest retailer given that Wal-Mart has either held or shared the bottom spot on the index for six years running.
For anyone who has not been following the Wal-Mart saga, sales have been sinking dramatically at the retailer as the company has turned to hiring mostly temporary workers (those who must reapply for a job every 180 days) to staff their stores while cutting full-time employees’ hours down to part-time status in order to avoid providing workers with healthcare benefits.
The result?
Empty shelves, ridiculously long check-out lines, helpless customers wandering through the electronics section and general disorganization at Wal-Mart store locations.
This is hardly a recipe for success.
A recent description of a Wal-Mart store in Newark, New Jersey published by Bloomberg, says it all—
“Three days earlier, about 10 people waited in a customer service line at a Wal-Mart in Secaucus, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York, the nation’s largest city. Twelve of 30 registers were open and the lines were about five deep. There were empty spaces on shelves large enough for a grown man to lie down, and a woman wandered around vainly seeking a frying pan.”
The description pretty much sums up what you will find at the typical Wal-Mart store in the United States these days.
While the company’s trend toward temporary employees has allowed the retailer to avoid its responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act—a law that Wal-Mart publicly supported only to turn around after passage and work to avoid providing health care benefits to employees—they’ve managed to tank their store sales in the process.
Who would have guessed that a well-staffed store filled with competent and reasonably paid employees might actually have an impact on the success of a company?
Home Depot—that’s who.
According to Zeynep Ton, a retail researcher and associate professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, in the early 2000s, Home Depot’s CEO, Robert Nardelli, moved to cut full-time staffing levels while increasing part-time employees in an effort to boost profits by trimming the expense that comes with employing full-time workers. It worked for a short while. However, as Ton notes, eventually customer service declined—and with it, customer satisfaction—leading to a severe decline of same-store sales.
Wal-Mart’s penny wise-pound foolish approach to its business was further well documented in the Bloomberg article referenced earlier where they told the story of Margaret Hancock, a retired accountant from Newark, Delaware, who has always viewed Wal-Mart as her “one stop shopping destination”.
While Ms. Hancock had, for years, been able to get everything she needed at her local Wal-Mart store, recent visits resulted in her failing to locate numerous items as the products were simply not out on the shelves and available for purchase.
As Hancock explained it, “If it’s not on the shelf, I can’t buy it. You hate to see a company self-destruct, but there are other places to go.”
And ‘go’ is exactly what Ms. Hancock did—no doubt to Wal-Mart’s competitor, Costco, a company that experienced a 19 percent increase in profits in Q2 2013 while paying its employees 40 percent more on average (the average Costco wage is $21.96 per hour) than what a Wal-Mart worker can earn. In that same quarter, Wal-Mart numbers revealed the company is going nowhere fast given its current state of operations.
So, where is all that product that once filled Wal-Mart shelves?
Oh, the goods are in the store—either in the back room or in the unopened boxes lining the aisles as they await the availability of a store clerk to get to the rather critical job of moving the merchandise from the box to the shelf where a customer can actually purchase it. But when there are insufficient numbers of store clerks available—due to Wal-Mart’s commitment to using temporary workers or busting its full-time employees down to part-time so as to avoid worker benefit—the products Wal-Mart sells stay off the shelves and unavailable for customers to purchase.
Of course, Wal-Mart’s efforts to keep its workers from earning a decent living while achieving health care benefits has created some full-time work for some.
The company now hires people to work with its employees to help them sign up for Medicaid, the government program that makes healthcare available to Americans who neither get coverage at work or are able to afford it without public assistance.
What that means is that you and I are subsidizing Wal-Mart’s poor treatment of its employees as we pay for their workers health care coverage with our tax dollars and all so Wal-Mart can feather and mask its sinking profits by allowing you and I to pay for their responsibilities, whether we shop at Wal-Mart or not.
The moral to the story?
Wal-Mart is finally learning what all American businesses who seek to avoid their health care responsibilities to employees will soon learn.
It may be a clever enough dodge to cut employees below the 30 hours per week in order to avoid the expectations of Obamacare, but the move comes at a substantial price to be paid in lost revenue and profits. Given that the entire point of business is to show a profit, it is only a matter of time before employers learn what Home Depot learned some years ago and what Wal-Mart is slowly beginning to figure out—you get what you pay for.
Cut back on employees and you will, eventually, cut back on your profits as the savings a business creates by cutting worker hours leads to greatly decreased sales as customer satisfaction disappears.
While there are no shortage of Americans who enjoy deriding the Affordable Care Act as a ‘job killer’, what will soon emerge—and sooner than you may think—is an understanding that the losses experienced by businesses that cut worker hours will far exceed whatever is gained by avoiding giving employees the healthcare benefits their families so badly require.
Don’t believe it?
Just ask Wal-Mart.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 25, 2013
“Imaginary Armies Of Voices”: The “American People” Who Only Exist In Ted Cruz’s Head
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz spoke seemingly endlessly about Obamacare yesterday and today, repeatedly demanding that Washington listen to “the American people.” But to which people exactly is Cruz listening? And is he willing to follow his own advice?
I ask because the latest New York Times/CBS News poll shows that an astonishing majority disapproves of the kind of shutdown-showdown tactics the tea party legislator is pushing in his effort to stop the Affordable Care Act. According to the Times:
Eight in 10 Americans find it unacceptable for either President Obama or members of Congress to threaten to shut down the government during budget negotiations in order to achieve their goals, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. Fewer than 1 in 5 think the stalemate between Mr. Obama and the Republicans in Congress is acceptable.
These results jibe with a host of other polls showing that Americans want cooperation in Washington and don’t want a government shutdown. But that’s precisely what Cruz and House Republicans are threatening to do with their “defund” stand: shut down the government unless President Obama and Senate Democrats grant them a win by extortion that the American people – the real ones, not Cruz’s imagined armies – denied them at the ballot box less than a year ago.
And it also bears repeating that for all of Cruz’s sanctimonious blather about how Congress should be more attuned to “the American people,” he flatly opposes their will on other critical issues. As I wrote last week:
For example 86 percent of Americans support background checks for people buying guns; on immigration reform, 64 percent of Americans support the comprehensive bill that the Senate passed and 78 percent support a qualified path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. … For those keeping track at home, those figures are more impressive than the 50-something opposed to Obamacare – perhaps no one has told Cruz, Lee et al. about these judgments from “the American people?”
So which “American people” is he talking about exactly? And will he listen to the ones that exist outside of his imagination?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 25, 2013
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