Charles Krauthammer sticks to his party’s script in his new column this morning, complaining about President Obama’s “refusal to compromise or even negotiate.” It got me thinking about how best to explain to conservatives why this makes so little sense.
Maybe it’s time to flip the script to better illustrate the point. After all, when it comes to funding the government and protecting the integrity of the full faith and credit of the United States, we’re describing an inherently cooperative process — the White House needs Congress to pass legislation, the Congress needs a president to sign the legislation. One without the other doesn’t work.
With this mind, imagine a hypothetical.
Let’s say President Obama, feeling good after winning re-election fairly easily, adopted an overly confident posture with lawmakers. He started boasting about the fact that his approval rating is four times higher than Congress’ approval rating; his policy agenda enjoys broader public support than Republicans’ policy agenda; and he decided it’s time they start rewarding him before he considered engaging in basic governance.
“Sure,” Obama said to Republicans in this imaginary scenario, “I’ll sign the spending measures to prevent a government shutdown, but first you have to raise taxes on the wealthy. And end the sequestration policy. And pass comprehensive immigration reform. And approve universal background checks. The American people are with me, so I expect you to compromise and negotiate with me on these matters.”
The president then said to GOP lawmakers, “And sure, I’ll sign a bill to raise the debt limit, paying the bills you already piled up, but I’m not ready to sign a ‘clean’ bill. Instead, I also expect Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, a public option for the health care system, universal pre-K, and billions in infrastructure investments. If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to tell the public you refuse to compromise and negotiate.”
Much of the political establishment has come to accept a certain frame: the White House is going to have to accept some concessions to make congressional Republicans happy. Obama won’t like it, but voters did elect a House GOP majority.
What I’m suggesting is that this assumption is incomplete. No one seems to question, or even consider in passing, what Republicans will be asked to do to make the White House happy. Boehner & Co. won’t like it, but voters did elect a Democratic president.
Of course, the point of this apparently silly hypothetical is to help Krauthammer and others who share his ideology understand a basic truth: Obama isn’t making any demands. He’s offered no threats. There is no presidential wish list, filled with progressive goodies — unrelated to the budget or the debt ceiling — that Obama expects Congress to pass before the president fulfills his duties.
This notion that Obama “refuses to compromise or even negotiate” isn’t just deliberately misleading; it’s demonstrably silly. If the president was making extravagant demands, threatening to veto every bill lacking liberal treats, Republicans and their pundits would have a point.
But until then, can we at least try to recognize reality as it exists?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
October 7, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Republicans | Afordable Care Act, Charles Krauthammer, Congress, Conservatives, GOP, John Boehner, Sequester |
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Suppose President Obama announced:
Unless Republicans agree to my proposal for gun control, I will use my authority as commander in chief to scuttle one aircraft carrier a week in the bottom of the ocean.
I invite Republican leaders to come to the White House and negotiate a deal to preserve our military strength. I hope Republicans will work with me to prevent the loss of our carrier fleet.
If the Republicans refuse to negotiate, I will be compelled to begin by scuttling the U.S.S. George Washington in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, with 80 aircraft on board.
In that situation, we would all agree that Obama had gone nuts. Whatever his beefs with Republicans, it would be an inexcusable betrayal to try to get his way by destroying our national assets. That would be an abuse of power and the worst kind of blackmail.
And in that kind of situation, I would hope that we as journalists wouldn’t describe the resulting furor as a “political impasse” or “partisan gridlock.” I hope that we wouldn’t settle for quoting politicians on each side as blaming the other. It would be appropriate to point out the obvious: Our president had tumbled over the edge and was endangering the nation.
Today, we have a similar situation, except that it’s a band of extremist House Republicans who are deliberately sabotaging America’s economy and damaging our national security — all in hopes of gaining leverage on unrelated issues.
The shutdown of government by House Republicans has already cost at least $1.2 billion, with the tab increasing by $300 million a day. Some estimates are much higher than that.
The 1995 and 1996 shutdowns cost the country $2.1 billion at today’s value, and the current one is also likely to end up costing billions — a cost imposed on every citizen by House Republicans, even as members of Congress pay themselves.
The government shutdown and risk of default also undermine America’s strength around the world. It’s not just that 72 percent of the intelligence community’s civilian work force has been furloughed. It’s not simply that “the jeopardy to the safety and security of this country will increase” daily, according to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.
Nor is it just that the White House telephone number is now answered with a recording that says to call back when government is functioning again. It’s not simply that several countries have issued travel advisories about visiting America. It’s not just that we’re mocked worldwide, with the French newspaper Le Monde writing: “Jefferson, wake up! They’ve gone crazy!”
Rather, it’s that America’s strength and influence derive in part from the success of our political and economic model. When House Republicans shut our government down and leave us teetering on the abyss of default, we are a diminished nation. We have less influence. We have less raw power, as surely as if we had fewer aircraft carriers.
Some Americans think that this crisis reflects typical partisan squabbling. No. Democrats and Republicans have always disagreed, sometimes ferociously, about what economic policy is best, but, in the past, it was not normal for either to sabotage the economy as a negotiating tactic.
In a household, husbands and wives disagree passionately about high-stakes issues like how to raise children. But normal people do not announce that if their spouse does not give in, they will break all the windows in the house.
Hard-line House Republicans seem to think that their ability to inflict pain on 800,000 federal workers by furloughing them without pay gives them bargaining chips. The hard-liners apparently believe that their negotiating position is strengthened when they demonstrate that they can wreck American governance.
The stakes rise as we approach the debt limit and the risk of default — which the Treasury Department notes could have an impact like that of the 2008 financial crisis and “has the potential to be catastrophic.” Astonishingly, Republican hard-liners see that potential catastrophe as a source of bargaining power in a game of extortion: We don’t want anything to happen to this fine American economy as we approach the debt limit, so you’d better meet our demands.
In this situation, it strikes a false note for us as journalists to cover the crisis simply by quoting each side as blaming the other. That’s a false equivalency.
The last time House Republicans played politics with this debt limit, in 2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating. In the long run, that may mean higher debt payments and higher taxes.
My opening example of a president scuttling naval ships was ludicrous. No one would do that. But if we default because of extremist House Republicans, the cost could be much greater to our economy and to our national security than the loss of a few aircraft carriers.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 5, 2013
October 7, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Republicans | Congress, Default, Economy, Federal Workers, Gun Control, Journalists, National Security |
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A lot of the talk from progressives (and I plead guilty to doing this myself on occasion) about the government shutdown and/or the impending possibility of a debt default suggests House Republicans are suffering from some sort of temporary insanity, or are indulging some sort of temporary temper tantrum by a faction they cannot ignore but can outlast. This habit flows from the broader sense that the Tea Party movement is some sort of temporary phenomenon–a “fever,” as the president famously put it–that will go away to be replaced by good, stolid, “moderate” conservatism sooner rather than later. You see it in the high hosannas raised every time yet another poll shows the percentage of voters identifying with the Tea Party–as opposed to the Republican Party that has largely internalized Tea Party policies and strategies–declining.
This attitude is perfectly understandable, but risks a major misunderstanding of what conservatives are up to at any given moment. Yes, many of them have a remarkably radical vision for America all right, which involves bringing back the idyllic government of the Coolidge administration and patriarchal culture of the Eisenhower administration. But they are pursuing an entirely rational if risky strategy for getting from here to way back there, based on three overlapping perspectives that are reasonably common in the conservative commentariat:
1) Radicalism on spending is the hand voters have dealt the GOP. The “defunding Obamacare” strategy has always been based on the leverage Republicans had after 2012 in maintaining control of just one congressional chamber. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare or enact the Ryan Budget, but they could refuse to fund the Obama Era welfare state, which meant threatening a government shutdown or a debt default. Obamacare was the natural target for this strategic brinkmanship since it polled worse than, say, Medicare or food stamps.
2) Resisting a new entitlement is easier and more effective than rolling back an established entitlement. For all the conservative talk about the hatred Americans feel for Obamacare, there is a widespread fear on the Right that once the law is in place for a few years, it will become part of the landscape, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the Rx drug prescription before them. And this fear coincides with the “tipping point” argument that the Welfare State is now ensnaring so many Americans that “takers” are outnumbering “makers,” and will defend their theft of “maker” resources fiercely at the polls.
3) In divided government, implacable unity is the winning formula. There is an intense belief among conservatives that Republican back-stabbing–RINOism!–and tactical surrender to liberals explains every defeat for the Right going back for decades. Add in the inevitable “war of nerves” that characterizes politics in an era of divided government, and the conviction that red-state Democrats will side with Republicans if pushed to the wall, and you have an argument against compromise of any sort, at any price.
You can see how these three factors reinforce each other in Ted Cruz’s basic “defund Obamacare” rap as expressed back in August in an interview with the Daily Caller:
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, the most important check we have on an overreaching executive. Now is the best chance we have to exercise this power in order to defund Obamacare. It can be done as part of passing the Continuing Resolution (CR) — a piece of legislation that funds the government and must be renewed by September 30th.
The Continuing Resolution gives us real leverage to defund Obamacare. Fighting this fight won’t be easy, but it’s now or never. President Obama’s strategy is simple: on January 1, the subsidies kick in. President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound. That’s why the administration announced that it won’t enforce eligibility requirements-essentially encouraging fraud and “liar loans”-because that way the most people possible will get addicted to the sugar.
To stop that from happening, the House should pass a new Continuing Resolution to fund the entire federal government except Obamacare. The House should include a rider in that bill that explicitly prohibits any federal dollars – discretionary and mandatory – from being spent on it. Republicans control the House, and have already voted some 40 times to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this.
Then the bill comes to the Senate. Republicans need just 41 votes to prevent Democrats from passing legislation that funds Obamacare – 45 Republicans in the Senate have already voted to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this also.
At that point, we simply have to continue to stand together and not blink. If Republicans are truly against Obamacare, they will not vote to fund it.
Cruz obviously miscalculated that Senate Republicans would block any vote on a continuing resolution that “funded Obamacare,” but his argument still stands that the side that doesn’t “blink” will ultimately win; that it’s now or never for killing Obamacare; and that exploiting the House veto power over spending and debt limit increases is the one point of leverage that Obama’s re-election did not eliminate.
So Cruz’s revolt, into which John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have been dragged because they can’t pass any bill opposed by Democrats without the support of conservatives who agree with his approach, wasn’t some adolescent outburst that will pass like a moment of hormonal rage, but a consistent strategy for using limited leverage on behalf on an extremist agenda. If it’s “insane,” the insanity is not temporary, and won’t just go away.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2013
October 3, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down | Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Default, House Republicans, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Tea-party, Ted Cruz |
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So at the risk of getting ahead of myself here just a bit, the appropriations crisis is merging with the debt limit crisis. And as everybody’s favorite source for GOP thinking, National Review‘s Robert Costa, tells us today, John Boehner is determined not to relent on what just about everyone is calling an insanely untenable position on the CR because he’s got to keep GOPers together for the real ball game, the debt limit. Why? Kathleen Parker says that’s the rainbow that yielded a pot of gold for Boehner last time it appeared:
What Republicans hope to accomplish by tying demands to the debt ceiling is a grand bargain to include a package of entitlement and tax reform. Sound familiar? The president can refuse to negotiate, but at 3 a.m. when the phone rings and it’s Angela Merkel inquiring just what the hell is going on, it won’t be John Boehner’s phone ringing. It will be President Obama’s. That’s leverage. During the last debt-ceiling battle, Boehner managed to secure more than $2 trillion in cuts and no taxes.
So the conviction that Obama will eventually cave on the debt limit is what is making it possible for Boehner to walk the path Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and their House minions have laid out for him.
Now I don’t know anything about the president’s relationship with Boehner. But it’s becoming a matter of national security for him to find some way to take him aside, maybe give the Speaker a cigarette from his secret stash, and say: “I will see you in Hell before I negotiate over the debt limit. And if you let a default happen, I will devote the rest of my presidency to making sure you, personally, bear the blame, and go down in history with our most despised traitors and criminals. For generations, little school children in Ohio will cross themselves and make hex signs when your name is mentioned. So do not, do not, go back and tell your crazy people they can win if they just stick together.”
This sort of attitude adjustment needs to happen sooner rather than later, before Boehner takes another step down the path he is currently contemplating.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 2, 2013
October 3, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down | Conservatives, Default, GOP, Jim DeMInt, John Boehner, Republicans, Tea-party, Ted Cruz |
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Yes, the tea party Republicans should hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner across the House of Representatives. They could flank it with large portraits of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who ousted John Boehner as speaker of the House in an unacknowledged coup. The right-wing extremists got exactly what they wanted. Now, what will the country do about it?
In blundering into a shutdown, Boehner has lost any claim to authority. Helpfully, the Speaker-in-Name-Only underscored this fact himself on the House floor when he mocked the way President Obama talked. Does anyone remember a real speaker going to the well of the House and making fun of a president of the United States? Can anyone now doubt who is responsible for Washington’s dysfunction? The Republican right still does not accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. That is why the government shut down.
The issue here is not that Congress failed to reach a “compromise.” The Democrats already have compromised, lopping some $70 billion [this number has been updated from an earlier version] off their budget proposal, to the dismay of many liberals. That was meaningless to a tea party crowd that seems to care not a whit about the deficit, despite its fulsome talk. It will be satisfied only if Congress denies heath-care coverage to some 25 million Americans, which is what “repealing Obamacare” really means.
It needs to be said over and over as long as this stupid and artificial crisis brewed by the tea party continues: Financing the government in a normal way and avoiding a shutdown should not be seen as a “concession.” Making sure the government pays its debt is not a “concession.” It’s what we expect from a normal, well-functioning, constitutional system. It’s what we expect from responsible stewards of our great experiment. The extremists who have taken over the House do not believe in a normal, constitutional system. They believe only in power.
There’s a profound irony here, since no one talks more about the Constitution than the tea party. Before the Civil War, John C. Calhoun and a variety of nullifiers and future secessionists spoke incessantly about the Constitution, too. We know where that led.
In the normal course of things in a constitutional and democratic republic, parties win elections on the issues that matter to them. They pass laws or repeal them by majority vote. The tea party could not muster such a majority to repeal the Affordable Care Act because Democrats held the White House and the Senate in the 2012 elections. Lacking a majority, the extremists chose force. “Do what we want,” they said, “or we will render the country ungovernable.”
That’s what they have done. Everyone says Boehner knew better and did not want this outcome. But he was so fearful for his job that he let it happen.
My conservative colleague Michael Gerson had it exactly right this morning: “We are no longer seeing a revolt against the Republican leadership, or even against the Republican ‘establishment’; this revolt is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality.”
I would only add: This is also revolt against anyone who accepts majority rule and constitutional constraints.
The burden now is on Republicans who know how profoundly radical and, indeed, crazy the tea party has become. These genuine, non-radical conservatives know how irresponsible this shutdown is. They know that playing around with the debt ceiling later this month would be a profoundly un-patriotic act. “It’s a dead end,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of the shutdown strategy. King, along with Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), had the courage to stand up against the lunacy by voting against Boehner’s last in a series of craven proposals Monday night. Dent told CNN that as many as 200 Republicans were secretly hoping that there would be a vote on the Senate’s continuing resolution so the government could stay open. But if those Republicans exist, they are paralyzed, unwilling to stand up to the far right.
There is only one way for this to end: Republicans who know better need to tell the far right, “Enough.” They need to overcome their abject fear of Republicans who are under Cruz-control and their cheerleaders in Rush Limbaugh’s world. They need to exit the boulevard of self-inflicted wounds.
We now know where the tea party’s political experiment ends. If this shutdown does not end the tea party’s reign of intimidation, we will face one unnecessary crisis after another as the extremists keep ripping up the roots of our great constitutional system.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 1, 2013
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Tea Party | Affordable Care Act, Charlie Dent, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Peter King, Republicans, Ted Cruz |
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