“A Calculated Risk Making For An Ugly Fall”: The Scary Reason Republicans Want A Debt Ceiling Fight
Washington Monthly’s Ed Kilgore notes with appropriate alarm the won’t-go-away talk among House Republicans about substituting a threat of government shutdown if Obamacare isn’t defunded with a refusal to raise the debt ceiling. This is a terrifically stupid idea, he notes, because, as Ezra Klein says, a government shutdown would be an “inconvenience” while a debt default “is a global financial crisis.”
So what, Kilgore asks, are Republicans thinking? He suggests movement conservatives are ensorcelled by the Green Lantern/”Nike existentialism” (“Just do it!”) theory of politics, which holds that the only thing standing between a movement and victory is a lack of will. And I think there’s something to that.
But I think there’s another dimension more grounded in reality (and so arguably scarier) why Republican leaders might see a debt ceiling fight as better ground than a government shutdown showdown. First, we’ve seen both of these movies before. Revisionist conservatives aside, Republicans took a beating during the government shutdowns of the mid-1990s, while they managed to extract concessions from President Obama during the last debt ceiling fight. From that point of view, if you have to have a fight, it might as well be the one that – from a cold political perspective – turned out better than the other.
Ultimately Republicans suspect that (per Politico today) Democrats actually want a government shutdown, that they see it as a way to reset midterm congressional elections stacked heavily in the GOP’s favor. Add to that the fact that everyone knows Obama is desperate to avoid a debt default (for the same rational reasons every president – Democrat and Republican alike – has been desperate to avoid one) and the fact that conservatives have a deep-seated belief that Obama is inclined to cave (see also the certitude among the ludicrous right that he’ll sign a defunding bill at all).
What you have is a formula where the debt default (which he’s desperate to avoid) is a better fight than the shutdown (which, they believe, he wants anyway).
As I said, that analysis makes a default fight even scarier because it’s not just being pushed by the Republican rank-and-file, but could be a calculated risk by the leadership.
It could be an ugly fall indeed.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 22, 2013
“Holding The Credit Rating Hostage, Again”: The GOP’s Big New Plan To Take Down ObamaCare
With crucial pieces of the Affordable Care Act set to kick in later this year, some conservative lawmakers have been trying to rally support within the party to shut down the government to block the law, or to force President Obama to scrap it.
That threat — a refusal to pass a budget (or in D.C. jargon, a “continuing resolution”) to fund the government until ObamaCare is defeated — hasn’t gained traction with the party at large. Yet now, multiple reports say the thinking inside the GOP is to shift the ObamaCare battle from the budget fight to another looming fall showdown: The debt ceiling. (For a refresher, read the Guardian‘s helpful history of the debt ceiling here.)
From the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll:
House leadership firmly believes that attaching anything “new” to a continuing resolution is politically untenable, while passing a higher debt limit, without attaching anything new, is also politically impossible. Hence the House leadership’s desire to fight ObamaCare through the debt limit, but not the CR.
The plan is to pass a 60-day CR extension that keeps discretionary spending at the existing sequestration levels. Then House leadership wants to combine Democratic desires to roll-back sequestration with conservative desires to delay/defund ObamaCare into the debt limit fight. [Washington Examiner]
A government shutdown, besides failing to actually defund ObamaCare, has the potential to be politically disastrous for the GOP. Republicans bore the brunt of public rage over the government shutdown in 1995 when they refused to bargain with President Clinton, and they would likely suffer the same fate should they go that route again now. No wonder conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer have labeled the strategy “really dumb.”
Though the impact of a debt ceiling standoff is tougher to predict, the fallout would be more economic than political, potentially sparing the GOP on that front. Still, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised — meaning the U.S. couldn’t borrow more money to pay its existing debts, thus threatening the nation’s credit rating — the fiscal consequences for the country could be catastrophic. That’s why this gambit would represent a “massive escalation” in the ObamaCare funding showdown, argues New York‘s Jonathan Chait.
Closing the federal government for a limited period would have mostly political consequences (probably for the Republicans). The substantive effects build up cumulatively and start to really harm the economy after weeks on end, but the two sides could negotiate through a shutdown.
The debt ceiling is another story. The effects of missing the deadline would be immediate and, while unpredictable, potentially very large and irreversible. That’s why Obama now insists, after disastrously allowing himself to be extorted in 2011, he won’t negotiate the debt ceiling, but has never made an analogous pledge about a continuing resolution. [New York Magazine]
Unlike the very vocal threat to shut down the government over ObamaCare, the latest rumored standoff is, for now, merely rumblings from behind closed doors. And there’s at least some reason to believe it will amount to no more than an empty threat in the end.
The Republican leadership has been increasingly under pressure to appease the right wing of the party. Publicly insisting that ObamaCare funding will be fought further down the road would soothe the demand for that fight in the first place, while kicking the can down the road, perhaps indefinitely.
As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent points out, this is exactly what happened with the last debt ceiling fight. In January, Boehner said the upcoming sequester debate, not debt ceiling fight, gave the GOP its best position to push for major budget cuts. Yet the sequester came and went without the GOP winning those deep concessions.
There’s some reason to think the same dynamic is at play here, too. The health care exchanges mandated under the ACA go into effect October 1. If Republicans really try to defund ObamaCare during the debt ceiling talks, they will, in effect, be arguing a settled debate.
Here’s Sargent:
So now, under this emerging plan, Republicans would be moving to demand a delay in ObamaCare’s implementation — after the exchanges kick in — in exchange for not allowing the country to go into default, even though Boehner himself has already admitted the debt limit must be raised to avoid putting the full faith and credit of the U.S. at risk?
What all of this comes down to is that GOP leaders need to decide if they are going to level with their base, and acknowledge that blocking ObamaCare by using this fall’s confrontations as leverage is just a nonstarter, period, full stop — whether we’re talking about a government shutdown, the debt limit, or whatever. [Washington Post]
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, August 15, 2013
“Misleading Others And Lying To Themselves”: Why John Boehner Has To Keep Making Crazy Threats
You probably read yesterday about the efforts of John Boehner and the Republican leadership in the House to convince the rank-and-file members that shutting down the government until Obamacare is defunded is a Bad Idea, and not a Brilliant Political Maneuver. Robert Costa’s account in the National Review has the basic narrative. It looks, now, like Boehner has succeeded in defusing the shutdown threat. All he had to do was promise something worse. Now we are going to not raise the debt ceiling instead.
As Jonathan Chait points out, replacing the shutdown threat with a default threat is actually much crazier and more potentially disastrous. But Boehner couldn’t get Republicans to agree to just give up on defunding Obamacare this year. He had to promise to exchange their one crazy plan to do so with another one that will go into effect later. And when it is time for that one to go into effect, he will need to find something else to distract them for a little while, until the next crazy plan is ready to go. As Brian Beutler says, we’ve seen this play out over and over again. Boehner has to promise to let Republicans do some apocalyptic thing later in order to get them to avoid doing some apocalyptic thing now. So far we’ve avoided an apocalypse.
But the people Boehner is trying to deal with here don’t see any of these threats as particularly apocalyptic. They don’t really see anything at all that might contradict their ideological stances. The House members Boehner’s trying to walk back from the ledge don’t read the Times or the Post. They don’t care what Brookings or the CBO or CRS say. They believe every “nonpartisan” or “objective” information source to be a part of the vast liberal conspiracy, and they rely for their facts and predictions strictly on sources explicitly aligned with the conservative movement. And those sources are just telling them crazy, untrue things, all the time.
That’s Boehner’s problem: He’s trying to ease his members into the real world, where defunding Obamacare is impossible as long as Obama is in the White House, and where attempts to do so via incredibly unconventional means could have disastrous consequences. What makes his job more difficult is that this reality isn’t acknowledged by most of the conservative organizations his members, and his party’s voters, exclusively follow.
Take Heritage, for years the most influential conservative think tank (it is still in the top five, depending on how you categorize advocacy groups like FreedomWorks). Heritage has been attempting to convince Republicans that a shutdown wouldn’t be such a big deal. Polls commissioned by Heritage say a government shutdown wouldn’t cause anyone to lose their seats, so have at it! The poll, by the way, was conducted entirely in Republican or Republican-leaning House districts.
Now, the venerable Heritage Foundation isn’t saying this. The poll, and the shutdown encouragement, were issued by “Heritage Action for America,” the 501(c)(4) group founded as Heritage’s sister organization in 2010, to take advantage of the new post-Citizens United “almost anything goes” rules for supposed “social welfare” organizations. “Think of it as the Heritage Foundation with teeth,” Betsy Woodruff said in the National Review. So far Heritage Action has been using those teeth to drag the GOP into the world of right-wing fantasy, in which the Farm Bill must be rejected because it does not cut food stamps enough, and the border “surge” amendment to the immigration reform bill must be opposed because $38 billion worth of fences and agents aren’t enough.
For years, the Heritage Foundation’s mission was to craft conservative policy ideas that would both be possible to implement and be broadly popular. School vouchers and welfare reform and tax cuts are all ideas within the realm of the politically possible, and they are also all ideas that have polled quite well at various times. This was effective: Reagan and George W. Bush’s domestic agendas came largely prepackaged by Heritage. But now the organization is using its lobbying arm to just demand total fealty, damn the consequences, to the most extreme form of conservatism possible. That is something of a shift. But it’s a shift the movement has seemingly embraced in the Obama era. Now even supposedly “sober” and “grown-up” conservatives argue that breaching the debt ceiling wouldn’t be so bad — may even indeed be pretty good depending on how you look at it! — and work to convince Republicans that the way to handle demographic change is with strict immigration limits and the militarization of the border, combined with making the party even more dependent solely on white votes.
This is not a left-winger pining for the days of Republican “moderation.” Heritage and the National Review were always very conservative. They were just realistically conservative. Professional conservatives graduated some time ago from misleading others to lying to themselves.
If you want evidence, look at the rapturous praise that greeted the publication of “American Betrayal” by Diana West, a book that argues that … McCarthy was right about everything and that the FDR administration was a puppet regime for Stalin, and that we purposely delayed winning World War II so that the Soviets could have more of Europe when it was finished. The book is just untrue, start to finish. Conservative historian Ronald Radosh — writing in the online publication of David Horowitz, a man who is not unfriendly to wild conspiracy theories about leftists — patiently and at length knocked down nearly every single one of its claims in a review. The book is so silly that Radosh planned to ignore it, but he couldn’t once he saw how the movement had fallen for it:
But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations. These included the Heritage Foundation which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; Breitbart.com which is serializing America Betrayed; PJ Media which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”
Hey, there’s Heritage again! And Amity Shlaes, who wrote a book about how FDR made the Depression worse with liberalism. That book didn’t really coherently build an economic case against Keynesianism but because it had a thesis conservatives liked it quickly became popular, and she has been writing for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal ever since. (And Bloomberg View, for some reason.) This West book is just another step away from reality, into the sweet embrace of fantasy. FDR didn’t just make the Depression worse, he also surrounded himself with Stalinists! The far right has been pushing this shit for decades, obviously. It used to be the mainstream right’s job to make sure it only traveled as far as was politically expedient. Now they lap it up themselves.
This is why Boehner is having so much trouble. He can’t live entirely in this wonderful fantasy world. He has to actually raise the debt ceiling and make sure essential government services get funded. All the institutions designed to make his life easier, to corral the voters, activists and even legislators into supporting the agenda and ensuring the future success of the Republican Party, are all too busy make-believing about the 1930s and convincing themselves that they can defeat Obamacare if they simply want to bad enough, to be of any assistance.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 15, 2013
“The Axis Of The Unhinged”: Why Republicans Want To Shut Down The Government, This Time
Count Texas Sen. Ted Cruz among the growing ranks of Republicans who want to shut down the government – because Republicans always look good when threatening a shutdown – over the party’s Quixotic quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Cruz is in Iowa today laying the groundwork for his presumptive 2016 presidential bid and, according to a Tweet from National Review Online’s Robert Costa (h/t Dave Weigel), told conservatives this morning that he won’t support continued funding of the government without a full defunding of Obamacare. That makes him the third GOP senator this month to push that line, joining Utah conservative Mike Lee and Florida’s Marco Rubio, who told a Weekly Standard breakfast last week that “I will not vote for a continuing resolution unless it defunds Obamacare.” (At the risk of being pedantic: The current continuing resolution runs through the end of the current fiscal year; the next funding fight will be over regular appropriations bills, not another continuing resolution.)
As a group, the three men form a conservative thought leader critical mass. Cruz and Lee can be counted on as reliable barometers of the GOP base’s id. Rubio is desperately scrambling to get back into the party base’s good graces after displaying a dangerous proclivity toward actually trying to constructively legislate – as opposed to confining himself to angry stands on principle – on the immigration issue. That sort of thing (an ability to work with political adversaries to get something done) might play well with swing voters in a general presidential election, but it won’t fly in GOP primaries.
It seems clear that while the Obama administration and congressional Democrats are gearing up for a pro-Obamacare push, we can expect an increasing drumbeat of far-right lawmakers and commentators to talk up the idea of shutting down the government barring an Obamacare defunding. Can it be very long before Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul adds his support, completing the Axis of the Unhinged?
Look, the Affordable Care Act remains unpopular with voters. But the groundswell of support for a defund-or-shutdown stand will be confined to consumers of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s shtick and redstate.com. I’d like Cruz, Lee and Rubio to explain how exactly the results of the 2012 presidential election – where a president whose signature accomplishment is Obamacare was re-elected by a comfortable margin – can be interpreted as a mandate to threaten government shutdowns.
On the one hand, the whole thing’s as absurd as the endless Obamacare repeal votes the House insists on taking. There’s no chance of Obamacare getting repealed or defunded this year or next. None. Zero. It won’t pass the Senate and it won’t get by the president’s veto stamp.
But that’s also what makes this flavor of Obamacare Derangement Syndrome irresponsible and dangerous. At least the House repeal votes merely waste Congress’s time. Threatening a shutdown is akin to threatening a debt default: Republicans would be holding out the prospect of deliberately harming the economy (as my colleague Pat Garofalo ably illustrated when there was talk of a shutdown in 2011) unless they get their way on policy. Even sustained talk of a shutdown will further undermine public confidence in the government’s ability to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And it’s also politically dumb for the GOP, which is already suffering from dismal public approval in polls. Opinion surveys show that the GOP is unpopular and that most of the public wants our political leaders to work together to get things done, valuing that over taking uncompromising stands. People like Lee might try to spin a prospective shutdown as the Democrats’ choice – “If congressional Democrats want to oppose appropriations bills without additional Obamacare funding, shut down the government, and side with the president and Big Business against the American people, then it’s their choice” – but voters will see through that. What this talk does is present, again, the GOP’s radical, intransigent side to the public – although that may admittedly be the only side the party has left at this point, talk of a party revamp be damned.
But this is what the GOP has become: a poseur party, where the importance of ideology is matched by the way it is expressed – the more aggressive and uncompromising the better. (That’s basically why Liz Cheney is challenging incumbent Sen. Mike Enzi, Wyo., in a primary – sure they’re both conservative, but she brings Fox News flash to the table.)
Talk of a government shutdown will boost Cruz’s presidential prospects and help rescue Rubio’s with the GOP base. And really, that’s all the party seems to care about these days anyway.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, July 19, 2013
“Are These People On Drugs”: House GOP Apparently Wants To Be Even More Unpopular Than It Already Is
With the July 4 holiday behind them, House members might be expected to take up work on the immigration reform bill passed by the Senate. But they won’t. They’re looking at piecemeal reforms that will be heavier on border enforcement than the Senate bill – which doubled the number of border control agents, after the border control budget already doubled in size in the last decade — and even nuttier ideas.
Instead the House GOP is apparently making big plans for another debt ceiling hostage-taking, and this time they’ve got a strategy to demand big budget cuts from President Obama and the Democrats. According to the National Journal, House leaders are working on a “menu” of budget-slashing offers to Obama in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling for a short, medium or long period of time. Their template is Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget – the budget so unjust and biased against the poor that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops took time out from restricting women’s rights to criticize the Ryan plan.
House members reluctantly voted to raise the debt ceiling in January promising to come back with a strengthened hand on behalf of budget cuts next time around (which will probably be the end of this year). So House Speaker John Boehner is reportedly meeting with Ryan and other conservatives like Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, who boasted about their talks to the National Journal. The key points:
For a long-term deal, one that gives Treasury borrowing authority for three-and-a-half years, Obama would have to agree to premium support. The plan to privatize Medicare, perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Ryan budget, is the holy grail for conservatives who say major deficit-reduction can only be achieved by making this type of cut to mandatory spending. “If the president wants to go big, there’s a big idea,” said Rep. Steve Scalise, chairman of the Republican Study Committee.
For a medium-sized increase in the debt-limit, Republicans want Obama to agree to cut spending in the SNAP food stamp program, block-grant Medicaid, or tinker with chained CPI.
For a smaller increase, there is talk of means-testing Social Security, for example, or ending certain agricultural subsidies.
…Even at the smallest end of the spectrum — another months-long extension of debt-limit — there is talk of pushing back the eligibility age for Social Security by an equal number of months.
Are these people on drugs? These are wildly unpopular ideas that have no chance of passing the Senate. (“Republicans are eager to look like they are giving the White House plenty of options, convinced that it is in their interest to appear engaged and flexible at the negotiating table,” the NJ’s Tim Alberta reports, apparently unironically.) Unfortunately, the president himself has come out behind the chained CPI, but given the enormousness of House GOP demands and delusion, he’s unlikely to get much for that concession. So one cheer for House GOP delusion.
Scalise seems to be the main source for the National Journal story, and you can imagine other members wincing at his clueless bluster. Not surprisingly, Scalise starred in another story today about the Obama team’s belief it will see some congressional movement on both immigration reform and the economy this summer. Not so fast, Scalise told the Washington Post: “We’re going to continue to be very aggressive in serving as a check and balance against the Obama administration. That’s what the country said in November. We’re very far apart.”
It’s interesting to note that Paul Ryan is key to these debt-ceiling strategy talks, according to the National Journal, when he’s also supposed to be key to comprehensive immigration reform. To his credit, Ryan has come out for something along the lines of the Senate bill, but the question is whether he’ll expend any political capital getting other members to join him. So far, he hasn’t. It looks like another round of debt-ceiling hostage taking is a higher priority for him.
Ironically, the fact that the deficit is falling faster than at any time since World War II is helping drive the House GOP’s extremism – they have to go for big, slashing cuts, because the deficit is already shrinking. Here’s hoping the extremism of the House GOP’s opening salvo will remind the Obama administration not to waste its time on another attempt at a “grand bargain” on deficit reduction.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, July 8, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 