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Up Is Down: Michele Bachmann Distances Herself From Reality

Talk about cognitive dissonance. I went to a breakfast this morning with Alice Rivlin and lunch with Michele Bachmann. How to put this politely? If men are from Mars and women from Venus, Rivlin is from Earth, Bachmann is from Saturn. Someplace way out in the solar system and removed from reality.

Rivlin, a Democrat, is a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, former director of the Office of Management and Budget, and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. She is, in short, a Very Serious Person and, like every serious person around, finds herself somewhere between disbelieving and aghast at the current crisis over raising the debt ceiling.

“Putting a limit on the debt and saying, ‘Hey, we made these decisions but we didn’t really mean it, we’re not going to pay our bills,’ is just an unthinkable thing to do,” Rivlin said at an event sponsored by Atlantic Media.

“This is outrageous, folks,” she told interviewer Linda Douglass. “The greatest democracy, oldest democracy in the world should not be behaving this way.…It’s embarrassing for us to have a government that is so dysfunctional and that has created this artificial crisis.”

And the consequences could be catastrophic. “Suppose the world has decided that [debt ceiling crisis] might happen again and this democracy isn’t quite as solid or thoughtful as we thought it was, so we not going to stop lending to the United  States but we’re going to charge more interest. As the interest bill goes up, two things happen. One is it’s must more expensive for the government to carry this large debt….But more seriously it means that everybody’s interest payment goes up….So we would be paying more on our mortgage, more on our car loans, more on our credit cards, more for business loans and that’s not good for the economy.

It takes nothing away from Rivlin’s considerable intelligence and insight to say that she is expressing the conventional wisdom.

Fast forward a few hours to Bachmann, a congresswoman from Minnesota and Republican presidential candidate, addressing the National Press Club. Bachmann’s position is two-fold:

First, the debt ceiling should not be raised, under any circumstances. No deal could be good enough, Bachmann said, to induce her to do so. “I won’t raise taxes. I will reduce spending and I won’t vote to raise the debt ceiling,” she said. “And I have the titanium spine to see it through.”

Second, the United States will not default. “I want to state unequivocally I think for the world as well as the markets as well as for the American people, I have no doubt that we will not lose the full faith and credit of the United States,” Bachmann said.

Huh? Bachmann accused President Obama of employing “scare tactics” in warning of “catastrophic results for our economy.” But what do she and others in the titanium spine caucus think is going to happen when the United States can’t pay its bills?

Sure, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner could manage to pay off bondholders. But as Rivlin and others explained, it won’t be too long before the checks due exceed the amount in the coffers.

An analysis by former George W. Bush administration Treasury official Jay Powell by the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that if the administration prioritizes payments to bondholders, Social Security recipients, Medicare and Medicaid providers, defense contractors and unemployment benefits (total $172.7 billion for the month) then it wouldn’t be able to pay another $134 billion worth of bills, including military active duty pay, veterans affairs programs, federal salaries and benefits, food stamps and Pell grants. You can shift around the numbers all you want but the bottom line is that refusing to increase the debt ceiling is not a sustainable option.

Bachman said that “saying no” to an increase in the debt ceiling would be “saying yes to job creation and to the next generation.” Up is down in Bachmann-world. The credit rating agencies are already threatening a downgrade. The grave implications of that are clear, for jobs now and stretching into the next generation with the hangover of higher interest rates.

Bachmann spent a lot of time invoking Ronald Reagan, so here’s one from the Gipper back at her. “The full consequences of a default—or even the serious prospect of default—by the Untied States are impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate,” he wrote to then-Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker in November 1983. “Denigration of the full faith and credit of the United States would have substantial effects on the domestic financial markets and the value of the dollar in exchange markets. The nation can ill afford to allow such a result.”

By: Ruth Marcus, The Washington Post, July 28, 2011

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July 29, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Conservatives, Consumer Credit, Consumers, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democracy, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Jobs, Medicaid, Medicare, Politics, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, Social Security, Taxes, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Declaring Loyalties: Sex And Violence On Capitol Hill

(Warner Bros./via AP) - Searching for a theme in the debt debate, the Republicans settled on honor among thieves.

The time has come in the debt-limit fight for all Americans to declare their loyalties: Are you with the bank robbers, or are you with the dirty old men?

This unpalatable choice is as good a way as any to frame the debate in these last days before the default deadline.

On one side are House Republican leaders who, facing a rebellion of Tea Party conservatives, appealed for party unity by screening for members a clip of the 2010 film “The Town,” in which Ben Affleck’s bank-robber character tells the Jeremy Renner character: “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.” Renner replies: “Whose car we takin’?” The clip ended before the shooting and beatings that followed.

On the other side are House Democratic leaders, who had to decide how to handle Rep. David Wu (D-Ore.), accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward a teenage girl (he claims it was consensual). Wu, who previously attracted attention by sending staff members photos of himself in a tiger costume, had no choice but to resign. But leaders accepted his plan to stay on the job for the debt standoff, thereby giving them one more vote against Speaker John Boehner’s debt plan.

It’s hard to decide which wins the craven crown: Exhorting colleagues by playing for them a call to criminal violence? Or trying to thwart the opposition by tolerating a 56-year-old colleague accused of forcing himself on a friend’s daughter?

Both are evidence of how desperate the warring parties are for any fleeting advantage in the fight. Someday, Democrats may rue wooing Wu to stay with them for the budget votes, and Republicans may do penance for embracing Hollywood violence. But this is not that day.

In the Democrats’ case, Wu’s grace period was a matter of arithmetic. Without him, Boehner would need 216 votes to pass his budget-cutting plan; with him, Boehner needs 217. And so Wu released a statement that he would “resign effective upon the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis.”

That’s a delay Democrats are apparently comfortable with, even though this was not the first time this tiger has prowled: He was disciplined in college after a woman accused him of trying to force her to have sex, the Oregonian newspaper reported several years ago.

At a news conference Wednesday, I asked Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairman, whether she thought Wu should go sooner — and she demurred. “I think he made the right decision to resign,” she said.

The Republicans’ problem is more complicated. Though he has made few concessions, Boehner is facing a chorus of criticism from Tea Party activists who think he has not been belligerent enough. At a breakfast organized by the Christian Science Monitor on Wednesday, the co-founders of the influential Tea Party Patriots network said a poll of their supporters found 82 percent of them dissatisfied with House leadership and 74 percent inclined to see Boehner replaced.

One of the co-founders, Mark Meckler, called Boehner’s proposed budget cuts “phantom” and “fake.” Later in the day, the leader of a smaller group called Tea Party Nation called for Boehner to be ousted. And staffers for conservative lawmakers rallied interest groups to fight against Boehner’s plan.

To resist such pressure, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) thought the proper tone would be Affleck’s crime thriller, packed with sex, drugs, violence and profanity, and described by USA Today as having “murky morality.”

The selection evidently had the desired effect. After the clip, in which the Renner character asks whose car they’ll drive, Rep. Allen West (Fla.), a Tea Party favorite, announced to his colleagues: “I’m ready to drive the car!”

Over the next 24 hours, conservatives’ resistance to Boehner’s plan ebbed, and Wednesday morning, Rep. Louie Gohmert (Tex.), one of the few remaining holdouts, emerged from a caucus meeting feeling the pain McCarthy promised. “I’m a beat-up ‘no,’ ” he reported.

Democrats pretended to be offended by the film selection. “They could have used ‘Hoosiers,’ ‘Rudy’ or ‘Band of Brothers,’ ” protested Wasserman Schultz (the person would-be getaway car driver West called “vile” and “not a lady”). “Now is not the time to be thinking about putting the political hurt to the other party or the president.”

But Republicans have a defense. That effort to “hurt people” in “The Town” was planned as revenge on men who had hassled a young woman.

David Wu might want to take that as a warning.

July 29, 2011 Posted by | Congress, Conservatives, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democrats, GOP, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Lawmakers, Politics, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Blame For The Debt Ceiling Crisis Rests With Republicans

Are you watching your 401(k) drop? Are you seeing your retirement tank? Are you waiting for higher interest rates on your credit cards and mortgages? Are you nervous about another recession?

Well, thank the Republicans.

This debt crisis is totally of the Republicans’ making. From the beginning we should have had a clean vote—up or down—on the debt ceiling, just as Ronald Reagan and other presidents have done.

If Speaker John Boehner and the Republicans allow a default with  their last minute antics things are only going to get worse. That is  clear.

And the very notion of revisiting this silly scenario in six months  is absurd. For the life of me I can think of no quicker way to sink our  economy. Will that give confidence to the markets? Not a chance. Will it  result in a downgrading of our credit rating? In all likelihood it  will.

The sad truth is that without the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy,  without the oil and gas loopholes and, most important, without two wars  that the Republicans and Bush failed to pay for, we would be in the  black right now, or close to it.

Democrats will have to come up with a grand compromise, hurting many  segments of our society, to bail out the Republicans, much the way Bill  Clinton did in the 1990s. Revenues will have to be part of that package.  Hopefully, that can happen when cooler heads prevail and the Tea Party  stops their nonsense.

In the meantime, if the stock market continues to drop and Americans  are taken to the cleaners, pick up the phone and thank John Boehner and  the Tea Party Republicans for what they have done to your bank accounts  and your savings.

All this sound and fury comes out of the majority in the House and  not one bill on jobs, not one piece of legislation to help our economy.  Sad.

 

By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, July 28, 2011

July 28, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Consumer Credit, Consumers, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Deficits, Democracy, Democrats, Economy, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Jobs, Lawmakers, Middle Class, Mortgages, Politics, Public, Public Opinion, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty, Wealthy | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Rejecting The GOP’s ‘Hezbollah Faction’: Where Are The Sane Republicans?

I found a lot to disagree with in Thomas Friedman’s column today, but his criticism of the Republican Party’s base rings true.

The Tea Party … is so lacking in any aspiration for American greatness, so dominated by the narrowest visions for our country and so ignorant of the fact that it was not tax cuts that made America great but our unique public-private partnerships across the generations. If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.

This strikes me as fair, and it got me thinking about a question a friend of mine asked me the other day: where are the “sane Republicans” willing to “stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst”? Where are Bob Dole and John Warner? Why can’t John Danforth and Colin Powell express their disapproval for what their party is doing? Maybe some of Reagan’s old guard, like Ken Duberstein, could speak up?

The party is not without elder statesmen and women. They couldn’t possibly see their party’s antics on Capitol Hill and feel a sense of pride. Maybe it’s time they say so?

A regular reader recently passed along this item from Robert Prather, published a week ago on the center-right Outside the Beltway blog, about his sense of what’s become of the GOP.

I’ve been moving to the left for a few years now, but these idiots are radicalizing me. I’ve never voted for a Democrat in my life (full disclosure: I didn’t vote the last two elections due to moving), but I doubt I’ll ever vote for a Republican again. They’re either stupid or evil, but either way they’re dangerous and bad for the country.

I don’t know much about Prather’s political background, and maybe he’s an anomaly. But shouldn’t there be a legion of Republicans — former office holders, party loyalists, life-long members, all of the above — who are sympathetic to this perspective?

We’re not talking about GOP officials taking a hard line on some random piece of legislation, or nominating some radical for a key public office. We’re talking about congressional Republicans who’ve decided to play a game of chicken with the full faith and credit of the United States — something no American institution has ever done in more than two centuries — and who are fully prepared to trash the constitutional principle next week as part of a hostage strategy gone horribly awry?

Are there no noteworthy Republicans watching this, willing to say, “My party is simply going too far”?

By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 27, 2011

July 28, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Constitution, Debt Ceiling, Debt Crisis, Democracy, Democrats, Dictators, Disasters, Economic Recovery, Economy, GOP, Government, Government Shut Down, Ideologues, Ideology, Lawmakers, Politics, Public, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Circular Firing Squad: Boehner Bill Is Showdown Between House Republican Purists And Realists

The run-up to the vote expected Thursday on House Speaker John A. Boehner’s proposal to provide a short-term increase in the national debt limit is quickly turning into a time of clarity for the chamber’s Republicans.

If GOP leaders are unable to muster enough support to get the plan out of the House, the only measure left would be a Democratic proposal by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), and voting with Reid is not a concession many House Republicans are willing to make.

“There’s only three choices,” said Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio), a close Boehner ally. “One is to vote for Senator Reid’s plan. One is to default. And one choice is the Boehner bill. It should be pretty self-evident what the best choice is to someone who’s a Republican.”

Increasingly, the vote on Boehner’s proposal is shaping up not as a test of wills between moderates and conservatives, but as a face-off between political purists who scorn the bill and realists who prefer it to the alternative.

“We came here to reduce the size of government and reduce spending, and this bill, I think, begins to accomplish that goal,” said Rep. Sean P. Duffy (R-Wis.), who decided Wednesday that he will vote for the measure. “It’s by no means perfect. But it’s the best bill we have.”

At a closed-door meeting for House Republicans on Wednesday, where leaders tried to rally support for the measure, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (Wis.) read from a blog post by conservative commentator Bill Kristol. “To vote against Boehner is to choose to support Barack Obama,” Kristol wrote.

But it is not an easy sale for a party that won back control of the House last year on promises to vote without regard to political consequences.

Boehner’s bill would postpone major entitlement reform and other deep cuts by passing such decisions to a new committee that would report its recommendations by year’s end. The proposal also would not require Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, but only that it vote on one.

Some Republicans have vowed that they will not raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances.

Others preferred a conservative bill dubbed “cut, cap and balance” that passed the House this month but was killed in the Senate. It would have required Congress to vote to send the amendment to the states for ratification.

“The credit rating agencies have been clear that no matter what happens with the debt limit, the U.S. will lose its AAA credit rating unless we produce a credible plan to reduce the debt by trillions of dollars,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (Ohio), chairman of the Republican Study Committee. The group comprises more than 170 House conservatives. “Cut, cap and balance is the only plan on the table that meets this standard,” he said.

House leaders expressed cautious optimism Wednesday that they were convincing members that the plan advanced by Boehner (R-Ohio) is the best that Republicans can hope to get.

It would avert a government default, take a bite out of the deficit and require Congress to adopt $1.8 trillion in additional cuts before the debt ceiling could be raised again next year.

Freshman Rep. Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.), whose district in Staten Island and Brooklyn is home to many Wall Street professionals, said he decided Wednesday that he will vote for the bill after he was convinced that its failure would hand Democrats control of the debate.

“I don’t think it’s perfect. I don’t think it’s close to perfect. I don’t think it’s in the realm of what I expected to get,” he said.

But, Grimm said, it would require deep spending reductions over the coming years. “That’s historic. And that’s a step in the right direction.”

The public infighting has served to rally some Republicans. Behind closed doors, members erupted Wednesday over an e-mail that a staff member of Jordan’s Republican Study Committee sent to outside conservative groups. It listed undecided members who could be pressured to vote against the Boehner plan.

“I think it’s offensive when a group that you’re a part of uses your bullets to shoot you,” said Rep. Bill Flores (Tex.). “So I have a problem with it.”

Those entreaties did not quiet conservatives who are urging that the plan be abandoned: On Wednesday, the head of the group Tea Party Nation accused Boehner of surrendering to Washington’s status quo and called for him to be replaced.

The House proposal was panned at a small rally held at the Capitol by the Tea Party Express and the American Grassroots Coalition. The GOP that rode tea party energy and activism is hoping that some of it members can look past that relationship.

“Some people are new here and this is part of the learning curve,” LaTourette said. “At times you have to say ‘no’ to people you represent who are yelling at you, if you’ve reached the conclusion that it’s in the best interests of the country.”

By: Rosalind Helderman and Felicia Sonmez with Contribution by David Fahrenthold, The Washington Post Politics, July 27, 2011

July 28, 2011 Posted by | Budget, Congress, Conservatives, Debt Ceiling, Deficits, Democrats, Economic Recovery, Economy, Elections, GOP, Government Shut Down, Ideology, Lawmakers, Politics, Republicans, Revolution, Right Wing, Teaparty, Voters | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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