“Self Deluding For Fun And Profit”: Once Again, “The American People” Disagree With The Shutdown Caucus
New results from a pair of polls released today further undermine the right-wing fringe’s push to either defund Obamacare or shut down the government – and further puts the lie to the delusional notion that Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and his tea party fanatic cohorts are trying to work the will of “the American people.”
First, on the specific issue of the push to defund the Affordable Care Act (the official name of the law everyone calls Obamacare), a new CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds that not only do a plurality of Americans oppose the effort to stop the law by not funding it, but that when the question of shutting down the government or causing the U.S. to default on its debt (by not raising the debt ceiling – the next pressure point the fringe wants to use to stop the law) is raised, the opposition becomes dramatically more pronounced.
According to the poll, Americans oppose defunding by 44-38 percent, but that opposition increases to 59-19 when a shutdown or default comes into the discussion. It gets worse for the defund crowd. Not only do independents oppose defunding by 44-40, but that margin balloons to 65-14 when a shutdown enters the equation. And even Republicans (who support defunding in general by 51-36) oppose the defund plan 48-36 when shutdown or default enter the mix. It will surprise no one that the only subgroup favoring defunding even if it means a shutdown is tea-party-supporting Republicans.
In case you’re late to the debate, funding to keep the government open will expire at month’s end and Congress is expected to pass a bill to keep the money flowing at least for a few months more while a longer-term spending package is worked out. Last week, the House passed a continuing resolution that denied funding for the Affordable Care Act (never mind that that won’t even stop the law) and the Senate is expected to strip the provision out and send a “clean” bill back to the House.
People like Cruz who are leading the quixotic defund-or-shutdown fight insist that the House should keep sending back variations on a defunding bill – even as the government shuts down for lack of funding – in the expectation that eventually President Obama and the Senate will throw up their hands and agree to gut Obamacare because … well, it’s not really clear why they’ll surrender, but Cruz and company are pretty sure that they will when they witness the right’s sheer force of will. (Asked about the push on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn said, “Tactics and strategies ought to be based on what the real world is. We do not have the political power to do this. … So we’re not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we’re not going to fund any portion of” Obamacare.)
The tea party types have long argued that the GOP’s problem in recent years has less to do with things like demographics than with the public’s desire for a purer, harsher brand of conservatism. If only Republicans would stop compromising, the thinking goes, America would reward them with electoral success.
That belief, too, is wrong, according to the latest poll from Gallup, which asked adults whether it’s more important for political leaders to compromise, stand by their beliefs or be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. A majority of Americans (53 percent) want compromise while less than half as many (25 percent) want pols to stick to their beliefs and 20 percent want a compromise between, err, compromising and principles. To put it another way, nearly three-quarters of Americans don’t want Washingtonians to take an uncompromising position on major issues.
Senator Cruz, are you listening?
The cross-tabs are not surprising if you’ve seen polling on this topic before: Democrats and independents favor compromise over rigidity (61-20 and 55-24 respectively) while Republicans are more split, 38-36, with 25 percent wanting a middle position between compromise and standing strong – though that again means that even among Republicans 63 percent favor a position other than obstinacy.
As discussed last week, proponents of the defund scheme like to invoke “the American people” as being on their side given that polls show that Obamacare remains unpopular. But today’s polls underscore again that, at best, Cruz and company are self-deluding and at worst they’re charlatans cherry-picking data to support their narrow agendas (for fun and profit, as Brian Walsh recently argued). Americans may not like the law but they don’t want to fully roll it back and more broadly they want our leaders to work together not grandstand in the name of principal.
Again, are you listening Senator Cruz?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
“The GOP Mental-Health Hypocrisy”: Obstructing The Law That Does More To Advance The Cause Since ‘You-Know-Who’ Became President
So now we’re being treated to the charming spectacle of Republicans, or a few of them anyway, purporting to care about mental-health treatment in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard shooting. How touching. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they care about mental health. They’re just coming up with something to say in the wake of the tragedy that sounds to the willfully credulous like action and that won’t offend the National Rifle Association. Meanwhile, they have devastated mental-health funding since you-know-who became president. And more important than that, they voted against, and are now preparing to vote en bloc to defund or delay, the law that will do more to address mental health and give society at least a chance that future Aaron Alexises will get treatment that could prevent them going on shooting sprees since … well, pretty much since ever.
Alexis bought his weapon in Virginia, a state where anyone this side of Charles Manson can buy virtually any kind of gun he lusts after as long as he’s a resident. Current federal guidelines bar gun sales only to people who have been institutionalized or “adjudicated as a mental defective.” Neither of these narrow criteria applied in Alexis’s case. Not that it would even matter if one had, as The Atlantic noted; the Virginia Tech shooter had been so adjudicated and still was able to purchase his firepower in the commonwealth. (Alexis, being a nonresident, was blocked from purchasing an AR-15).
Alexis was fairly typical of the type of person who stands precious little chance of getting any mental-health treatment in this country. For starters, he was male, young, and black. That’s an unlucky combination of things to be in the United States for millions of people. But hitting that trifecta and being mentally ill on top of it constitutes the holding of a very unfortunate ovarian-lottery ticket. Single mothers, children, and the elderly all qualify for more forms of assistance than men do. Increasingly, there is a place where men like this wind up where they finally might get a little bit of treatment. It’s called jail. Our prisons are full of mentally ill substance abusers who committed crimes.
There are two things society can do about future Aaron Alexises. One, it can do nothing to improve mental-health approaches and let people fester, but even then it can at least take tougher steps to prevent the mentally ill from buying guns. Two, it can try to be a little more proactive about this whole category of illness, which affects nearly 60 million Americans (yep, one in five). On both counts, there is one party in Washington that’s eager to act, and one that is perfectly happy to let crazy people buy guns and perfectly content that we have more and more mentally ill people walking around with no treatment. Any guesses?
You may think I have phrased the above unfairly, but this is what the GOP position amounts to. On tougher background checks for the mentally ill, there were provisions in the Manchin-Toomey background-check bill, the one that nearly every Senate Republican voted against. This week New Hampshire Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte is talking up new legislation. You perhaps have read that “even the NRA” supports toughening mental-illness regulations. That’s nice in theory, but in fact, the Senate is not going to do anything on guns and mental illness right, and the reason it’s not going to do anything is that Harry Reid knows he doesn’t have 60 votes to pass anything, especially with huge votes on a possible government shutdown and the debt limit looming. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, a physician who isn’t hostile to tighter regulation in this case, acknowledged to The New York Times that “it’s all politics”—which in this case means that no one has the stomach or stones to take another gun-related vote.
They did, however, have the stomach and stones to cast votes over the past few years that have sliced away at funding for mental-health services. Decreased federal grants have forced states to make massive cuts to mental-health services. The National Alliance on Mental Illness referred in 2011 to the “crisis” that has resulted from states’ slashing of mental-health programs. It’s of course mainly Republicans in Congress who pushed for those block-grant cuts. The sequester made things worse. While the sequester doesn’t affect Medicaid, which funds most mental-health services, the non-Medicaid mental-health services have taken a serious hit, including 103,000 fewer treatment admissions in 2013.
And the Republicans will have the stomach and stones to vote very soon here to defund the Affordable Care Act, which, says University of Chicago health-care expert Harold Pollack, “is the most important change to mental-health and substance-abuse policy in decades,” for two reasons. First, the expansion of Medicaid to all citizens with incomes up to 138 percent of the poverty line will mean that millions of people will be able to afford mental-health care who simply couldn’t before. And second, the ACA requires that coverage of mental illness and substance abuse be offered by insurers “at parity” to more traditional medical treatments. Up to now, these treatments have been more expensive, less likely to be covered, and so on.
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee actually supported those particular provisions of the ACA on unanimous voice vote. So by that measure Republicans are “reasonable” on this issue. But final votes on legislation is where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where Republicans have voted and voted and voted—and will clearly continue to vote—to make sure that we have more potential mass murderers walking among us, listening to those voices until they can’t take it anymore and go out and slaughter innocents. It’s a party of nihilism that has no desire to solve any social problem, holding the rest of us hostage to its craziness as the bodies mount.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 20, 2013
“Collapse Of Their Credibility”: GOP Desperate To Defund ObamaCare Now Because They Know Its Popularity Is About To Skyrocket
Why are the Tea Party Republicans so desperate to defund ObamaCare right now? Because they know that once it goes into effect its popularity will skyrocket.
They know that once it is fully implemented, it will be impossible to take away the many benefits of ObamaCare. It is one thing to prevent something good from being passed by Congress. It’s quite another to take something away from the voters.
The Republicans know that once it is in effect, it will be impossible to tell the millions of Americans who have a pre-existing condition that they have to return to the days when they either were denied insurance coverage or had to pay an arm and a leg to get it.
They know that once it is in effect, it will be impossible to end the affordable coverage that will soon be available to the millions who are not covered by their employers and will have access to health insurance through the health insurance exchanges – where prices have come in lower than projected.
They know that once it is in effect, it will be very difficult to end coverage for the millions who will for the first time have health insurance through expanded Medicaid.
They know that once it goes into effect, it will be very hard to convince Americans to turn the health care system back over to the big insurance companies.
Most importantly, they know that all of the many ObamaCare “horrors” they have predicted – from “death panels” to price increases to a “government takeover” – will not happen.
As a consequence, they believe that once ObamaCare is fully implemented their credibility on the subject will collapse, support for major new progressive initiatives will increase, the popularity of the President – and of Democrats in Congress – will go up, and their chances of hanging on to the House or taking the Senate in 2014 – and the White House in 2016 – will decline.
All of that is why the Tea Party Republicans are so desperate to stop ObamaCare. That’s why they will risk shutting down the government or defaulting on America’s obligations – on the chance that they can force President Obama and the Democrats to delay its implementation and allow them to live to fight another day.
They are desperate. And to achieve their narrow ideological goal, they are willing to use the same desperate measures that other marginal movements have adopted around the world: they have taken a hostage. Except their hostage is not one person – it’s 320 million people – it’s the American economy.
The success of their hostage taking strategy faces two virtually insurmountable obstacles:
First, the President has made clear that he is not willing to negotiate at all over the debt ceiling or ObamaCare.
Many of these hostage takers are the same people who would demand, categorically, that the American government should never negotiate with hostage takers, because to do so only encourages them to take more hostages and make more demands.
President Obama apparently agrees with them. He knows that if he negotiates with people who are willing to collapse the American economy just to get their way, that they will then use the same threat again and again. And he is unlikely to budge, since he is obviously unwilling to sacrifice his signature initiative — ObamaCare.
Second, many key GOP stake holders think that the Tea Party’s willingness to shut down the government or cause a default is sheer madness and would severely damage the GOP brand. Democratic pollsters Jim Carville and Stan Greenberg wrote in a memo last Wednesday:
The Republican Party has a serious brand problem, and it keeps getting worse. The GOP is viewed unbelievably negatively, and even Republicans themselves agree that it is deeply divided.
Polls show the Republican brand problem manifesting itself in the Virginia gubernatorial race, and in Senate races across the country. And if Republicans damage their brand even worse by shutting down the government, we think that they could trigger a revolt that might even imperil their House majority in 2014.
The GOP demand that President Obama and the Democrats surrender or face a government shutdown or default is like a combatant in a war demanding that the other side surrender or he’ll blow his own head off. From a purely political point of view -if it weren’t so bad for the country and economy – you’d have to say: “Go ahead, make my day.”
All the polls show that if either a shutdown or default takes place, the Republicans will take the blame by a factor of at least two to one.
And after they have taken the blame, in the end they will collapse. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page said recently:
The evidence going back to the Newt Gingrich Congress is that no party can govern from the House, and the Republican Party can’t abide the outcry when flights are delayed, national parks close and direct deposits for military spouses stop. Sooner or later the GOP breaks.
So while the state of desperation in evidence among Tea Party Republicans at the prospect of ObamaCare going into effect — and becoming very popular — might be understandable, their desperate strategy of holding the economy hostage in order to kill it is downright suicidal.
Then again, while suicide bombers end up as victims of their own actions at the end of the day, there is no question they can inflict enormous amounts of pain and suffering on everyone else.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, September 20, 2013
“The Anti-Everything Party”: The Finger Of Blame For A Government Shutdown Points Only One Way
Sorry to subject you to another post about the pending government shutdown (It’s Friday—shouldn’t I be writing about robots? Maybe later.), but I just want to make this point briefly. As we approach and perhaps reach a shutdown, Republicans are going to try very hard to convince people that this is all Barack Obama’s fault. I’m guessing that right now, staffers in Eric Cantor’s office have formed a task force to work day and night to devise a Twitter hashtag to that effect; perhaps it’ll be #BarackOshutdown or #Obamadowner or something equally clever. They don’t have any choice, since both parties try to win every communication battle. But they’re going to fail. The public is going to blame them. It’s inevitable. Here’s why.
1. Only one side is making a substantive demand
The Democrats’ position is let’s not shut down the government, because that would be bad. They aren’t asking for any policy concessions. The Republican position, on the other hand, is if we don’t get what we want, we’ll force the government to shut down. So from the start, Republicans look like (and are) the ones forcing the crisis.
2. The demand Republicans are making is absurd and everyone knows it
Even many Republicans admit that it’s ridiculous to think Barack Obama would destroy his signature accomplishment, the most meaningful piece of domestic legislation in decades. If I say to you, “Would it be OK if I took your car, killed your dog, and burned down your house?” and you say “No, that would not be OK,” no one is going to accuse you of being the unreasonable one.
3. The Republicans have done this before
It happened when Bill Clinton was president (you can look here if you’ve forgotten how that turned out), and we’ve been through this cycle of threats of a shutdown more recently. Everyone is familiar with the pattern, and nothing about this particular iteration is going to be understood any differently. Which leads us to the most important reason:
4. Republicans are the ones who hate government, and Democrats are the ones who defend it
This is the heart of it. After so many decades of Republicans saying that government is evil, trying to slash it in a hundred ways, and more recently saying that they don’t think a shutdown would be all that bad, it will be all but impossible for them to convince people that they’re the ones who want government to stay open. Even if it were true (which it isn’t) they wouldn’t be able to convince people of it. They’re the anti-government party. That’s who they are. They worked very hard to create that image. So the universal default assumption is that when there’s a question of who’s responsible for shutting down the government, Republicans are the ones who are doing it, and persuading people that the opposite is true just isn’t going to happen.
I’m sure that at some point, Republicans will start arguing that because of some procedural detail (i.e. that the House passed a continuing resolution), they’re the ones who are moving forward while responsibility for the shutdown lays with Barack Obama. No one bought that when Newt Gingrich was Speaker (remember, that shutdown was triggered by a Clinton veto of a spending bill), and no one’s going to buy it now.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 20, 2013
“Hostages Are A Pre-requisite”: Coming To Terms With The Normalization Of Republican Extortion Politics
President Obama spoke yesterday to the Business Roundtable, and used some language to describe Republican tactics that raised a few eyebrows — not because he was incorrect, but because his word choice was provocative.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama accused what he called “a faction” of Republicans in the House of trying to “extort” him by refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless the president’s health care plan is repealed.
“You have never in the history of the United States seen the threat of not raising the debt ceiling to extort a president or a governing party,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s irresponsible.”
Mr. Obama called upon the business leaders to try to convince lawmakers to avoid the kind of “brinksmanship” that would lead to promises of “apocalypse” every few months. “What I will not do is to create a habit, a pattern whereby the full faith and credit of the united states ends up being a bargaining chip to make policy,” he said. “I’m tired of it,” he added. “And I suspect you are too.”
For the president to publicly reference Republican “extortion” tactics struck some as excessive. That’s a shame; Obama’s right.
Let’s step back for a moment. A traditional, transactional method of governing was in place in Washington for generations, and it worked fairly well. In some cases, policymakers would rely on intra-policy cooperation (“I’ll go along with some of the provisions you want if you go along with some of the provisions I want”), and in other cases it’s been inter-policy cooperation (“I can help move that bill you like if you help me move this other bill that I like”).
The transactional model was never easy, of course, and parties that were supposed to disagree usually did, but governing happened. Bills passed. Policymaking and compromises existed. The nation did not simply bounce from one self-imposed, manufactured crisis to the next.
In the wake of the radicalization of Republican politics, the system broke down, largely because GOP officials came to believe they can no longer accept concessions on anything, and anyone who dares compromise with those they disagree with deserves to lose in a Republican primary.
What matters, of course, is what’s replaced transactional politics.
I tend to describe it as extortion politics, which we may be getting used to, but which has no modern precedent in the American system of government.
Consider an example from earlier this year. House Republicans approved a budget plan and challenged Senate Democrats to do the same, assuming they’d fail. The GOP miscalculated and Senate Dems approved their own budget plan in the spring.
From there, lawmakers were supposed to enter bipartisan, bicameral negotiations, which is what always happens when the House and Senate approve competing budget blueprints. But a funny thing happened — Republicans refused to enter the budget talks they said they wanted.
It hasn’t generated much attention, but it’s important to understand why. GOP lawmakers couldn’t go to the negotiating table because that would mean … negotiating. Republicans weren’t prepared to compromise on anything, so why bother with budget talks? What GOP officials wanted instead was to wait until the fall when they might at least try to claim leverage in an extortion plot.
In other words, hostages have become a prerequisite to Republican governance.
We’ve actually reached the point at which the GOP seems genuinely and literally confused about the meaning of the word “compromise.” Consider this item from a week ago:
One group of conservatives on Thursday pressed what they called a compromise: a one-year stopgap spending bill that would raise the debt ceiling for a year, delay all aspects of the health care law for a year, and give back some of the Pentagon cuts as a sweetener. Backers insisted on Thursday that it was a package Mr. Obama should be able to accept.
Got that? In this approach, Republicans would get the health care delay they want and the spending levels they want. What would Democrats get? Nothing except the relief that comes with knowing that the hostage the GOP was threatening would live to see another day.
This, in the delusional minds of congressional Republicans, is not only a “compromise,” it’s the kind of deal the White House might actually go for.
This has become the norm in every major legislative fight since January 2011. Faced with a challenge, Republicans won’t compromise or consider possible concessions; they’ll instead reach for the nearest hostage and start making threats. The nation shifts from one crisis to the next, not because we have to, but because Republicans have made it their m.o. In the last Congress, Republicans created a debt-ceiling crisis and three separate shutdown threats. In this Congress, we’re only nine months in and we’re already facing a shutdown crisis this month and a new debt-ceiling crisis next month.
In each instance, the GOP approach is the same: so long as our demands are met, and we don’t have to compromise, we won’t have to hurt anyone on purpose.
So before the Beltway gets too bent out of shape over Obama using the word “extort” in a speech, I have a question: can anyone think of a more apt description of what’s tragically become the new status quo in Washington?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 19, 2013
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