“The Tea Party Is Pissed And That’s A Good Sign”: Here’s The Real Story, The GOP Has Surrendered On Repealing Obamacare
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) both referred to the budget deal they announced on Tuesday evening as “historic.” They were correct — but not because of any of the cuts or fees in the modest deficit-reduction plan.
What’s historic about Ryan and Murray’s bipartisan deal, which eases the automatic sequester cuts, is that it quietly funds Obamacare for the next two years, rejecting the Tea Party argument to defund/repeal the president’s signature legislative accomplishment until at least 2017.
Yes, Republicans are giving in and accepting the Affordable Care Act, right as the law and the president are near all-time popularity lows.
Two months of severe problems with the website compounded confusion and frustration with an already complex law. Most of the problems have been fixed, but the public perception of the law will take months to heal, if it ever does. But Republicans have figured out, after their failed attempt to dive-bomb the law with a shutdown in October, that they have no hope of getting rid of it — at least until President Obama is out of office.
The Ryan-Murray agreement isn’t the only sign that many Republicans are nearing the “acceptance” phase of mourning the existence of Obamacare.
Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who repeatedly said that the president’s health reform was an abomination that compelled him to run for office, now says he can accept the law’s state insurance exchange system.
Five of the 25 Republican-led states that have rejected Medicaid expansion are edging toward accepting federal money to help insure millions who earn just a bit too much to qualify for Medicaid. Republican governors in the key swing states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania are already working toward implementing expansion.
Another sign that most Republicans understand that they’re going to have to live with Obamacare is that the Tea Party is pissed.
Red State‘s Erick Erickson — one of the leading voices for primarying just about every incumbent Republican senator — put it this way:
Last month Republicans bailed on the Obamacare fight and declared sequestration their line in the sand. Now they are saying they’ll bail on sequestration, but they’ll hold the line on unemployment benefits.
Why should we believe them anymore? Is it any wonder that poll after poll shows Republican voters hate their Republican congressmen and senators?
Bend over America, here it comes again.
Republicans had two months of unity as they celebrated the miserable rollout of HealthCare.gov. Now the GOP is back to where it was in October, stuck with a base that’s pretty much furious at its leadership for surrendering — again.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 11, 2013
“The Coverage Could Get A Lot Worse”: Republicans Will Face Intense Pressure Over Unemployment Benefits
On the morning after lawmakers reached a budget deal that doesn’t include an extension in unemployment benefits, chief GOP budget architect Paul Ryan awoke to a raft of home-state headlines that were all about the nearly 100,000 Wisconsinites who stand to get cut off.
“99,000 unemployed Wisconsinites face cuts,” blared one front page. “Jobless benefits at risk for 99K in Wisconsin,” blared another. “99,000 state residents to lose benefits,” blared a third. You can see those and a lot more at this compilation of front pages put together by Dems on the Ways and Means Committee.
The imminent expiration of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program for 1.3 million Americans is mostly being treated as a fait accompli in Washington. But it looks to be turning into a very resonant issue in local media in states where many thousands of residents will be directly impacted by it. (Dems have created an interactive map showing how many people in each state stand to lose benefits.)
This fact is central to the emerging Dem strategy to increase pressure on Republicans to agree to an extension. House Dems are working to drum up as much local press coverage of the issue as possible, because local coverage can focus directly on how many constituents in a lawmaker’s state stand to be hurt – making it hit home in a way Beltway media coverage can’t.
For instance, articles like this one in the Las Vegas Review-Journal dramatize the plight of a family set to lose benefits, after the mother was laid off last year from her job as a store manager. Headline: “With benefits on block, jobless Nevadans face uncertainty.” Dems hope such coverage pressures Republicans they deem getable, such as Nevada Senator Dean Heller and Rep. Joe Heck.
This strategy includes placing Op ed pieces by Democrats in papers that serve the districts of top Republicans, such as this one by Rep. Sander Levin in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, the largest paper in John Boehner’s home state. The game plan is granular: One Democrat points out to me that stats are available on how many would lose benefits on the county level, and that Dems are trying to push these numbers into the coverage, because it is tangible for people in local communities. These numbers are already being reflected in local stories like this one.
Now, it’s fair to question whether Democrats did enough to get a UI extension in the budget deal. Perhaps they could have drawn a harder line on the issue and used their leverage (Republicans will need Dems to pass the deal out of the House) more effectively.
But beyond those legitimate points, it needs to be understood that Dems have not given up on getting Republicans to agree to the UI extension. This could either be accomplished through a stand alone bill or an add on during the budget process, and Democrats continue to press Republicans behind the scenes.
Will any of this matter to Republicans? It’s hard to say, since so many are cosseted away in such safe districts that tough headlines may not matter to them. But the public statements from GOP leaders on the extension have seemed tepid, suggesting their opposition isn’t really visceral. It seems like they’d love for this issue to go away. Boehner has said he’s willing to look at an extension if the White House offers a “plan,” which seems like he’s open to some kind of trade. Of course, conservatives who are already scorching GOP leaders over the deal will only get more outraged if they agree to a UI extension, making it that much harder.
Still, the coverage could get a lot worse, once the deadline looms and human interest stories multiply about folks facing the loss of benefits during the holiday season, at a time when reporters have little else to write about. I wouldn’t give up on Republicans agreeing to the extension just yet.
By: Greg Sargent, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, December 11, 2013
“Women Are From Earth, Republicans Are From Mars”: Demonstrating Once Again How Not To Message To Women
We’re well into the 21st century, and both the leaders and candidates in the Republican Party are well into their respective adulthoods. How is it that they are still reaching for some Dobie Gillis-style handbook on How to Talk to Girls?
The GOP did not do well with female voters in 2012, and lost a theirs-for-the-taking Senate race in Missouri because of some truly remarkably stupid comments the party’s Senate candidate made about “legitimate rape.” Since then, we have had a sitting Republican U.S. senator talk about the “hormones” that lead men in the military to sexually assault their female comrades, and we have seen the party’s last presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, discuss how he’s learned that when one employs women, one must be flexible to make sure they can be home at 5 to cook dinner for their families. Perhaps he found those job candidates in one of his binders full of women. And maybe he should ask Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a member of the House Republican leadership who just gave birth to her third child while serving as a congresswoman.
There’s no better example of how women can be parents, spouses and lawmakers, but others in the GOP are still not getting it, and it’s baffling why. Speaker John Boehner recognizes the problem, and spoke to Politico for a story about how the GOP was in training to learn how to win over females’ votes. The party, Boehner said, is:
trying to get them to be a little more sensitive. You know, you look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democratic caucus than there are in the Republican conference. And some of our members just aren’t as sensitive as they ought to be.
You think?
The problem here is that the mostly-male members of the GOP establishment sit around and try to deal with women as though females are some kind of bizarre and baffling other species, as though they couldn’t possibly care about the same things men do or have informed opinions about them. Instead we continue to see evidence that GOP candidates are unable to stop patronizing women and treating them as though females have some extra, irrational gene that must be handled. Iowa Senate candidate Mark Jacobs, asked on a radio show how he would reach out to female voters in a way that differs from talking to male voters, said:
I think you have to connect with women on an emotional level. And with a wife of 25 years and an 18-year-old daughter, I’ve had a lot of coaching on that.
Jacobs makes himself sound like the hapless male victim of a home full of surging estrogen. And worse, he implicitly buys into the fallacy that kept women out of positions of power for years – the idea that men think but women feel, ergo we need to put the thinkers in charge of the governments and economies of the world. They’ll need to think a little harder if they want to get electoral support from women, who make up the strong majority of voters. Because if Republican men lose women voters again, how will that make them feel?
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 10, 2013
“Today’s GOP”: Clueless, Heartless, And Gutless
The most charitable thing you can say about the Republican Party is that it has an image problem. Even if you support its policies, no clear-eyed observer can deny that on any given day the GOP looks clueless, heartless, and gutless.
Just take today. For all of President Obama’s problems and their correlation to the future of the Democratic Party (see: lack of credibility and competence), it takes just four stories to see how much worse things are for the GOP.
“Invisible Child: Dasani’s Homeless Life“ is a wrenching New York Times portrait of a girl stuck in poverty in the shadow of Manhattan’s opulence. More than that, it’s the story of our times.
In the short span of Dasani’s life, her city has been reborn. The skyline soars with luxury towers, beacons of a new gilded age. More than 200 miles of fresh bike lanes connect commuters to high-tech jobs, passing through upgraded parks and avant-garde projects like the High Line and Jane’s Carousel. Posh retail has spread from its Manhattan roots to the city’s other boroughs. These are the crown jewels of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s long reign, which began just seven months after Dasani was born.
In the shadows of this renewal, it is Dasani’s population who have been left behind. The ranks of the poor have risen, with almost half of New Yorkers living near or below the poverty line. Their traditional anchors—affordable housing and jobs that pay a living wage—have weakened as the city reorders itself around the whims of the wealthy.
Long before Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio rose to power by denouncing the city’s inequality, children like Dasani were being pushed further into the margins, and not just in New York. Cities across the nation have become flash points of polarization, as one population has bounced back from the recession while another continues to struggle. One in five American children is now living in poverty, giving the United States the highest child poverty rate of any developed nation except for Romania.
Written by Andrea Elliott and illustrated by photographer Ruth Fremson, Dasani’s story is an indictment of a political system that is aiding and abetting America’s division by class, where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class gets squeezed into oblivion. Both major parties are complicit, but Republicans, more than Democrats, seem especially eager to widen and exploit American inequality. Take the next story, for example.
“Rand Paul: Unemployment Benefits Extension Would Be a ‘Disservice’ to Workers.” Unless Congress extends the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, 1.3 million long-term jobless Americans will lose their benefits during the holidays. That’s good news, says the senator from Kentucky who hopes to be the 2016 GOP presidential nominee.
“When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you’re causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy,” Paul argued on Fox News Sunday, citing an unnamed study. “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers,”
He’s wrong, and he’s making the GOP look clueless. Studies typically cited by the GOP are old and irrelevant to the current economy, which is in the midst of a once-a-century economic shift that makes it extraordinarily difficult for some workers to adjust.
Obama and fellow Democrats support the extension but seem unwilling to make it a precondition for a short-term budget deal. That means Republicans will probably get their way, and the have-nots will have less. Making matters worse …
“Making the Poor Poorer” is an op-ed in The Washington Post by Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, and economist Melissa Kearney. They argue that GOP-led plans to reduce food stamps would be “economically and morally unsound.” Despite shrinking social mobility and durable unemployment, Congress is poised to reduce a benefit that currently amounts to just $1.40 per person per meal. It looks heartless.
“It is hard to reconcile traditional American values of hard work and generosity with the levels of poverty and fear of hunger in our country, especially because large shares of those suffering this plight work,” they wrote. “Nearly 11 million working Americans had annual income below the poverty line last year.”
Republicans argue that the food-stamp program is growing, which they blame on Democrats rather than a global economic revolution and the lingering effects of a recession rooted in Clinton- and Bush-era policies. It most cases, poverty isn’t the fault of the poor. Trust us, the GOP says. And yet …
“The Bogus Claim That Obama Is ‘Closing’ the Vatican Embassy” is a Washington Post story that has nothing to do with the economy but everything to do with trust. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and the Republican senatorial campaign committee falsely accused the White House of closing the embassy. The committee went so far as to call the White House anti-religion, a hateful slur. This is what political parties do: Find and create issues that divide Americans, exploit our ignorance and fear, and repeat.
The Republican Party, in particular, doesn’t have the courage to defy extreme elements of its coalition, such as those who pushed the Vatican-closing story. Bush knew or should have known that the story was wrong. The same goes for the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. Indeed, sources tell me that there was some internal debate about whether to launch the attack. Level heads didn’t prevail. Gutless won.
By: Ron Fournier, The National Journal, December 9, 2013
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