The GOP’s Problem: There’s No Bridging The Gap Between Tea Party And Reality
Why do the Tea Party and the right adamantly oppose Mitch McConnell’s proposal to transfer control of the debt ceiling to the president as a way out of an impasse that many think is badly damaging the GOP?
The answer, paradoxically, lies in the beauty of the McConnell plan: It was crafted to allow Republicans to repeatedly vote against raising the debt ceiling without actually stopping it from being raised.
McConnell and other GOP leaders know full well the debt ceiling must be hiked. But they also know full well that this is entirely unacceptable to large swaths of the base who now see this as their number one ideological cause celebre, on a par with the now-forgotten drive to repeal Obamacare. So his plan tries to solve both these problems at once. It provides for Republicans to vote to “disapprove” of each debt ceiling hike the President pursues. But since they need a veto proof majority to block each debt limit hike, those “disapproval” votes won’t actually stop the hikes from happening — keeping the business community happy and averting economic and political disaster.
The problem for GOP leaders, however, is that the Tea Party and the right are dead serious about this stopping-the-debt-ceiling-hike thing — reality and the consequences be damned. Solid majorities of Republican voters and Tea Partyers don’t even think failure to raise it will be a problem. Symbolic votes to “disapprove” of debt ceiling hikes aren’t enough. Anything short of stopping the debt ceiling from going up is unacceptable. The McConnell plan would surrender the GOP’s ability to do this. Therefore it’s a total cave-in.
Business leaders and sane GOP leaders want the debt ceiling raised and understand that failure will be catastrophic. The Tea Party wants a hike blocked at all costs. The problem in a nutshell is that there’s no putting that ideological genie back in the bottle. One party is going to have to walk out of this situation not getting what it wants. Hint: That party’s name begins with the letter “T.”
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, July 19, 2011
Bandits, Blowhards And Showhorses: The GOP’s Road Not Taken
Over the past months, Republicans enjoyed enormous advantages. Opinion polls showed that voters are eager to reduce the federal debt, and they want to do it mostly but not entirely through spending cuts.
There was a Democratic president eager to move to the center. He floated certain ideas that would be normally unheard of from a Democrat. According to widespread reports, White House officials talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age, cutting Social Security by changing the inflation index, freezing domestic discretionary spending and offering to pre-empt the end of the Bush tax cuts in exchange for a broad tax-reform process.
The Democratic offers were slippery, and President Barack Obama didn’t put them in writing. But John Boehner, the House speaker, thought they were serious. The liberal activists thought they were alarmingly serious. I can tell you from my reporting that White House officials took them seriously.
The combined effect would have been to reduce the size of government by $3 trillion over a decade. That’s a number roughly three times larger than the cost of the Obama health care law. It also would have brutally fractured the Democratic Party.
But the Republican Party decided not to pursue this deal or even seriously consider it. Instead, what happened was this: Conservatives told themselves how steadfast they were being for a few weeks. Then morale crumbled.
This week, Republicans probably will pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment that has zero chance of becoming law. Then they may end up clinging to a no mas Senate compromise. This proposal would pocket cuts that have already been agreed on, and it would eliminate leverage for future cuts and make them less likely.
It could be that this has been a glorious moment in Republican history. It could be that having convinced independents that they are a prudent party, Republicans will sweep the next election. Controlling the White House and Congress, perhaps they will have the guts to cut Medicare unilaterally, reform the welfare state and herald in an era of conservative greatness.
But it’s much more likely that Republicans will come to regret this missed opportunity. So let us pause to identify the people who decided not to seize the chance to usher in the largest cut in the size of government in U.S. history. They fall into a few categories:
The Beltway Bandits
American conservatism now has a rich network of Washington interest groups adept at arousing elderly donors and attracting rich lobbying contracts. For example, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform has been instrumental in every recent GOP setback. He was a Newt Gingrich strategist in the 1990s, a major Jack Abramoff companion in the 2000s and he enforced the no-compromise orthodoxy that binds the party today.
Norquist is the Zelig of Republican catastrophe. His method is always the same. He enforces rigid ultimatums that make governance, or even thinking, impossible.
The Big Government Blowhards
The talk-radio jocks are not in the business of promoting conservative governance. They are in the business of building an audience by stroking the pleasure centers of their listeners.
They mostly give pseudo Crispin’s Day speeches to battalions of the like-minded from the safety of the conservative ghetto. To keep audience share, they need to portray politics as a cataclysmic, Manichaean struggle. A series of compromises that steadily advance conservative aims would muddy their story lines and be death to their ratings.
The Show Horses
Republicans now have a group of political celebrities who are marvelously uninterested in actually producing results. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann produce tweets, not laws. They have created a climate in which purity is prized over practicality.
The Permanent Campaigners
For many legislators, the purpose of being in Congress is not to pass laws. It’s to create clear contrasts you can take into the next election campaign. It’s not to take responsibility for the state of the country and make it better. It’s to pass responsibility onto the other party and force them to take as many difficult votes as possible.
All of these groups share the same mentality. They do not see politics as the art of the possible. They do not believe in seizing opportunities to make steady, messy progress toward conservative goals. They believe that politics is a cataclysmic struggle. They believe that if they can remain pure in their faith then someday their party will win a total and permanent victory over its foes. They believe they are Gods of the New Dawn.
Fortunately, there are still practical conservatives in the GOP, who believe in results, who believe in intelligent compromise. If people someday decide the events of the past weeks have been a debacle, then practical conservatives may regain control.
By: David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times, July 19, 2011
A Politician-Created Crisis: Why Did Congress Waste Six Months?
The House Republican strategy to link a normally routine increase in the nation’s debt limit with a crusade to slash spending has already had a high cost, threatening the nation’s credit rating and making the United States look dysfunctional and incompetent to the rest of the world.
But that’s not the most awful thing about it.
What’s even worse is that this entirely artificial, politician-created crisis has kept government from doing what taxpayers expect it to do: Solve the problems citizens care about.
The most obvious problem is unemployment. The best way, short term, to drive the deficit down is to spur growth and get Americans back to work. Has anyone noticed that Americans with jobs can provide for their families, put money into the economy — and, oh yes, pay taxes that increase revenue and thus cut the deficit?
There is no mystery about the steps government could take. Ramping up public works spending is a twofer: It creates jobs upfront and provides the nation’s businesses and workers the ways and means to boost their own productivity down the road.
Wise infrastructure spending can save energy. And when public works investments are part of metropolitan plans for smarter growth, they can also ease congestion and reduce commuter times, giving our citizens back valuable minutes or hours they waste in traffic. If you want a pro-family policy, this is it.
State and local budgets all across the country are a shambles. Teachers, police, firefighters, librarians and other public servants are being laid off. As the New York Times’ David Leonhardt pointed out recently, even as the private economy has been adding jobs, if too slowly, state and local governments have hemorrhaged about half a million jobs in two years.
President Obama knows this. “As we’ve seen that federal support for states diminish, you’ve seen the biggest job losses in the public sector,” he said in his July 11 news conference. “So my strong preference would be for us to figure out ways that we can continue to provide help across the board.”
So why not do it? “I’m operating within some political constraints here,” Obama explained, “because whatever I do has to go through the House of Representatives.”
Excuse me, Mr. President, but if you believe in this policy, why not propose it and fight for it? Leadership on jobs is your central job right now. Let the Republicans explain why they want more cops and teachers let go, or local taxes to rise.
We should also extend the payroll tax reduction instituted last year and unemployment insurance. Why so little discussion of how balky Republicans have been on this Obama tax cut proposal, or how resistant they have been to further help those out of work? They won’t raise taxes on the rich to balance the budget but are utterly bored by relief for the middle class or the jobless. Isn’t that instructive?
And while we have been parsing the Rube Goldberg complexities of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s procedural contortions to get us out of a battle we should never have gotten into, we haven’t been discussing how to reform the No Child Left Behind law.
It’s true that some good people in Congress are trying to figure out a way forward on education reform. That’s a far more important national conversation than whether Tea Party Republicans understand the elementary laws of economics. But you wouldn’t know it because those who care about the substance of governing never get into the media. You get a lot of attention — and are sometimes proclaimed a hero — if you say something really dumb about the debt ceiling.
Then there is the coming debate over a “balanced budget” amendment to the Constitution that would limit government spending to 18 percent of gross domestic product and require a two-thirds vote to raise taxes. It’s an outrageous way for members of Congress to vote to slash Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, aid to education and a slew of other things, to lock in low taxes on the rich — and never have to admit they’re doing it. It’s one of the most dishonest proposals ever to come before Congress, and I realize that’s saying something.
Every member of Congress who got us into this debt-ceiling fight should be docked six months’ pay. They wasted our time on political posturing instead of solving problems. Better yet, the voters might ponder firing them next year. This could do wonders for national productivity.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 17, 2011
A Conspicuous Pattern: The GOP Is Really Not Interested In Governing
At his press conference the other day, President Obama noted the recommendations of the bipartisan deficit-reduction commission (which, by the way, failed to reach an agreement). He mentioned in passing that his White House set up the structure for the commission: “As you will recall, this was originally bipartisan legislation that some of the Republican supporters of decided to vote against when I said I supported it — that seems to be a pattern that I’m still puzzled by.”
It is, to be sure, quite a pattern. For two-and-a-half years, Obama has run into congressional Republicans who not only refuse to take “yes” for an answer, but routinely oppose their own ideas when the president is willing to accept them.
This seems especially relevant in the context of the current debt-reduction talks. At a certain level, it’s almost comical — here we have a Democratic president agreeing with a conservative Republican House Speaker on a massive deal that would lower the debt by over $4 trillion over the next decade. It would tilt heavily in the GOP’s direction, and address the problem Republicans pretend to care about most. Obama is even willing to consider significant entitlement “reforms,” which should be music to the ears of the right.
And yet, in the latest example that “puzzles” the president, Republicans aren’t interested.
Now, part of this is obviously the result of Republicans adopting a faith-based approach to revenue, which happens to be wildly disconnected to reality. But that’s not the only angle that matters. Matt Yglesias had a good item the other day that raised a point that’s often lost in the shuffle.
[H]ere we get to the problem that’s recurred throughout Obama’s time in office. If members of Congress think like partisans who want to capture the White House, then the smart strategy for them is to refuse to do whatever it is the president wants. The content of the president’s desire is irrelevant. But the more ambitious his desire is, the more important it is to turn him down.
After all, if the President wants a big bipartisan deal on the deficit, then a big bipartisan deal on the deficit is “a win for President Obama,” which means a loss for the anti-Obama side. When Obama didn’t want to embrace Bowles-Simpson, then failure to embrace Bowles-Simpson was a valid critique of him. But had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson, then it would have been necessary for his opponents to reject it.
For weeks, many have marveled at the priorities of the Republican policy wish-list — given a choice between the larger debt-reduction plan in American history and preserving some tax breaks for the wealthy, GOP officials at nearly every level strongly prefer the latter. Indeed, for nearly all Republicans, it’s such a no-brainer, this question is almost silly.
But there’s a separate challenge — Republicans have a choice between advancing policies they ostensibly agree with and Obama scoring a legislative victory. And as it turns out, that’s a no-brainer, too, since GOP lawmakers don’t really care about governing so much as they care about denying the president political victories. It might make them appear ridiculous — why would anyone reject their own ideas? — but looking foolish isn’t a major concern for congressional Republicans.
Obviously, this makes compromise literally impossible, and all but guarantees the least productive legislative session in many years. But it also suggests the president needs to adapt to an awkward set of circumstances: given Republican beliefs, Obama must realize his support for a legislative idea necessarily means it’s less likely to happen.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, July 17, 2011
The Incredible Crazies: Finding Someone The House GOP Will Listen To
Negotiating with House Republicans isn’t just difficult because they refuse to compromise; it’s also because they don’t even appreciate the point of the exercise. Told, for example, that failure on the debt ceiling would lead to a disaster, the House GOP simply doesn’t believe the evidence.
It’s challenging enough trying to craft an agreement when the parties have the same goal. But what happens when the crew of the Titanic says, “The captain’s wrong; icebergs are no big deal”?
The trick is finding someone the crazies find credible. (thanks to T.K.)
Republican leaders in the House have begun to prepare their troops for politically painful votes to raise the nation’s debt limit, offering warnings and concessions to move the hard-line majority toward a compromise that would avert a federal default. […]
At a closed-door meeting Friday morning, GOP leaders turned to their most trusted budget expert, Rep. Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, to explain to rank-and-file members what many others have come to understand: A fiscal meltdown could occur if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling. […]
The warnings appeared to have softened the views of at least some House members who, until now, were inclined to dismiss statements by administration officials, business leaders and outside economists that the economic impact would be dire if the federal government were suddenly unable to pay its bills. [emphasis added]
Right-wing freshman Rep. Steve Womack (R-Ark.) said he found the presentation, particularly the parts about skyrocketing interest rates, “sobering.”
Oh, now it’s “sobering”? We’re 17 days before the drop-dead crisis deadline, and now it’s dawning on some House Republicans that they’re not only playing with matches, but may actually torch the entire economy?
At this point, of course, I’ll take progress wherever I can find it. If some of the House GOP’s madness is “softening,” maybe they’ll be slightly more inclined to be responsible.
But I can’t help but find it interesting the limited pool of individuals Republicans are willing to listen to. The Treasury tells the House GOP caucus members they have to raise the debt ceiling, and Republicans don’t care. The Federal Reserve tells them, and they still don’t care. House Speaker John Boehner tells them, and that doesn’t work, either. Business leaders, governors, and economists tell them, and Republicans ignore all of them.
But Paul Ryan warns of a meltdown and all of a sudden, the House GOP is willing to pay attention.
I guess we should be thankful the radical House Budget Committee chairman is only wrong 90% of the time, and not 100%.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, July 16, 2011
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 