Republicans Ignored Warnings On Paul Ryan Plan
It might be a political time bomb — that’s what GOP pollsters warned as House Republicans prepared for the April 15 vote on Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, with its plan to dramatically remake Medicare.
No matter how favorably pollsters with the Tarrance Group or other firms spun the bill in their pitch — casting it as the only path to saving the beloved health entitlement for seniors — the Ryan budget’s approval rating barely budged above the high 30s or its disapproval below 50 percent, according to a Republican operative familiar with the presentation.
The poll numbers on the plan were so toxic — nearly as bad as those of President Barack Obama’s health reform bill at the nadir of its unpopularity — that staffers with the National Republican Congressional Committee warned leadership, “You might not want to go there” in a series of tense pre-vote meetings.
But go there Republicans did, en masse and with rhetorical gusto — transforming the political landscape for 2012, giving Democrats a new shot at life and forcing the GOP to suddenly shift from offense to defense.
It’s been more than a month since Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his lieutenant, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va) boldly positioned their party as a beacon of fiscal responsibility — a move many have praised as principled, if risky. In the process, however, they raced through political red lights to pass Ryan’s controversial measure in a deceptively unified 235-193 vote, with only four GOP dissenters.
The story of how it passed so quickly — with a minimum of public hand-wringing and a frenzy of backroom machinations — is a tale of colliding principles and power politics set against the backdrop of a fickle and anxious electorate.
The outward unity projected by House Republicans masked weeks of fierce debate, even infighting, and doubt over a measure that stands virtually no chance of becoming law. In a series of heated closed-door exchanges, dissenters, led by Ryan’s main internal rival — House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) — argued for a less radical, more bipartisan approach, GOP staffers say.
At a fundraiser shortly after the vote, a frustrated Camp groused, “We shouldn’t have done it” and that he was “overridden,” according to a person in attendance.
A few days earlier, as most Republicans remained mute during a GOP conference meeting on the Ryan plan, Camp rose and drily asserted, “People in my district like Medicare,” one lawmaker, who is now having his own doubts about voting yes, told POLITICO.
At the same time, GOP pollsters, political consultants and House and NRCC staffers vividly reminded leadership that their members were being forced to walk the plank for a piece of quixotic legislation. They described for leadership the horrors that might be visited on the party during the next campaign, comparing it time and again with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ram through a cap-and-trade bill despite the risks it posed to Democratic incumbents.
“The tea party itch has definitely not been scratched, so the voices who were saying, ‘Let’s do this in a way that’s politically survivable,’ got drowned out by a kind of panic,” a top GOP consultant involved in the debate said, on condition of anonymity.
“The feeling among leadership was, we have to be true to the people who put us here. We don’t know what to do, but it has to be bold.”
Another GOP insider involved to the process was more morbid: “Jumping off a bridge is bold, too.”
Time will tell whether the Medicare vote, the most politically significant legislative act of the 112th Congress thus far, will be viewed by 2012 voters as a courageous act of fiscal responsibility — or as an unforced error that puts dozens of marginal GOP seats and the party’s presidential candidates at serious risk. That question might be answered, in part, this week during a special election in New York’s 26th Congressional District, in which Republican Jane Corwin appears to be losing ground to Democrat Kathy Hochul.
The GOP message team is already scrambling to redefine the issue as a Republican attempt to “save” Medicare, not kill it.
But the party’s stars remain stubbornly misaligned. Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich candidly described the Medicare plan as “right-wing social engineering” — only to pull it back when Ryan and others griped. And Priorities USA Action, an independent group started by two West Wing veterans of the Obama administration, was out Friday with its first ad, a TV spot in South Carolina using Gingrich’s words to savage Mitt Romney for saying he was on the “same page” as Ryan.
“The impact of what the House Republicans have done is just enormous. It will be a litmus test in the GOP [presidential] primary,” said former White House deputy press secretary Bill Burton, one of the group’s founders.
“I couldn’t believe these idiots — I don’t know what else to call them — they’re idiots. … They actually made their members vote on it. It was completely stunning to me,” said former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat who worked hard to win over the western part of his state, which has among the highest concentration of elderly voters in the country.
It was also the site of some of the Democrats’ worst losses in 2010 — three swing House seats Democrats hope to recapture next year, largely on the strength of the Medicare argument.
“Look at [freshman House members in the Pittsburgh-Scranton area], they make them vote on this when they’re representing one of the oldest districts in the country?” Rendell asked.
“We have a message challenge, a big one, and that’s what the polling is showing,” conceded Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), a former Karl Rove protégé who enthusiastically backed the Ryan plan. “There’s no way you attack the deficit in my lifetime without dealing with the growth of Medicare. Do we get a political benefit from proposing a legitimate solution to a major policy problem? That’s an open question.”
The House Republican leadership had hinted at an emerging plan to tackle entitlement reform on Feb. 14 — the day Obama released his budget without reforms to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Cantor caught Hill reporters by surprise when he said, nonchalantly, that the Republican budget would be a “serious document that will reflect the type of path we feel we should be taking to address the fiscal situation, including addressing entitlement reforms.”
But there were also internal motivations in the decision to go big on Medicare, rooted in Boehner’s still tenuous grasp of the leadership reins, according to a dozen party operatives and Hill staffers interviewed by POLITICO.
Republican sources said Boehner, who has struggled to control his rambunctious new majority, needed to send a message to conservative upstarts that he was serious about bold fiscal reform — especially after some of the 63 freshmen rebelled against his 2011 budget deal that averted a government shutdown.
Then there’s the ever-present friction between Boehner and Cantor, who, along with Minority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has positioned himself as the next generation of GOP leadership and champion of the conservative freshman class.
Boehner’s camp said the speaker has always supported the Ryan approach — which would offer vouchers to future Medicare recipients currently younger than 55 in lieu of direct federal subsidies — and proved his support by voting for a similar measure in 2009.
“Boehner has said for years, including leading up to the 2010 election, that we would honestly deal with the big challenges facing our country,” said his spokesman, Michael Steel. “With 10,000 Baby Boomers retiring every day, it is clear to everyone that Medicare will not be there for future generations unless it is reformed. The status quo means bankruptcy and deep benefit cuts for seniors. It’s clear who the real grown-ups in the room are. We’ve told the truth and led, while the Democrats who run Washington have cravenly scrambled and lied for partisan gain.”
But that message hasn’t always been quite that clear. On several occasions, Boehner has seemed squishy on the Ryan budget. In talking to ABC News, Boehner said he was “not wedded” to the plan and that it was “worthy of consideration.”
Still, even if Boehner had opposed the plan — and his top aide, Barry Jackson, expressed concerns about the political fallout to other staffers — he probably couldn’t have stopped the Ryan Express anyway, so great was the push from freshmen and conservatives.
That’s not to say some of the speaker’s allies from the Midwest didn’t try. Camp and Ryan hashed out their differences in a series of private meetings that, on occasion, turned testy, according to several GOP aides. Camp argued that the Ryan plan, which he backed in principle — and eventually voted for — was a nonstarter that would only make it harder to reach a bipartisan framework on real entitlement reform.
A few weeks later, Camp told a health care conference that, from a pragmatic legislative perspective, he considered the Ryan budget history. “Frankly, I’m not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in. I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” he said.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) also made the case for a more moderate approach — but his principal concern was the Medicaid portion of Ryan’s plan, an approach he believed wouldn’t do enough to reduce burdens of indigent care on states.
But even as Democrats high-five over the possibility of Medicare-fueled political gains, Republicans are trying to muster a unified defense. Cantor, for his part, stumbled by suggesting to a Washington Post reporter that the Ryan Medicare provisions might be ditched during bipartisan debt negotiations being led by Vice President Joe Biden.
Cantor later clarified his remarks and claimed he still backed the Ryan principles, but no GOP staffer interviewed for this article believed the Medicare overhaul has any realistic chance of passage.
By: Glenn Thrush and Jake Sherman, Politico, May 23, 2011
Even Without Donald Trump, Plenty Of Clowns In The 2012 GOP Field
Farewell Donald Trump. For a brief moment last month, his birther buffoonery powered him to the front of the Republican pack. What a difference a birth certificate, a death announcement, and serious treatment by the press make. Now The Donald has announced that as with his previous presidential flirtations he is not making this race. Suddenly he looks like one of the celebrity has-beens who gets fired on his television show—or worse, like a celebrity has-been who doesn’t actually get onto the show at all.
Trump peaked in mid-April when a survey from the Democratic group Public Policy Polling set him as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination, with 26 percent of the vote. Then reality intruded. The press went from treating him like a celebrity making silly noises about running to treating him like a genuine would-be candidate, checking out who he contributed to and fact-checking his weird claims. Then Obama’s long form birth certificate put an end to birtherism while Osama bin Laden’s violent end reminded us that there are monsters in the real world and that the presidency is for serious people, not reality TV blowhards.
Public Policy Polling’s survey last week had Trump at 8 percent, in a fifth place tie with Ron Paul.
But with Trump-mentum ended, where can we hope to find entertainment value in the GOP primary field? The answer is, where can’t you? Donald Trump, entertainer-turned-pol was never going to be the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But neither will the other maybes and might-want-tos.
Take Newt Gingrich, whose announcement video last week said we should “look reality in the face, [and] tell the truth.” The truth and the reality are that Gingrich is an abrasive bomb thrower who resigned his speakership after his colleagues, and most voters, had enough of him, not the profile swing voters usually latch onto. His disapproval rating when he left office was 70 percent and was still as high as 38 percent as recently as last summer. And Gingrich, a self-styled historian, is fighting history. Only once has a former speaker of the house made the transition to the White House. That, NBC’s Chuck Todd notes, was James Polk in 1844. And not since James Garfield in 1880 has a politician achieved the White House having only served in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Newt is not alone with this problem, of course. Sitting Rep. Michele Bachmann seems happy to conflate her fanatical Tea Party following with actual broad-based support. But again her lack of experience in winning even a statewide office in Minnesota makes one wonder whether she’s drinking tea or Kool-Aid. For sheer “what is he thinking” chutzpah, however, it’s hard to beat Rick Santorum, whose last act in American politics ended when the voters of his home state of Pennsylvania fired him from the U.S. Senate. I can think of one modern politician who won the White House after losing his last previous election, and Richard Nixon is not a figure whose mantel many GOPers lay claim to these days.
Sure Newt, Bachmann, and Santorum are members of the GOP presidential B Team, but is the A Team much more impressive? You could have made an argument for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, before he announced this weekend that he would not run. The best that can be said of Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, is that he is inoffensive (read: bland), while the worst that can be said of 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is that she’s . . . Sarah Palin.
Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels commented last week that “the chances [of his beating Obama] would actually be quite good.” Apparently channeling some Trump-ian bombast, he added that, “The quality and the number of people who have said they’d like to be associated is really quite awesome to me.” Also awesome is the idea of someone running as a gimlet-eyed spending hawk whose previous job before governor was as George W. Bush’s budget chief. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, “By themselves, in fact, the Bush tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will account for almost half of the $20 trillion in debt that, under current policies, the nation will owe by 2019.”
Then there’s Mitt Romney, who Thursday made his highest profile attempt to explain why the healthcare law he passed while governor of Massachusetts, with an individual mandate, is good, but the national-level version of it, signed by Barack Obama, is bad. Romney’s dilemma: He can’t embrace the individual mandate because conservatives don’t like it any more at the state level than they do at the federal one. But he also can’t repudiate it lest he feed the political chameleon image that led the Democratic National Committee to tout “Mitt Romney, Version 5.0.”
The most damning illustration of the state of the GOP field may have come in a Politico report noting that virtually the only issue the contenders agree on is that “Sharia law is a continuing threat to the United States.”
One can’t help but look forward to the GOP nominee explaining that urgent threat in a general election debate while standing next to the president who got bin Laden.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 16, 2011
John Boehner’s Unreality Check On The Deficit
The news out of House Speaker John Boehner’s speech to the New York Economic Club was his demand for “cuts of trillions, not just billions” before the debt ceiling can be raised. Not just broad deficit-reduction targets, the Ohio Republican insisted, but “actual cuts and program reforms.”
That’s alarming enough. It is all but impossible to get this done in the available time. It certainly can’t be accomplished on Boehner’s unbending, no-new-taxes terms. And if the speaker truly believes that it would be “more irresponsible” to raise the debt ceiling without instituting deficit-reduction measures than not to raise it at all, we’re in a heap of trouble.
Even more alarming, because it has consequences beyond the debt-ceiling debate, is the incoherent, impervious-to-facts economic philosophy undergirding Boehner’s remarks.
Reporters naturally tend to ignore this boilerplate. Journalistically, that makes sense. Boehner’s economic comments were nothing particularly new. Indeed, they reflect what has become the mainstream thinking of the Republican Party. But that’s exactly the point. We become so inured to hearing this thinking that we neglect to point out how wrong it is.
My argument with Boehner is not that he believes in a more limited role for government than I do, not that he is more skeptical of government intervention and regulation, and not that he is more worried about the economically stifling implications of tax increases. Those are legitimate ideological differences. American politics is better off for them.
I’m talking about statements that are simply false.
“The recent stimulus spending binge hurt our economy and hampered private-sector job creation in America.”
Reasonable economists can disagree about the effectiveness of the stimulus spending and whether it was worth the drag of the additional debt, but no reasonable economist argues that it hurt the economy in the short term.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates the stimulus added, on average, about one percentage point annually to economic growth and reduced the unemployment rate by half a point between 2009 and 2011. And that’s the low-end estimate. The high-end numbers show the stimulus spending adding more than 2 percentage points annually to economic growth and cutting the unemployment rate by more than 1 percentage point.
The CBO is not alone. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi estimated in a July 2010 paper that without the stimulus spending, the unemployment rate would be 1.5 percentage points higher.
“The massive borrowing and spending by the Treasury Department crowded out private investment by American businesses of all sizes.”
Crowding out occurs when government spending drives up interest rates and makes borrowing unattractive to the private sector. As economist Joseph Minarik of the Committee for Economic Development explains, “When interest rates are on the floor, you can’t say federal government borrowing is crowding out business investment.” The lackluster investment climate reflects low consumer demand and underutilized capacity. You can’t be crowded out of a room you’re not trying to enter.
“The truth is we will never balance the budget and rid our children of debt unless we cut spending and have real economic growth. And we will never have real economic growth if we raise taxes on those in America who create jobs.”
Never? Under President Clinton, taxes were raised, primarily on the wealthy. During the eight years of his administration, the economy grew by an average of close to 4 percent.
“I ran for Congress in 1990, the year our nation’s leaders struck a so-called bargain that raised taxes as part of a bipartisan plan to balance the budget. The result of that so-called bargain was the recession of the early 1990s. It wasn’t until the economy picked back up toward the end of that decade that we achieved a balanced budget.”
Boehner blames the budget deal for tanking the economy, but the recession actually started in July 1990, two months before the agreement was reached. And that revived economy? It came despite the supposed dead weight of the Clinton tax increase.
“A tax hike would wreak havoc not only on our economy’s ability to create private-sector jobs, but also on our ability to tackle the national debt.”
During the early 1980s, taxes were cut and public debt ballooned, from 26 percent of GDP in 1980 to 40 percent by 1986. In 1993, taxes were increased (and spending cut); debt as a share of the economy fell, from 49 percent to 33 percent. In 2001 and 2003, taxes were cut. By the time President Obama took office, debt had climbed to 40 percent of GDP.
Listening to Boehner, I began to think the country suffers from two deficits: the gap between spending and revenue, and the one between reality and ideology. The first cannot be solved unless we find some way of at least narrowing the second.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 10, 2011
Liberal Media Bias?: The Sunday Shows Can’t Help Themselves
I promise not to do this every Sunday morning — it only seems like I will — but take a look at today’s guest lists for the five major Sunday shows.
* NBC’s “Meet the Press”: Disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.)
* CBS’s “Face the Nation”: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio)
* ABC’s “This Week”: South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R)
* Fox News’ “Fox News Sunday”: Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) [Update: Mike Huckabee (R) is a late edition to the line-up]
* CNN’s “State of the Union”: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), former Bush administration officials Dennis Blair and John Negroponte
For those keeping score at home, that’s two Republican presidential candidates, two House Republican leaders, two Senate Republican leaders, one Republican governor, one former Republican governor, two Bush administration officials, and one Democrat.
Liberal media, indeed.
In fairness, it’s worth noting that after these headliner guests, the shows will feature panel discussions, and some of the voices will be center-left. Paul Krugman will be on ABC, E.J. Dionne Jr will be on NBC, and Joe Lockhardt will be on CNN.
But (a) this doesn’t make up for the seven-to-one imbalance among officeholders and candidates; and (b) each of the center-left guests will be featured alongside a conservative, presumably to offer the kind of “balance” viewers won’t get with the headline guests.
Rachel Maddow noted the other day, “The Sunday shows are supposedly the apex of political debate — the pulsing, throbbing heart of what’s going on in American politics.”
Right, and week in and week out, this debate is dominated by voices from only one party.
A couple of years ago, Josh Marshall talked about how the Washington establishment is simply “wired” for Republicans. It’s GOP ideas that get attention; it’s GOP talking points that get internalized; it’s GOP voices that get aired.
The Sunday show guest lists help drive the point home nicely.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, May 15, 2011
Big Government Bailout Worked
Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and Web sites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.
The actual headlines make the point. “Demand for fuel-efficient cars helps GM to $3.2 billion profit,”declared The Post. “GM Reports Earnings Tripled in First Quarter, as Revenue Jumped 15%,” reported the New York Times.
Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure.
“Having the federal government involved in every aspect of the private sector is very dangerous,” Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) told Fox News in December 2008. “In the long term it could cause us to become a quasi-socialist country.” I don’t see any evidence that we have become a “quasi-socialist country,” just big profits.
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) called the bailout “the leading edge of the Obama administration’s war on capitalism,” while other members of Congress derided the president’s auto industry task force. “Of course we know that nobody on the task force has any experience in the auto business, and we heard at the hearing many of them don’t even own cars,” declared Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) after a hearing on the bailout in May 2009. “And they’re dictating the auto industry for our future? What’s wrong with this picture?”
What’s wrong, sorry to say, is that you won’t see a news conference where the bailout’s foes candidly acknowledge how mistaken they were.
The lack of accountability is stunning but not surprising. It reflects a deep bias in the way our political debate is carried out. The unexamined assumption of so much political reporting is that attacks on government’s capacity to do anything right make intuitive sense because “everybody knows” that government is basically inefficient and incompetent, especially when compared with the private sector.
Government failure gets a lot of coverage. That’s useful because government should be held accountable for its mistakes. What’s not okay is that we hear very little when government acts competently and even creatively. For if mistakes teach lessons, successes teach lessons, too.
In the case of the car industry, allowing the market to operate without any intervention by government would have wiped out a large part of the business that is based in Midwestern states. This irreversible decision would have damaged the economy, many communities and tens of thousands of families.
And contrary to critics’ predictions, government officials were quite capable of working with the market to restructure the industry. Government didn’t overturn capitalism. It tempered the market at a moment when its “natural” forces were pushing toward catastrophe. Government had the resources to buy the industry time.
What’s heartening is that average voters understand that broad assaults on government provide better guidance for the production of sound bites than for the creation of sensible public policy. That’s why House Republicans are backpedaling like crazy on their plans to privatize Medicare — even as they pretend not to.
Conservatives really believed that voters mistrusted government so much that they’d welcome a chance to scrap Big Government Medicare and have the opportunity to purchase policies in the wondrous health insurance marketplace. Don’t people assume that anything is better than government?
But there were deep potholes on the road to a market utopia. Put aside that the Republican budget wouldn’t provide enough money in the long term for the elderly to afford decent private coverage. The truth is that most consumers don’t have great confidence in the private insurance companies, with which they have rather a lot of experience.
When it comes to guaranteeing their access to health care in old age, most citizens trust government more than they trust the marketplace. This doesn’t mean they think Medicare is without flaws. What they do know is that Medicare does not cut people off in mid-illness and that its coverage is affordable because government subsidizes it.
It’s axiomatic that government isn’t perfect and that we’re better off having a large private sector. It ought to be axiomatic that the private market isn’t perfect, either, and that we need government to step in when the market fails. The success of the auto bailout and the failure of the Republicans’ anti-Medicare campaign both teach the same lesson: The era of anti-government extremism is ending.
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 8, 2011
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