“This Madness Will Never End”: So Long As There’s A Democrat In The White House, The Fever Will Never Break
I wish I could write something optimistic as we begin the government shutdown. I wish I could, but I can’t. In fact, this morning I can’t help but feel something close to despair. It isn’t that this shutdown won’t be resolved, because it will. It will be resolved in the only way it can: when John Boehner allows a vote on a “clean CR,” a continuing resolution that funds the government without attacking the Affordable Care Act. It could happen in a week or two, whenever the political cost of the shutdown becomes high enough for Boehner to finally find the courage to say no to the Tea Partiers in his caucus. That CR will pass with mostly Democratic votes, and maybe the result will be a revolt against Boehner that leads to him losing the speakership (or maybe not; as some have argued, Boehner’s job could be safe simply because no one else could possibly want it).
But the reason for my despair isn’t about this week or this month. It’s the fact that this period in our political history—the period of lurching from absurd crisis to absurd crisis, with no possibility of passing a budget let alone legislation to address any serious problems we face, with a cowardly Republican leadership held hostage by a group of insane political terrorists who think it’s a tragedy if a poor person gets health insurance and it’s a great day when you kick a kid off food stamps, a period where this collection of extremists and fools, these people who think the likes of Michele Bachmann and Steve King are noble and wise leaders—this awful, horrific period in our history, when these are the people who control the country’s fate, looks like it will never end.
OK, so “never” is an exaggeration. But does anyone see how it could end as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, whether it’s Barack Obama or anyone else? Once the shutdown is over, we’re going to do it all over again with the debt ceiling in less than three weeks. And the CRs the House and Senate are passing back and forth now only fund the government for six weeks, meaning we could have a shutdown, followed by a debt ceiling crisis, followed by another shutdown. Whenever the next CR expires, we’ll do it again, and we’ll do it again the next time the debt ceiling has to be raised.
According to conservative reporter Byron York, this whole thing is being driven by 30 of the most radical GOP House members. And nothing will convince them that what they’re doing is crazy and wrong. Nothing. They’re zealots. They don’t care if the country suffers and they don’t care if their party suffers. They have an ideology that tells them that the only important things are fighting government and fighting Barack Obama, by any means necessary. If you can’t win at the ballot box, and you can’t win in the ordinary legislative process, and you can’t win at the Supreme Court, then it’ll have to be blackmail. And if that doesn’t work, then they’ll find some other method.
In June of last year, Obama expressed the belief that if he was re-elected, “the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Once booting him from office was no longer a possibility, they’d settle down and oppose him in the ordinary way opposition parties oppose presidents, not in this insane berserker rage they’ve been gripped by since January of 2009. I don’t know if he actually believed that, or if he was just trying to be optimistic. But it was never going to happen. That’s not only because of their white-hot hatred of him, but also because, generally speaking, the crazier a Republican member of Congress is, the less they have to worry about political consequences from their craziness. The most radical members come from the most conservative districts, where the only question determining who gets elected is which candidate in a Republican primary is the most extreme, hates Barack Obama the most, and can talk with the most contempt about liberals and government and all the “thems” his constituents despise so much.
And even if the shutdown turns out to be a disaster for the GOP as a whole, those Tea Party members are going to be 100 percent sure that the only problem was that Republicans didn’t fight hard enough. They’ll come out of it more convinced than ever that government is evil and Democrats are the enemies of all that is right and good, and the good Lord himself put them in Congress to fight liberals and obstruct Obama and undermine government and scratch and bite and kick and scream. And that’s what they’re going to continue to do as long as they are privileged to serve.
Their fever will never break. Never. The only thing that will give it a temporary respite is if a Republican becomes president, at which time they’ll decide that crises aren’t such a great tool after all. Their nihilistic rage will be put away, behind a glass door with the words “Break in case of Democratic president” written on it. And then it will start all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2013
“The Law Of The Land”: The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Stopped Being A “Bill” Several Years Ago
When congressional Republicans condemn the Affordable Care Act, there’s one problematic word in particular they tend to use an awful lot. The Hill did a nice job picking up on the trend.
In floor speeches, TV interviews and town halls, Republicans often refer to President Obama’s signature healthcare law either as “ObamaCare” or a healthcare “bill” — subtly implying that it’s not truly permanent.
“The bill is named after the president. Why wouldn’t the president want to be under the bill?” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) asked in a floor speech earlier this month, making the case that the president should get his healthcare through ObamaCare.
It’s clear that Enzi, who famously admitted that he engaged in health care reform negotiations in bad faith, is confused. The name of the reform law is technically the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” not “Obamacare,” so it’s not “named after the president.”
But that’s not the important thing. Rather, note that Enzi refers to the law as a “bill.” So does Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who said last week that “this bill,” referring to the health care law, is going to hurt people. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said there are “a host of problems [with] this bill.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said “this bill” isn’t working. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) chastised Democrats for supporting “this dog of a bill.”
Keep in mind, all of these quotes come from this month — September 2013 — not from the debate when the law was actually still a bill.
The Hill‘s report added that the Kaiser Family Foundation recently found that roughly 40% of Americans don’t know that the Affordable Care Act is, to use John Boehner’s phrase, the law of the land. One possible explanation for such widespread ignorance is the way in which congressional Republicans mislead the public in such a brazen way.
But stepping past the rhetoric, there’s also a substantive significance to this.
If you listened to the House floor debate on Saturday night or watched the Sunday shows, you know the GOP desperately hopes to characterize the current crisis as a “both sides” problem so it won’t receive the bulk of the blame. To hear Republicans tell it, they demand that “Obamacare” be gutted, while Democrats demand that “Obamacare” be implemented. “See?” conservatives say, “both sides are making demands.”
The problem, of course, is that this is almost unimaginably dumb. What Democrats are arguing is that the law is already the law; it’s met constitutional muster according to the U.S. Supreme Court; and it’s up to the president to faithfully execute current laws. If Republicans want to change the law, they can introduce legislation and give it their best shot.
Both sides, in other words, aren’t making comparable “demands” — one side expects existing law to be implemented, the other expects to use extortion to undermine the law they claim to dislike.
It’s very likely why so many Republican U.S. senators, who presumably have some understanding of the differences between a “bill” and a “law,” keep deliberately getting this wrong. If the Affordable Care Act is just a “bill,” then it’s not fully legitimate and Republicans are justified in trying to sabotage it outside the American legislative process.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 30, 2013
“Our Nation’s Biggest Shame”: How Much Money Would It Take To Eliminate Poverty In America?
Last week, the Census Bureau put out its annual income and poverty figures for 2012. The big news on the poverty front is that the percentage of Americans living in poverty is unchanged at 15 percent, which amounts to 46.5 million Americans. More than one in five kids under the age of 18 are in poverty, and nearly one in four kids under the age of six are impoverished as well. These are numbers we’ve all become accustomed to, but they can still shock the conscience if you make an effort to let them soak in again.
The sheer scale of poverty in the U.S. is so massive that it can seem as if eliminating or dramatically reducing it would be nearly impossible. After all, 46 million people is a lot of people. But in reality, if we stick to the official poverty line, the amount of money standing in the way of poverty eradication is much lower than people realize.
In its annual poverty report, the Census Bureau includes a table that few take note of which actually details by how much families are below the poverty line. A little multiplication and addition later, and the magic number pops out. In 2012, the number was $175.3 billion. That is how many dollars it would take to bring every person in the United States up to the poverty line. In 2012, that number was just 1.08 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), which is to say the overall size of the economy.
To be sure, you probably don’t want to run a program that hunts out every family below the poverty line and brings them right up to it. Such a program would effectively involve imposing a 100 percent marginal tax rate for all income made below the poverty line. But, things like strategically expanding the Child Tax Credit, the Earned Income Tax Credit, SNAP, and related programs could make enormous strides toward poverty reduction. Implementing a mild basic income and a negative income tax would also help a great deal. The policy solutions for dramatically cutting poverty exist, they are used by countries elsewhere, and they could be used here, if we chose to do so.
It might be helpful to put the $175.3 billion magic number in perspective. In 2012, this number was just one-fourth of the $700 billion the federal government spent on the military. When you start hunting through the submerged spending we do through the tax code, it takes you no time to find enough tax expenditures geared toward the affluent to get to that number as well. The utterly ridiculous tax expenditures directed toward the disproportionately affluent class of people called homeowners—mortgage interest deduction, property tax deduction, exclusion of capital gains on residences—by themselves sum to $115.3 billion in 2012. Throw in the $117.3 billion in tax expenditures used to subsidize employer-based health care (also a disproportionate sop to the rich), and you’ve already eclipsed the magic number.
Eradicating or dramatically cutting poverty is not the deeply complicated intractable problem people make it out to be. The dollars we are talking about are minuscule up against the size of our economy. We have poverty because we choose to have it. We choose to design our distributive institutions in ways that generate poverty when we could design them in ways that don’t. Its continued existence is totally indefensible and our nation’s biggest shame.
By: Matt Bruenig, The American Prospect, September 24, 2013
“Being Crazy Isn’t Enough”: The Greedy Once-Ler Gets All The Way To The End Of “Green Eggs And Ham”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who’s still talking to hear himself talk, raised a few eyebrows last night by reading, among other things, from Dr. Seuss. Watch on YouTube
For those who can’t watch clips online, the far-right Texan read “Green Eggs and Ham” with great earnestness from the Senate floor. (He can’t hold a candle to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s version, but let’s put that aside for now.) Cruz continued to reference the book after having put it down, insisting it “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate.”
He added, “The difference with green eggs and ham — when Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare, either. They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, or with a mouse.”
There is, however, a small problem with Cruz’s choice of literary references: he apparently didn’t understand the story.
In “Green Eggs and Ham,” our protagonist thinks he dislikes food he hasn’t tried. By the end, the character discovers green eggs and ham really aren’t so bad after all. Indeed, he comes to regret criticizing something he didn’t fully understand, and ends up celebrating the very thing he’d complained about so bitterly.
Cruz thinks this “has some applicability, as curious as it may sound, to the Obamacare debate”? What a coincidence; I think it has some applicability, too.
Indeed, the larger point helps underscore why the right is fighting so furiously to defund, delay, sabotage, impair, malign, and otherwise undermine the federal health care law right now, before it’s too late. Unhinged Republicans aren’t worried Obamacare will fail; they’re worried it will work and Americans will discover they quite like green eggs and ham after all.
Eugene Robinson had a good piece on this yesterday, published well ahead of the theatrics on the Senate floor.
Republicans scream that Obamacare is sure to fail. But what they really fear is that it will succeed.
That’s the reason for all the desperation. Republicans are afraid that Obamacare will not prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare — that Americans, in fact, will find they actually like it.
Similarly, Josh Marshall referenced one of my favorite health care stories yesterday. Bill Kristol wrote a strategy memo as the Clinton-era health care fight was getting underway, urging Republicans to destroy reform at all costs. The conservative pundit said at the time that if Clinton succeeded, Democrats would be seen as the “protector of middle-class interests,” and it would be politically impossible to take away the health care benefits once they were in place.
What the GOP had to do, Kristol said, was put the party’s interests over the country’s needs, stopping the reform effort before Americans discovered they like it. Republicans, of course, agreed.
Nearly two decades later, the script hasn’t changed much, except now the green eggs and ham are on the plate and the public is poised to discover how much they like the very thing they’ve been told to complain about.
Why Ted Cruz thinks this story is helpful to his cause is a bit of a mystery, but maybe later today, one of his friends from Harvard or Princeton can have a chat with him about literary interpretation and the potency of metaphors.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 25, 2013
“More Than A Value For Birth”: A Right-Wing Agenda Can Be Defeated
Pope Francis is stirring up all Catholics and the ways that we are involved in the world — including in politics. For too long the leaders of our church were either firmly committed to a narrow view of the Gospel or were timid about speaking of the full message of Jesus. Politicians have been for not toeing the line on the narrow message.
Now we have a breath of fresh air. This fresh air is disturbing to those who have engineered the narrow message. I can only imagine that those who have been focused on abortion and same sex marriage are angry at the sea change. Their crafty plans of using faith for a right-wing political agenda are crashing down around their ears. Pope Francis is saying that the Gospel cannot be used to benefit one political party.
In 2012 U.S. Catholic sisters and my organization, Network, were criticized by the Vatican for not holding their narrow focus. Now we see that our pope knows that no one political party has control of the Gospel message.
The faith value of life is more than a value for birth. Gospel values that mandate a care for the poor are at the heart of our faith and Pope Francis is speaking of that message. I don’t believe that our pope (or God) would be pleased with the Republican effort to eliminate food stamps for hungry people, end housing benefits for struggling workers, deny healthcare for those with no access and to refuse to consider comprehensive immigration reform.
Pope Francis spoke of his own change and conversion to a more compassionate leadership. He is speaking to the heart of those who have been in control with fear and judgment. The test is to see if they can embrace the more challenging role of struggling together to create the common good.
Catholic Democrats also have a test in front of them. They have struggled for years to be faithful in the face of a narrow right-wing agenda. Now the challenge will be for them not to retaliate. The conversion for the Democrats will be to continue to work for the full message of the Gospel and not be arrogant or judgmental themselves.
On the bus we learned that we need the 100 percent to embody our faith. We need the 100 percent to make the Gospel live. And in our pluralistic country I pray that this renewed message will help the 100 percent live our communal and Constitutional mandate to “form a more perfect union.”
By: Sister Simone Campbell, Executive Director of Network, Opinion Pages, The New York Times, September 22, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 