“Drunk And Disorderly”: Republican Extremists Are Shredding Every Principle The GOP Claims To Uphold
By Washington standards, the current government shutdown is an everyday disaster – of a kind we are gradually learning to expect whenever the Republican Party controls Congress. The impending breach of the nation’s credit, however, when those same Republicans refuse to raise the debt limit to cover the funds they have spent, threatens a singular catastrophe: unpredictable, global, yet entirely avoidable.
The blame for this disgrace seems to be apportioned properly by most Americans, according to the latest polling data. But the future of the country and the world may well rest on whether voters understand the roots of this crisis – in a party controlled by an extremist faction that is violating every public value that party has supposedly espoused for 30 years and more.
Republicans used to tell us, often with a self-righteous air, that they were the true upholders of constitutional order, the rule of law, fiscal probity, personal responsibility, majority rights, and market principles. In their unquenchable zeal to oppose President Obama and all his works, they have discarded every one of those ideals.
They have closed down the government, with all the costs and sorrows that has imposed on the American people, in order to save us all from the Affordable Care Act – a law duly passed under the Constitution and declared to be so by a majority of the Supreme Court, including its very conservative chief justice. (Following that decision, the Republicans spent the next year campaigning to defeat the president on a platform of repealing health care reform – and were soundly defeated by him instead.)
To measure just how grossly the current attempts to obstruct Obamacare violate their supposed devotion to “law and order,” just imagine the Republican reaction if House Democrats had shut down government to force George W. Bush to repeal his beloved tax cuts.
Such hypocrisy is business as usual. But what about the substance of the Republican complaint against health care reform? To anyone aware of the law’s historical context, the fanatical Republican opposition simply seems bizarre. Here, after all, is a market-based system, originally conceived and promoted at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation as an alternative to Democratic plans for universal coverage. Its fundamental premises are individual responsibility and the power of competition to control costs and stop waste. Its first proven success occurred in a state governed by a Republican business executive — whom they later nominated for president.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party Republicans remain so determined to eradicate Obamacare that they are willing to jeopardize the economic recovery and the nation’s future prospects. They justify these outrages in the name of the budget, which they insist will be ruined by the costs of subsidizing health care for the country’s uninsured millions. But there is nothing fiscally responsible about shutting down government, an act that costs the U.S. economy at least $300 million each day – not including the additional burdens likely to arise from cancelled food inspections, disease monitoring, flu vaccinations, and weather reporting, to mention a few vital services that actually save enormous amounts of money and prevent untold suffering.
Should they continue to foment anarchy by causing a debt default, the ultimate costs are totally unpredictable – except that they will be very large. Even the threat of a shutdown in 2011 caused an immediate slowdown and an increase in unemployment. What will the real thing do? Nobody knows for certain, but the resulting market chaos and economic downturn will cause deeper fiscal problems as well as enormous public pain – at a time when deficits are falling faster than at any time in the past seven decades.
That is why the president and Senate Democrats are right to reject the House leadership’s demand for “negotiations.” Encouraging the destructive strategies of the extremists would convey precisely the wrong message to them and to the world. No doubt many Republicans, appalled at the shame that the Tea Party has brought upon their once Grand Old Party, are quietly applauding the president’s newfound firmness.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 3, 2013
“When All Else Fails, Just Lie”: Bogus Republican Arguments To Justify A Government Shutdown
The House conservatives who refused to keep the government open without kneecapping ObamaCare seem to believe, now that the government has shut down, they can win the public opinion fight and force Democrats to back down.
But to make the case that their actions and demands were reasonable, Republicans need arguments that are remotely plausible. Instead, they are heading into battle with claims that I would call paper-thin, were that not a grave insult to paper. Here are the five legs on which the Republican position can’t stand.
1. Obama won’t negotiate
Speaker Boehner embraced this argument in a web video with the tag line, “Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria… but not with Congress to address Washington’s spending problem?” That’s a disingenuous reading of the situation. Washington is at an impasse because Republicans have repeatedly snubbed Obama’s offer for a budget compromise that pairs a stingier Social Security cost-of-living formula with corporate tax increases. Republicans refused to negotiate over taxes. They have continually demanded that Democrats scrap President Obama’s biggest legislative achievement in exchange for simply keeping the government operating. Of course Obama won’t negotiate over that. Otherwise, Obama has proved quite willing to negotiate on all aspects of the budget. It’s Republicans who have refused to offer any concession of any sort.
2. Republicans have already compromised
Sen. Ted Cruz tried this one during his Sunday Meet The Press appearance: “My position in this fight was we should defund [ObamaCare], which is different from repeal. And even now what the House of Representatives has done is a step removed from defunding. It’s delaying it. Now that’s the essence of a compromise.” No, the essence of compromise is when each party gives up something. Republicans aren’t proposing to give up anything. They’re just demanding a little bit less than before. Meanwhile, Democrats aren’t asking for any trophies. Keeping the government open and raising the debt limit aren’t ideological prizes, but basic housekeeping.
3. Republicans are just demanding what the people want
Republicans are nominally correct in saying that polling shows a lack of majority support for ObamaCare. But you don’t have to look much deeper in the data to see that doesn’t translate into majority support for threatening government shutdown to defund or delay ObamaCare. Multiple polls show widespread opposition to the Republican strategy linking the funding of government operations to stopping ObamaCare. Sixty-three percent of the electorate says Congress should “provide the funding to keep the government operating and deal with the health care issue separately.” Sixty percent say avoiding a shutdown is more important than “cutting the funds” to implement ObamaCare. Four in five people say threatening shutdown is “not an acceptable way to negotiate.” Even if you take the threat of shutdown out of the question, the Republican position still polls poorly. Only 38 percent support the view that “funding for the 2010 health care law must be cut off as part of any budget agreement,” with 50 percent opposed. Furthermore, the notion of widespread opposition to ObamaCare on conservative grounds is also misplaced. As CNN’s polling has long showed, while support for ObamaCare is below 50 percent, about 10 to 15 percent of that opposition says the program is “not liberal enough.” Support for the Republican view that ObamaCare is “too liberal” is only in the mid-to-upper 30s.
4. Harry Reid is the one who shut down the government
On Meet the Press, Sen. Cruz claimed: “[Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid’s] position is 100 percent of ObamaCare must be funded in all instances, and, other than that, he’s going to shut the government down.” To translate, Sen. Reid’s position is programs that Congress has already established by law should be properly funded. Reid is not the one who brought these issues together. House Republicans are the ones who made the decision to repeatedly link the suffocation of ObamaCare to legislation that would keep the government open; that was the threat, a threat on which Republicans have now followed through.
5. Since Obama is delaying ObamaCare for his friends, he should for everyone else
Also on this Sunday’s Meet The Press, GOP Rep. Raul Labrador tried to make the case for a one-year delay of the entire Affordable Care Act program because there have been delays regarding certain provisions: “The president has already delayed it for big businesses. They have delayed it for all his friends … all we’re asking for in the House of Representatives is for a one-year delay. Just like the unions are asking for a one-year delay.” That doesn’t make any sense. If Obama’s objective was to go easy on his friends and save them from a bureaucratic disaster, don’t you think the unions that supported his re-election would be getting help before the big businesses that didn’t?
The real story is that the delay for the mandate on employers with 50 or more workers was to give extra time to resolve a specific issue that arose: a concern that the paperwork was going to be unnecessarily burdensome on the vast majority of businesses that already provide insurance. So a delay was issued to provide the time to resolve that specific matter. Soon after, certain unions tried to use the employer mandate delay, not to get a similar temporary delay, but to permanently change a rule that denies ObamaCare subsidies to a particular kind of employer-based insurance utilized by union members. Obama told his union friends, no, there’s no legal basis for giving you those subsidies. The president is not doling out special favors. Nor does he consider the need for a few delays to resolve discrete issues to be cause for junking the entire law. In turn, these unions accepted the president’s answer and continue to support ObamaCare. They did not throw a temper tantrum and call for a general strike that would grind the entire economy to a halt.
Perhaps Republicans can take a lesson from that.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 1, 2013
“Government By A La Carte”: House Republican’s Goal, Shut Down The Government With No Political Repercussions
Plan A was for the House to pass a spending measure that gutted the Affordable Care Act, which the Senate could then clean up and send on to the White House. Plan B was the House bill to go ahead and defund the health care law and dare the Senate to pass it. Plan C was the House bill to delay health care benefits for a year and dare the Senate again.
Plan D was a half-hearted House Republican effort to embrace budget talks that House Republicans spent six months avoiding. And Plan E is, well, kind of silly.
House Republican leaders Tuesday told rank-and-file members that they will attempt to pass several separate bills to reopen the government a few agencies at a time.
A GOP aide confirmed that leaders want next steps to include passage of a series of continuing resolutions that fund individual government programs — an idea floated by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, Monday.
Why House Republicans don’t just make Cruz the Speaker and get it over with is unclear.
Regardless, this new plan is hilarious. Republicans could pass a center-right spending bill and end the shutdown, but what they’d prefer to do is break up the federal spending bill into chunks, and slowly turn the lights on piecemeal. Staffers were referring today to “mini-CRs.”
The idea, apparently, is to identify the parts of the Republicans’ shutdown that make the public upset, then pass a spending measure that resolves just that part of the crisis while leaving the rest of the government shut down. Americans are annoyed by closed federal parks? No sweat, Republicans say, they’ll pass a mini-CR that provides funding to reopen the parks — and nothing else.
And then when some other part of the shutdown creates public pressure, presumably Republicans would consider flipping the switch on that, too. The goal, apparently, is to shut down the government without feeling the political repercussions of a wildly unpopular government shutdown.
Sigh.
It didn’t take long for Democratic policymakers to dismiss the nonsense.
“We just decided in there we’re not going to do that,” Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said after leaving Tuesday’s Senate Democratic Conference meeting.
White House spokesman Jay Carney also ripped the idea as “not serious.”
“If they want to open the government, they should open the government,” Carney said.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) called it “just another whacky idea.” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) asked why opening federal parks is more important than “ensuring seniors, poor mothers, and children have access to meals and critical services?” A senior Senate Democratic aide said the House gimmick has “no chance” of success.
House Republicans can either keep their shutdown going, or they end this fiasco. The time for stunts, gimmicks, and partial pseudo solutions has long since passed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 1, 2013
“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
“A Series Of Near-Death Experiences”: Republicans Threatening National Harm Every Few Months
Against the backdrop of a government-shutdown deadline, Karen Tumulty noted yesterday the “cumulative effect of almost three years of governing by near-death experience.” It’s phrasing that rings true for a reason — since Republicans retook the House majority in January 2011, no major legislation has become law, but we have endured quite a few crises.
In April 2011, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In July 2011, congressional Republicans created the first debt-ceiling crisis in American history. In September 2011, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In April 2012, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In December 2012, congressional Republicans pushed the nation towards the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In January 2013, congressional Republicans briefly flirted with the possibility of another debt-ceiling crisis. In March 2013, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. And right now, in September 2013, the odds of a government shutdown are quite good once again.
That’s eight self-imposed, entirely unnecessary, easily avoidable crises since John Boehner got his hands on the Speaker’s gavel — a 33-month period in which Congress racked up zero major legislative accomplishments.
Josh Marshall had a good item on the trend over the weekend.
Years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase ‘defining deviancy down.’ James Q. Wilson popularized the conceptually related “broken windows” theory of crime and crime prevention. Whether or not these theories and catch phrases work as sociology is separate question; subsequent research has not been kind. But they capture the toxic consequences of the normalization and expanded acceptance of destructive behavior — something that not only applies to individuals and communities but to states and their internal workings. Stepping back from the latest Washington debacle, you quickly see how far down this road we’ve gone without really even realizing it.
It has started to feel normal that two or three times a year we have a major state/fiscal crisis and maybe once every 18 months or two years, there is a true breakdown with fairly grave consequences….. [T]his is really unprecedented stuff — deep attacks on the state itself inasmuch as the state requires for it to function a penumbra of norms surrounding the formal mechanisms of government.
Quite right. In fact, I think it creates unsettling conditions and raises uncomfortable questions about the future of the American experiment.
Put simply, great nations can’t function this way. The United States can either be a 21st-century superpower or it can tolerate Republicans abandoning the governing process and subjecting Americans to a series of self-imposed extortion crises. It cannot do both.
We can be the indispensable nation — we can even be a shining city on a hill — but not with a radicalized major party that throws seasonal tantrums that threaten the nation’s wellbeing. The cost is simply too great.
In the abstract, I imagine Americans who don’t pay attention to day-to-day developments have come to expect routine gridlock and partisan bickering. Democrats and Republicans arguing is arguably the ultimate in dog-bites-man stories.
But those same Americans should search their memories: have they ever seen a governing party threaten five government shutdowns in less than three years, while sprinkling two debt-ceiling crises on top?
The American tradition has no experience with our own elected officials imposing deliberate crises on the nation — as if one of our major political parties is mad at us and feels the need to punish us for offending them.
I realize Republicans consider the Affordable Care Act an example of such profound outrage that they have no choice but to threaten Americans on purpose. I can’t begin to fathom why they hate a moderate law based on Republican principles with such wild-eyed contempt, but it’s currently the world we live in.
My suggestion to them, however, is that they introduce legislation that would deliver their preferred goals. If it passes, they’ll get what they want. If it fails, they can try winning more elections. Either way, watching Republican officials — ostensibly elected to advance our interests — threaten national harm every few months has quite tiresome.
By: Steve benen, The Maddow Blog, September 30, 2013
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