Cut Cap & Balance And The New Frontiers of Kookery
A scant few months after the Paul Ryan budget redefined the boundaries of conservative fanaticism, the Republican Party’s new “Cut, Cap, and Balance” Constitutional Amendment makes that document seem quaintly reasonable. Ezra Klein sums up the policy:
Ronald Reagan’s entire presidency would’ve been unconstitutional under CC&B. Same for George W. Bush’s. Paul Ryan’s budget wouldn’t pass muster. The only budget that might work for this policy — if you could implement it — would be the proposal produced by the ultra-conservative Republican Study Committee. But that proposal was so extreme and unworkable that a majority of Republicans voted it down.
37 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans have pledged not to support a debt ceiling increase unless the CC&B Constitutional Amendment passes. Mitt Romney has signed this insane pledge. Ramesh Ponnuru has some gentle questions:
Representative Mick Mulvaney, a freshman Republican from South Carolina who is a leading supporter of the amendment, said in an interview that if “the president wants this debt-ceiling increase, he’s going to help us get the votes.” He argued that Obama should deliver 50 Democratic votes in the House and 20 to 30 in the Senate. “That’s a good compromise for both sides.”
Does the congressman think that 50 Republicans would vote for a constitutional amendment that contradicts everything they stand for if President Romney asked them to?
What a congressman who pledges to increase the debt limit only if a spending-limit amendment passes is really saying is that he opposes increasing the debt limit. Because there is no way that two-thirds of Congress is going to pass this amendment now, or ever.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the CC&B amendment is the casual way in which it attempts to enshrine specific spending levels and to freeze current taxes into the Constitution. I would like to see its advocates explain why it is necessary for the Constitution to require their agenda. What is keeping the public from electing officials who will enact this agenda? If people want to enact policies like this, why not just let them do it? And if they don’t, why force these policies upon them?
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, 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
Eric Cantor Loves Government Spending…On The Drug Industry
Republicans would like you to believe that our deficit problem is primarily a spending problem and that responsibility for that problematic spending is primarily a Democratic responsibility. But the second claim is as misleading as the first. Republicans have also been known to promote wasteful government spending, particularly when it goes towards an industry with which they happen to be cozy. For a vivid illustration of this, look no further than a new Politico article about House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and his position on a key deficit reduction proposal.
The proposal in question would lower the cost of what the federal government currently pays to provide low-income seniors with prescription drugs. For years, the government purchased drugs for these seniors directly through Medicaid, taking advantage of the low prices drug companies must, by law, provide when selling drugs for the people in that program. But that changed in 2006, with the creation of Medicare drug benefit. At that point, the government delegated the purchasing of drugs for low-income seniors to private firms. And the firms haven’t been able to negotiate equally deep discounts, partly because of restrictions on their ability to limit drug availability.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, restoring the “Medicaid discount” for low-income seniors could save more than $100 billion over the course of a decade, depending on the structure of the proposal. And, at one point, many health care reformers had hoped to include that proposal as part of what became the Affordable Care Act. The administration and leaders of the Senate Finance Committee agreed not to include the proposal in the final legislation, as part of their infamous deal with the drug industry lobby. But that was a one-time deal, at least in theory, and congressional negotiators are looking seriously at enacting the proposal now.
The problem is lawmakers like Cantor, who oppose the idea. According to the Politico story, written by Matt Dobias, Cantor is making the same argument that the drug industry lobby does: That the proposal would amount to a form of government price controls, retarding economic growth and discouraging innovation.
The latter point is highly dubious: The reduction would bring reimbursement levels for these drugs very close to what they were a few years ago. Many experts, including the CBO, think the likely impact on research and development would be negligible. (Harvard economists Richard Frank and Joseph Newhouse addressed this issue at some length in Health Affairs a few years ago.)
As for the former suggestion, it’s true that any net reduction in government spending could reduce economic growth, at least at this particular moment. That’s why it’s not a good idea to be madly slashing government spending right now — and why, perhaps, congressional negotiators should delay implementation of this cut, like the others, so that it would take effect after the economy has more fully recovered.
But Cantor’s anxiety over the economic ramifications of spending cuts seems strangely selective. He hasn’t raised similar concerns about cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, and similar programs that would likely have a more devastating impact, both on the economy as a whole and the people who depend upon them for support.
Then again, food stamp recipients didn’t donate $168,000 to Cantor’s reelection campaign in the last cycle. The drug industry did.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, July 15, 2011
The Minnesota Shutdown – A Glimpse Into The Nation’s Future And The GOP’s True Intentions
A telephone help line service for the elderly will not be ringing today in Minnesota.
Blind residents reliant on state funding for reading services will remain in the dark for as long as the government’s lights are turned off. Poor families who receive subsidies for childcare are on their own. The St. Louis Park Emergency Program’s food shelf will have bare pickings for those who depend on the program for sustenance. The Community
Action Center of Northfield will likely be forced to close down its homeless shelter without the state funding upon which it relies to house the homeless.
And yes, 23,000 state workers will be trying to figure out how to care for their families without a paycheck for the duration along with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 construction workers who will be laid off as the state shuts down dozens of road and highway projects.
These are but a few of the consequences of the shutdown of Minnesota’s government.
At issue is how to close a $5 billion deficit in the state left by the previous Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat, had tried to bargain his way toward an agreement by offering up massive cuts in state services. In return, he asked the Republicans to agree to a tax increase for the wealthier citizens of the state to make up the remainder of the funding required to close most of the gap in the budget.
But the Republicans held firm on taxes – even when Dayton made his final offer that would have placed an additional 3% tax on only those Minnesotans earning over $1 million a year, a burden that would have been placed on just .03% of all Minnesotans.
It’s not so much that the state’s GOP leaders had a violent, allergic reaction to those earning seven figures a year having to pay a few percentage points more in taxes. What appears to have ended negotiations were the
Republican demands that Governor Dayton agree to their social agenda issues, including Voter ID legislation and abortion restrictions, as the price for the Republicans allowing the very wealthy to pay a little more.
When the Governor refused to swallow the notion that the conservative social agenda should be used as a tool to resolve budgetary issues, the talks broke down and the lights at the statehouse were turned off.
So, you might wonder, how did the Minnesota GOP suggest that the gap in the finances be met even as they seemed to realize that there was little left for the Governor to offer on the cutting side of the ledger?
You won’t believe it.
The Republicans actually proposed creating more debt to close the gap.
The GOP proposed delaying another $700 million in payments owed to schools, which would add to the more than $1 billion the state already owes K-12 schools.
Republicans also offered to issue “tobacco bonds” of an unspecified amount to cover any remaining budget gap. Sources said Dayton considered the offer, but he criticized it as unwise borrowing late Thursday. Via The Star Tribune
I guess a Republican has to do what a Republican has to do when it comes to protecting the wealthiest in the state from paying a higher tax rate- even if it means creating more debt despite a GOP platform that, allegedly, abhors debt.
If you find the lessons of Minnesota disturbing, get used to it.
What you are seeing is simply the national debate playing out on a smaller stage. I suppose this is what Republicans mean when they suggest using the states as laboratories for what will and won’t work on the national level.
You can bet that every political player on the national stage will be watching to see how the Minnesota public reacts to their situation along with which party gets the lion’s share of the blame for bringing this blight upon their land.
If Governor Dayton caves and simply accepts the GOP budget, we can expect that our Congressional Republicans would take great heart in such an occurrence and be emboldened to stick with the plan.
If the GOP legislators begin to fear that their jobs may be in jeopardy as punishment for shutting down the state in order to protect a little more than 7,000 Minnesotans earning at least a million bucks a year, that too will be noticed.
Watch the polls in Minnesota over the next week or two. They may tell you everything you need to know about what is likely to happen as we move towards resolving the debt ceiling debate.
By: Rick Ungar, The Policy Page, Forbes, Junly 1, 2011
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