GOP Wheeling And Dealing May Come Back To Bite Them
Wednesday was the anniversary of the day in 1944 when Democrats nominated Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term. If he could see the wheeling and dealing in D.C. during the current budget deficit debate, FDR wouldn’t be surprised. Republicans are still trying to kill Social Security, and the GOP is still cozy with bankers, billionaires, and big business.
Tea Party House Republicans, under the leadership of Eric Cantor, are doing everything they can to protect their BFFs on Wall Street from paying their fair share of taxes. If majority Leader (and presumptive peaker) Cantor and the rest of the Tea Party types were really concerned about the budget deficit, they would support President Obama’s effort to save money by ending billions of dollars in wasteful subsidies to big oil and for corporate jets. Tax breaks for corporate jets with full bars don’t stimulate the economy, but they do stimulate corporate jet setters.
Republicans did score one victory this week which may come back and bite them on the butt. President Obama passed over consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren for the job of director of the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Senate Republicans said they would filibuster her appointment. Warren’s crime was her fight to protect consumers from the big financial firms that rip off working families. Today is the first anniversary of the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act which Congress passed to curb predatory behavior by Wall Street.
Warren will return to her home in Massachusetts, and she may run against Republican U.S. Senator and Cosmo centerfold, Scott Brown. If the GOP has any hope of taking control of the Senate next year, Brown must win. But polls show that Brown is vulnerable, and Brown has the chops to show blue collar Democrats that Wall Street is the enemy of the working families who have lost their jobs and then their homes in the wake of the great recession, a downturn caused by big business and the bad boy bankers and billionaires that Warren has fought to regulate.
And one last date for all you American history buffs, Tuesday was the anniversary of the day in 1848 when a pioneering women’s rights convention met in Seneca Falls New York. The convention paved the way for way for women like Elizabeth Warren and Michele Bachmann to run for office. By the way, Representative Bachman, the convention was in Seneca Falls, N.Y., not Seneca Falls, N.H., if anyone asks.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 22, 2011
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
Why The Tea Party Should Stop Fearing Compromise
Among tea party voters, there is a belief that the right is always getting sold out by the political establishment. In their telling, Reagan-era conservatives agreed to an amnesty for illegal immigrants on the condition that the law would be enforced going forward, then deeply regretted having done so. George H.W. Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge. The Contract with America failed to deliver on many of its promises. George W. Bush joined forces with Ted Kennedy on No Child Left Behind, changed positions on campaign finance reform, and closed out his presidency by bailing out undeserving Wall Street firms. In all this, he was abetted by GOP legislators.
These tea party voters are sometimes justified in feeling betrayed. Other times, they misinterpret what happened. Right or wrong, however, they’re powerfully averse to compromise. Mere mention of the word aggrieves them. They don’t think of it as a means of bringing about a mutually beneficial change in the status quo, where one of their priorities is addressed in return for giving up something on an issue they care less about. When they hear the word compromise, the knee-jerk reaction is to oppose it. In their experience, going along with compromise is tantamount to getting screwed. The insistence that pols “stand on principle” is a defense mechanism.
This attitude helps explain why tea partiers are so frequently attracted to relatively inexperienced politicians like Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio, and Michele Bachmann. More experienced pols have been forced to compromise as the price of achieving something, just as a President Palin, Rubio or Bachmann would be forced to compromise in order to pass the parts of their agenda most important to them. Having gotten so little of substance done in their careers, however, they haven’t yet had to give up anything significant, so they can maintain the fiction that they never would. As Daniel Larison puts it, “Bachmann’s lack of achievements is in some ways a blessing for her, because it is proof that she has never compromised. In today’s GOP, that is very valuable, and she doesn’t have many competitors in the race who can say the same.”
The tea party movement should know better. The Founding Fathers engaged in an endless series of compromises. Abraham Lincoln compromised. Franklin D. Roosevelt compromised. So did Ronald Reagan. Every consequential leader in the history of the United States has had to compromise.
It defies common sense to think the next Republican president will be different. So why are tea party voters asking themselves, “Which of these presidential candidates is least likely to compromise?” They ought to be pondering different questions, such as: “What style of negotiation and compromise does this candidate employ? How much have they gotten in the past for what they gave up?”
“Do the issues they’ve treated as most important align with my priorities?”
Viewed in that light, Mitch Daniels’ talk of a truce on social issues in order to focus on the budget deficit should’ve appealed to a large faction of tea partiers. He laid out his priorities. They aligned perfectly with tea party rhetoric: it is a movement focused on economic issues and individual liberty far more than social conservatism if you trust what its typical adherents themselves assert. But even tea partiers who shared Daniels’ priorities didn’t like that he talked of compromise.
They got self-righteous about it.
Tea partiers would be better off accepting that every politician cares about some things more than others, that there is no such thing as successfully governing America as an uncompromising social, economic and national security conservative, and that pretending otherwise results in choosing candidates who are marginally less likely to choose the best compromises.
Another way to put this is that if tea party voters were less naive about the centrality of compromise to politics — and more willing to believe that a principled person can compromise — they’d feel less victimized by an unchangeable fact of democracy. They’d also be more frequently empowered to bring about policy outcomes that better align with what they care about most.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, Associate Editor, The Atlantic, July 15, 2011
Does Michele Bachmann Have A ‘Reverend Wright’ Problem?
Joshua Green of The Atlantic is reporting that Rep. Michelle Bachmann has long belonged to a church that, well, has some odd views about the Catholic Church:
Michele Bachmann is practically synonymous with political controversy, and if the 2008 presidential election is any guide, the conservative Lutheran church she belonged to for many years is likely to add another chapter due to the nature of its beliefs–such as its assertion, explained and footnoted on this website, that the Roman Catholic Pope is the Antichrist.
The short, obvious response to the idea that this might hurt Bachmann’s presidential aspirations is, in a few words, “Reverend Jeremiah Wright.”
After all, President Barack Obama’s ties to Reverend Wright and his church didn’t hurt his presidential campaign nearly as much as expected — as he went on to win. Even in 2008, the idea that Obama was a covert black radical hiding behind a moderate liberal façade seemed far fetched. There was little connection between Wright’s views and Obama’s actual policy agenda.
This could, however, create problems for Bachmann. After all, unlike Obama, Bachmann has placed her religious views front and center in the campaign, most recently by signing onto a “pledge” issued by a group of social conservatives in Iowa affirming a number of paternalistic policy positions. In signing the pledge, Bachmann was promising to fight marriage equality, pornography, the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and even the presence of women in the Armed Forces. Bachmann’s religious views, unlike Obama’s, are easily connectable to a definable policy agenda. So her religious views will be far more relevant than Obama’s — and many of the policy positions she’s adopted as a result aren’t likely to be popular outside of the GOP base.
George W. Bush frequently credited Karl Rove’s outreach to Catholics as key to his ascension to the White House. Has Bachmann — who left her former church last year and disavowed its views on Catholicism — damaged herself with this key segment of the electorate? That’s anybody’s guess. But generally speaking, some of her religiously informed political views will be a major liability among the broader electorate, should she win the nomination, and may even discourage Republicans who want to win the White House from voting for her. The more stories like this one expose the extent to which some of Bachmann’s religious views smack of bigotry, the worse her chances will get.
By: Adam Serwer, The Washington Post, July 14, 2011
Debt Ceiling Hostage Taking: Section 4 Of The 14th Amendment Was Designed To Stop John Boehner
Kevin Drum is skeptical that the Obama administration would really be within its rights to ignore the debt ceiling:
Maybe I’m missing something here, but it strikes me that this doesn’t come close to implying that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. What it really suggests is merely that the public debt is the only untouchable part of the federal budget.
Jack Balkin delves into the legislative history and shows why the 14th Amendment has a provision guaranteeing the debt in the first place. The sponsor of the provision, Benjamin Wade, wrote at the time:
[The proposed amendment] puts the debt incurred in the civil war on our part under the guardianship of the Constitution of the United States, so that a Congress cannot repudiate it. I believe that to do this wil give great confidence to capitalists and will be of incalculable pecuniary benefit to the United States, for I have no doubt that every man who has property in the public funds will feel safer when he sees that the national debt is withdrawn from the power of a Congress to repudiate it and placed under the guardianship of the Constitution than he would feel if it were left at loose ends and subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress.
Balkin explains:
If Wade’s speech offers the central rationale for Section Four, the goal was to remove threats of default on federal debts from partisan struggle. Reconstruction Republicans feared that Democrats, once admitted to Congress would use their majorities to default on obligations they disliked politically. More generally, as Wade explained, “every man who has property in the public funds will feel safer when he sees that the national debt is withdrawn from the power of a Congress to repudiate it and placed under the guardianship of the Constitution than he would feel if it were left at loose ends and subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress.”
Like most inquiries into original understanding, this one does not resolve many of the most interesting questions. What it does suggest is an important structural principle. The threat of defaulting on government obligations is a powerful weapon, especially in a complex, interconnected world economy. Devoted partisans can use it to disrupt government, to roil ordinary politics, to undermine policies they do not like, even to seek political revenge. Section Four was placed in the Constitution to remove this weapon from ordinary politics.
In other words, it’s in the 14th Amendment to guard against exactly what Congressional Republicans are doing right now.
Balkin does not suggest, nor do I, that the legal merits are open and shut. It’s certainly risky to take a flyer in the middle of a debt crisis. But if we do reach h-hour, we’re probably better off if the Treasury simply announces it’s going to continue to pay the bills and dares Republicans to take them to court than repudiating the debt, right?
Matt Steinglass argues that the Supreme Court would likely side with the Treasury:
If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past 11 years, it is that the Supreme Court’s decisions on critical issues are very strongly influenced by political pressure. In a situation where the entire weight of world bond markets was bearing down on Anthony Kennedy’s head, would he really vote to crash the economy and destroy the credit rating of the United States? Would any individual do that? I don’t think even Eric Cantor would, if he were solely and publicly responsible for the decision. The ability of the GOP to push the government to the brink of default, and possibly ultimately over it, depends on the diffusion of responsibility: Republicans can only do it because they can hold Democrats to blame. It’s also driven by political vulnerability: Republicans have gotten themselves into a spiraling tea-party-driven political dynamic where they seem, on issue after issue, to be incapable of voting for any proposals that a Democrat might be able to accept, for fear of the consequences from their base. Anthony Kennedy does not have to fear a primary challenge, and if the United States’ ability to pay its debts comes down to his single vote, he’ll have no excuse. Maybe I have no idea how these things work. But I can’t see a Republican Supreme Court going toe to toe with the entire massed forces of Wall Street and not blinking.
A point that I think is worth drawing out here is that it’s not even clear the GOP leadership wants the power to take the credit of the Treasury hostage, or — more likely — if it’s simply been forced into this position by a financially uneducated base. Republicans in Congress might be relieved to have a deux ex machina absolve them of the need to walk a fine line between the demands of the base and the demands of their business constituency.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, July 1, 2011
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