“The GOP’s Growing Divide”: The Provocateurs Can Be Counted On To Keep Far-Right Anger And Resentment At A Rolling Boil
The Republican Party, which should have the wind at its back, enters 2014 in disarray bordering on open warfare.
President Obama and the Democrats have had, let’s face it, a bumpy few months. The debut of the Affordable Care Act was not quite the hair-pulling, garment-rending, world-historical disaster that some critics claim, but it was — and remains — messy enough to buff the shine on the GOP’s badly tarnished brand.
A CNN poll released Thursday found that 49 percent of those surveyed said they would prefer to be represented by a Republican in Congress, while 44 percent favored a Democrat. That’s not much of a margin, but it’s a big change from two months ago when 50 percent preferred a Democrat and just 42 percent preferred a Republican.
Such generic polls are of limited use in predicting what will happen in November. But the numbers do suggest that the GOP is back in the game. Voters appear willing to listen to what the party has to say.
If only the GOP had a message.
There is one proposition on which the party’s warring factions agree: “We don’t like Obama’s Affordable Care Act.” But there is a lack of consensus, to put it mildly, on how this visceral dislike of a president and his signature policy initiative should translate into concrete political action.
For Republicans — to invert a classic George W. Bush bon mot — Obamacare has somehow become a divider, not a uniter. In a year when the GOP may have a legitimate chance of capturing the Senate, several primary contests appear likely to devolve into bloody battles over Obama’s health-care reforms — not whether to oppose them, but how.
In Georgia, for example, one of the leading candidates to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss is Rep. Jack Kingston. He has voted repeatedly — and fruitlessly — with his House Republican colleagues to defund the Affordable Care Act. But when he suggested recently that to “just step back and let this thing fall to pieces on its own” was not “the responsible thing to do,” opponents quickly attacked Kingston as some kind of quisling who was waving a flag of surrender.
In fact, Kingston was simply acknowledging reality. Obamacare is the law. Memories of the program’s incompetent launch will fade. Republicans are going to have to decide whether to collaborate in making the Affordable Care Act work better — or risk being seen as working against the nation’s best interests.
On a range of issues, this is the party’s essential dilemma. Ideologues want to continue the practice of massive, uncompromising resistance to anything Obama tries to accomplish. Pragmatists want the GOP to demonstrate that it can be reasonable and trustworthy, on the theory that voters want their government to function well and won’t put a bunch of anti-government extremists in charge of running it.
Keep in mind that despite the findings of that CNN poll, other surveys show the GOP still has a ton of work to do. A recent Wall Street Journal poll reported that 48 percent of respondents had “negative feelings” toward the Republican Party, as opposed to 39 percent who felt negatively toward the Democratic Party.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), took a giant step for pragmatism by negotiating a budget deal with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) — and the ideological wing of the party freaked out. House Speaker John Boehner, as rock-ribbed a Main Street conservative as you’ll ever meet, is routinely attacked on far-right Web sites as some kind of squishy moderate.
The question of how the GOP should proceed really should be a no-brainer. But after cynically taking advantage of the huge jolt of energy provided by tea party activists, the Republican establishment is finding that these true believers don’t necessarily listen when they’re told to go sit in a corner and shut up.
The no-compromises GOP base is fertile fundraising territory for potential presidential candidates, such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and for pressure groups such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth. So these provocateurs can be counted on to keep far-right anger and resentment at a rolling boil — and resist the establishment’s attempt to lower the temperature.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is expected to spend up to $50 million to ensure that the Republican Party chooses no extremist “loser candidates” for Senate races. As Scott Reed, the chamber’s chief political strategist, told the Wall Street Journal: “That will be our mantra: No fools on our ticket.”
Wanna bet?
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 26, 2013
“The Obama Political Obituaries Are Way Premature”: Nothing That Happened In 2013 Is Nearly As Humiliating As What Bush Endured
If President Obama saw the columns and news stories I keep reading lately, he’d probably have half a mind to resign and scurry back to Chicago in time to see the Bears lose a playoff game. “Tanking” approval numbers, no accomplishments, rudderlessness, and of course the website fiasco; they all add up, the conventional wisdom seems to say, to a presidency that is already all but finished, unless John Podesta can somehow save it. The Washington Post reported this week that among second-term presidents in the polling era, only Richard Nixon had a lower approval rating at this point than Obama does now.
Nixon? Is it really that bad? (By the way, there’s still a considerable distance between the two—Obama sits at 43 percent in the Post poll, while Nixon was down at 29.) I can read numbers, and I know what’s happened over the past year. Obama has lost support among core Democratic groups such as women and Latinos, and one suspects that the failure—not his failure; the failure, a distinction not enough people are evidently making—to pass immigration reform was disillusioning for these cohorts. And obviously the HealthCare.gov fiasco is the governing reality here. It’s been a messy year.
At the same time, everything that’s happened can be rebounded from. Let’s look, by way of comparison, at where President Bush was at the end of 2005. He’d started out the year, you might recall, saying, “I have political capital, and I intend to use it.” Actually, he said that right after he beat John Kerry. Bush didn’t yet reveal how he meant to use that capital, but soon enough it became clear that he meant Social Security privatization, or partial privatization.
Bush staked a lot on that project. If you were around then, you remember those endless town halls, filled with plants and ringers offering their most plangent testimonials about how they couldn’t wait to get Uncle Sam’s heavy hand out of their purses and invest their own retirement money as they saw fit, as any real Murican would insist. This was how Bush and Karl Rove were going to create the permanent Republican majority, through the new ownership society.
What happened? Congress, even Republicans in Congress, wanted nothing to do with it. It was basically dead by Memorial Day. So that was going to be the signature issue of Bush’s second term—with a House and a Senate, remember, that were also in Republican hands at the time. And it went up in flames.
Nothing that has happened to Obama in 2013 is nearly as humiliating as what Bush endured—and that was before Katrina hit in August 2005. You could make an immigration comparison, but they’re hardly the same, because Bush’s party controlled both houses of Congress. If the Democrats were running the House right now, there’s little question the immigration bill would have passed. I don’t expect the general public to make such distinctions, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make them. Being smacked down by the opposite party, which has shown its contempt for you a hundred times already, isn’t remotely the same thing as being smacked down by your own party. The Bush privatization failure was devastating not only to his standing as president but as head of his own party.
Obama hasn’t suffered anything like that. He’s been the victim of a couple of ginned-up “scandals,” the IRS most especially, that had no truth to them but nevertheless took a bite out of his ratings. The Republicans are a constant irritant, willing to sacrifice their own standing as long as they can drag him down with them. But he has not launched a huge, historic initiative on which history has slammed the sarcophagus lid screaming “Failure!”
Health care? Come on. You’re joking. That was a bad first inning. Granted, a really, really bad first inning, but a first inning all the same. There is a lot of ball yet to be played. Even now, we’re only in the top of the second in terms of implementation of this law. And every week brings new reports that the troubles are of the past. The information that’s supposed to be getting to insurance companies is getting to them now, and providers are about to start advertising heavily to potential enrollees. Jeff Zients, the man who fixed the site, is leaving, but he’s being replaced by a Microsoft exec, Kurt DelBene, who presumably knows a thing or two about state-of-the-art operating systems. I’ve said it before and I will say it again. Obamacare is going to have, for most Americans who come face to face with it, a happy ending, and I think sooner rather than later.
That is the big error the Republicans are making. They truly seem to think it’s game-set-match on Obamacare. It isn’t even close. And the media, espying bad Obama poll numbers, go along, because then, instead of the bad poll numbers being just bad poll numbers, they can be woven into a Meta-Narrative Think Piece about how second terms in the modern presidency are graveyards.
Obama isn’t close to any graveyard yet. The Obamacare story is going to keep getting better. And the economy, if you hadn’t noticed, has grown at 3 percent for the last two quarters. That’s not just good considering the circumstances of the meltdown and an opposition party that’s been trying actively to harm the economy. That’s just plain old good.
Predicting a politician’s standing a year out is a mug’s game, so I won’t do that. But I’ll comfortably make the claim that nothing that has happened to Obama in 2013 rules out a rebound. Far be it from me to question The Washington Post’s poll numbers, but Bush was in far worse shape at this point. Obama’s second term will not likely match the list of accomplishments of his first. But even if the second term is nothing more than the successful implementation of Obamacare for 30 million or 40 million Americans, that’s plenty. Public opinion will catch up.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, December 19, 2013
“Ending Medicare As We Know It”: Here’s Why There Won’t Be A Republican Alternative To Obamacare
Republicans are sick of people saying they don’t have an alternative to Obamacare.
They have plenty!
And not just, “Don’t get sick! And if you do get sick, die quickly,” as Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) said in 2009.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives just hasn’t voted on even one Obamacare alternative because it’s hard to fit stuff in when you only work 28 hours a week and have to squeeze in all those Obamacare repeals.
But they’re going to fix that problem in 2014, says Rep. Tom Price (R-GA).
The congressman has introduced his Obamacare alternative — the Empowering Patients First Act — three times since 2009. Price’s bill has never been given a vote, even though it has 50 co-sponsors, including the eminent Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Price told Fox News that after the first of the year, Republican leaders are going to bring forth a bill that will “unite Republicans around health care issues” because “you can’t beat something with nothing.”
This logic runs contrary to Town Hall‘s Conn Carroll, who believes the House GOP won’t coalesce around one plan or, as he calls it, “a villain to run against.”
This has been the GOP strategy since 2010, and don’t expect it to change, despite the assurances the leadership has given to Rep. Price.
Price’s bill has never been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). But a former Republican head of the CBO scored it independently and found that it saves trillions of dollars over 10 years and will reduce the uninsured population by 29 percent by 2016.
If this is true, why haven’t Republicans even put it up for a vote?
A quick look at H.R. 2300, the current version of Price’s bill, shows you why the GOP likely won’t propose an alternative to Obamacare — ever.
The bill starts off with Republicans’ favorite health care distractions — tort reform and selling across state lines.
If you eliminated every malpractice claim in America, that would only reduce the costs of our health care system by 1 to 1.5 percent – far less than implementing a public option.
Selling insurance over state lines would just give insurers the chance to sell plans from the state with the fewest regulations. The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein looked at a CBO report on a bill from 2005 that would have made national sales of state insurance plans possible and found “the legislation would not change the number of insured Americans or save much money, but it would make insurance more expensive for the sick and cheaper for the healthy, and lead to more healthy people with insurance and fewer sick people with insurance.”
The real goal of Price’s bill and just about every Republican reform of the health care system is to end the employer-provided health insurance dynamic that most Americans rely upon. Employers get a generous tax break for providing health coverage that Price would then extend to individuals. The 2009 version of his bill did this in a way that would actually have resulted in a huge tax increase.
But the bigger problem with Price’s plan to sever the employer-employee health insurance relationship and create plans that stay with an individual for life is that it would end up in cancelations of current plans — tens of millions of cancelations.
Republicans could argue that these new plans would be better than the existing plans for various reasons — but that’s an argument they know doesn’t work, because they crushed it when Democrats used it to defend the cancelations that happened after the implementation Obamacare.
Price says his plan would cover people with pre-existing conditions, though it doesn’t include an individual mandate or any incentive to prevent insurers from cherry-picking the healthiest consumers.
“In other words, this looks much like the reforms that collapsed in Texas, and in California,” Klein noted. ”Price isn’t learning from past policy mistakes, and so he means to repeat them.”
The biggest problem with Price’s bill is how it reforms existing public health care programs.
If H.R. 2300 became law, anyone could opt out of Medicare or Medicaid and receive a voucher to purchase private insurance.
We have no idea how many people would opt out of Medicare given the fact that few private insurers see people over 65 as the path to prosperity for their business. But when the growth of Medicare costs is far below that of private insurers, all that voucher would end up being is a ticket to pay far more for health care at the time of your life when it will cost you the most.
And if too many beneficiaries opted out, the entire system of dictating costs to providers in exchange for volume could collapse with devastating effects to our deficit and debt.
The worst part for Republicans is the facet of the law that allows Democrats to make a pretty simple case against the GOP’s Obamacare alternative: It ends Medicare as we know it. The GOP could rebut that assertion by saying that Medicare will still exist for those who want it, but a party that has been shedding senior support all year doesn’t want to have that argument.
Any alternative the GOP proposes to replace Obamacare is going to spark negative headlines — even if the GOP manages to evade the tax increases, cancelations and potential problems for Medicare that exist in Price’s bill.
If the Republican leadership makes the mistake of offering an alternative, they’ll dull the sting of their attacks on Obamacare by having to defend some version of a plan they were wise enough to sit on for years.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 16, 2013
“Cheney’s Descent Into Incoherence”: The “Guy At The End Of The Bar” Agument
It stands to reason former Vice President Dick Cheney would be unimpressed with the international agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. Heck, Cheney didn’t even get along with George W. Bush late in their second term because Bush was reluctant to launch military strikes on Iran, so the notion that Cheney would balk at President Obama’s policy is hardly a surprise.
But as Ben Armbruster noted, Cheney appeared on Fox News this morning to complain about U.S. policy towards Iran, and the former VP doesn’t even seem to be trying anymore.
The former vice president moved to Iran and without mentioning any specific criticisms of the agreement, claimed it’s bad because of unrelated health care issues. “We don’t follow through and Iran we’ve got a very serious problem going forward and a deal now been cut,” he said. “The same people that brought us ‘you can keep your insurance if you want’ are telling us they’ve got a great deal in Iran with respect to their nuclear program. I don’t believe it.”
This is what I like to call a “guy at the end of the bar” argument. You may know the type: there’s some angry guy watching the TV above the bar, and to no one in particular, the loudmouth wants to share his poorly informed wisdom about a variety of subjects. He’s the guy who’s convinced government is inherently bad because of lines at the DMV.
Cheney has become that guy. About 1 percent of the population will be adversely affected by changes to the messy individual, non-group insurance market, and as such, the P5+1 nuclear agreement with Iran is suspect. What do these two things have to do with one another? For sensible people, nothing.
But in Cheney’s mind, if Obama used oversimplified rhetoric about a sliver of the population individual health plans, then literally everything the administration says on every subject should be rejected. One wonders if Cheney would hold himself to the same standard, given his lengthy record of breathtaking dishonesty.
Indeed, in the same Fox appearance, Cheney added, “I don’t think that Barack Obama believes that the U.S. is an exceptional nation,” which is demonstrably silly.
And why should anyone care what the failed former vice president thinks? It’s a fair question, though I’d note that Cheney’s perspective remains relevant, not just because of his frequent media appearances, but because congressional Republicans continue to seek his counsel on matters related to foreign policy and national security.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 9, 2013
“The Blurred Line Between Caricature And Reality”: Republicans Are Nothing If Not Predictable
It’s become a running joke: when Republican get bored with the latest manufactured outrage of the day, they turn to the Benghazi and IRS “scandals” as a standby. Indeed, it’s been widely assumed over the last several weeks that as the Affordable Care Act improves, GOP lawmakers would have no choice but to return to their favorite faux political controversies.
They are nothing if not predictable. Here’s Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) yesterday:
“Since the terrible tragedy that took four American lives in Benghazi, we’ve had difficulty, to put it mildly, trying to get to the bottom of this,” the second-ranking Senate Republican said during a Google Hangout session he held while the Senate is on recess. ”Now the goal is to talk to the Benghazi survivors – people who were actually there who could tell the truth and expose what happened and hold the people responsible accountable. This has been a cover up from the very beginning.”
And here’s House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) soon after:
The House’s chief investigator says the FBI is stonewalling his inquiry into whether the agency and the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative group True the Vote for special scrutiny, and Rep. Darrell E. Issa is now threatening subpoenas to pry loose the information from FBI Director James B. Comey Jr.
Mr. Issa, California Republican, and Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, are leading the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s IRS inquiry. They also said the FBI is refusing to turn over any documents related to its own investigation into the IRS, which began in the days after an auditor’s report revealed the tax agency had improperly targeted tea party groups for special scrutiny.
The White House should probably consider this a good sign. Remember, as recently as last week, congressional Republicans were reluctant to talk about literally any issue other than the Affordable Care Act, afraid that any distraction from the dysfunctional website might let Democrats off the hook. Even the reaction to the “nuclear option” was muted because Republicans wanted all of the political world’s focus solely on health care – and nothing else.
And it now appears that phase is ending and far-right lawmakers are back to Benghazi and the IRS. If that isn’t affirmation of the White House’s health care initiative getting back on track, nothing is.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 3, 2013
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