There will be, among my media colleagues, an instinct to blame the current government shutdown on both sides. A pox on both their houses is popular because it’s easy – everyone’s to blame for gridlock, so we’re not blaming anyone! – and attracts fewer charges of media bias. The double pox caucus likes to strike a post-partisan pose because it gives them a sense of superior enlightenment; they get the joke of the two party system, they think, in a way that grubby true believers don’t.
Don’t buy it. Both sides aren’t to blame. The GOP – specifically the fringe right that is currently calling the party’s shots – craved this shutdown and owns it.
Here’s a good rule of thumb when adjudicating blame for a government shutdown: Whichever side is using the threat or reality of a shutdown to effect changes to policy or law is responsible for the shutdown. This works for the forthcoming debt ceiling fight as well. When one side is making unilateral demands as the price of doing what they concede should be done anyway, they own the resulting crisis.
In this case the GOP is trying variations on a policy-changing theme: They wanted to defund Obamacare; when that didn’t work they tried to chip away at the law by, among other things, postponing the individual mandate for a year. They are, in other words, trying to win through extortion policy changes they couldn’t convince voters to ratify at the ballot box.
To paraphrase President Obama from last week, the equivalent would be if he vowed to veto any continuing resolution (thus shutting down the government) if it didn’t include universal background checks for gun purchases or a public option for Obamacare.
The fact of each party having a position doesn’t mean that each has equal validity. To suggest otherwise incentivizes extremism: If the “correct” answer is an even split, then the most extreme position wins by dragging the center as far in its direction as possible. (That’s the core of the House GOP’s effort to move the dispute over funding the government to a conference committee: enshrining the frame of two equal sides at the negotiating table.)
Here’s the thing: Obamacare has been litigated endlessly. It has been at the center of American politics since before it was passed. It played a central role in the 2012 presidential race, with GOP nominee Mitt Romney vowing to repeal it. The Supreme Court weighed in, finding the law constitutional. Then the American people weighed in, voting by a comfortable margin for the pro-Obamacare candidate over the repeal-Obamacare candidate.
Polls tell us a number of things about the American people (or Ted Cruz’s “the American people“) and Obamacare. We know that more Americans dislike the law than like it; we also know that a minority of Americans (but 100 percent of the people in Ted Cruz’s head!) favors repeal or defunding the law while a plurality or majority – depending upon the poll – favors making the law work.
And polls also show that people aren’t wild about the notion of a government shutdown hinging on the debate over the Affordable Care Act. A Quinnipiac survey released just this morning, for example, reiterated all of these trends: While voters split on the law (45 percent in favor, 47 percent opposing), a majority (58-34) oppose defunding it, and that opposition grows more pronounced when contemplating not raising the debt ceiling in order to defund the ACA (64-27 against) or shutting down the government in order to stop the law (72-22 against).
(Poll after poll also shows that Republicans are in line for most of the blame for shuttering the federal government; points to voters for paying attention.)
These figures – along with the aforementioned one poll that counts, from last November – paint a muddled picture of the American electorate’s wishes regarding Obamacare. But they also make one fact crystal clear: Republicans cannot fairly claim to speak for the electorate in foisting this government shutdown upon us.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 1, 2013
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP, Government Shut Down | Affordable Care Act, Debt Ceiling, media, ObamaCare, Public Opinion, Republicans, Ted Cruz |
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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
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Government Shut Down, Republicans | Affordable Care Act, Harry Reid, Jay Carney, Nita Lowey, ObamaCare, Senate, Ted Cruz, Tom Harkin |
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Yes, the tea party Republicans should hang a “Mission Accomplished” banner across the House of Representatives. They could flank it with large portraits of Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican who ousted John Boehner as speaker of the House in an unacknowledged coup. The right-wing extremists got exactly what they wanted. Now, what will the country do about it?
In blundering into a shutdown, Boehner has lost any claim to authority. Helpfully, the Speaker-in-Name-Only underscored this fact himself on the House floor when he mocked the way President Obama talked. Does anyone remember a real speaker going to the well of the House and making fun of a president of the United States? Can anyone now doubt who is responsible for Washington’s dysfunction? The Republican right still does not accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. That is why the government shut down.
The issue here is not that Congress failed to reach a “compromise.” The Democrats already have compromised, lopping some $70 billion [this number has been updated from an earlier version] off their budget proposal, to the dismay of many liberals. That was meaningless to a tea party crowd that seems to care not a whit about the deficit, despite its fulsome talk. It will be satisfied only if Congress denies heath-care coverage to some 25 million Americans, which is what “repealing Obamacare” really means.
It needs to be said over and over as long as this stupid and artificial crisis brewed by the tea party continues: Financing the government in a normal way and avoiding a shutdown should not be seen as a “concession.” Making sure the government pays its debt is not a “concession.” It’s what we expect from a normal, well-functioning, constitutional system. It’s what we expect from responsible stewards of our great experiment. The extremists who have taken over the House do not believe in a normal, constitutional system. They believe only in power.
There’s a profound irony here, since no one talks more about the Constitution than the tea party. Before the Civil War, John C. Calhoun and a variety of nullifiers and future secessionists spoke incessantly about the Constitution, too. We know where that led.
In the normal course of things in a constitutional and democratic republic, parties win elections on the issues that matter to them. They pass laws or repeal them by majority vote. The tea party could not muster such a majority to repeal the Affordable Care Act because Democrats held the White House and the Senate in the 2012 elections. Lacking a majority, the extremists chose force. “Do what we want,” they said, “or we will render the country ungovernable.”
That’s what they have done. Everyone says Boehner knew better and did not want this outcome. But he was so fearful for his job that he let it happen.
My conservative colleague Michael Gerson had it exactly right this morning: “We are no longer seeing a revolt against the Republican leadership, or even against the Republican ‘establishment’; this revolt is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality.”
I would only add: This is also revolt against anyone who accepts majority rule and constitutional constraints.
The burden now is on Republicans who know how profoundly radical and, indeed, crazy the tea party has become. These genuine, non-radical conservatives know how irresponsible this shutdown is. They know that playing around with the debt ceiling later this month would be a profoundly un-patriotic act. “It’s a dead end,” Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said of the shutdown strategy. King, along with Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.), had the courage to stand up against the lunacy by voting against Boehner’s last in a series of craven proposals Monday night. Dent told CNN that as many as 200 Republicans were secretly hoping that there would be a vote on the Senate’s continuing resolution so the government could stay open. But if those Republicans exist, they are paralyzed, unwilling to stand up to the far right.
There is only one way for this to end: Republicans who know better need to tell the far right, “Enough.” They need to overcome their abject fear of Republicans who are under Cruz-control and their cheerleaders in Rush Limbaugh’s world. They need to exit the boulevard of self-inflicted wounds.
We now know where the tea party’s political experiment ends. If this shutdown does not end the tea party’s reign of intimidation, we will face one unnecessary crisis after another as the extremists keep ripping up the roots of our great constitutional system.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 1, 2013
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Tea Party | Affordable Care Act, Charlie Dent, John Boehner, ObamaCare, Peter King, Republicans, Ted Cruz |
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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
October 2, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Politics, Republicans | Affordable Care Act, Conservatives, Debt Ceiling, Default, GOP, Government Shutdown, ObamaCare, Tea-party |
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In July, when several far-right lawmakers started pushing a government-shutdown scheme in earnest, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who isn’t exactly a moderate, had the good sense to reject the idea as silly.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Burr said at the time. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”
I mention this, of course, because the North Carolina Republicans’ reasoned, sensible approach to extortion politics has apparently disappeared over the last two months.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who dubbed Cruz’s threat to shut down the government over Obamacare the “dumbest idea” he’d ever heard, said Congress shouldn’t give Obama a debt ceiling increase without attaching strings, and the president “is going to pay some price for it, which is a benefit for the American people.”
“I hope [an Obamacare] delay is either part of the next [continuing resolution] or I hope it’s part of the debt ceiling,” Burr said.
There are a couple of important angles to this. First, if anyone was inclined to give Burr points for being an adult in July, now is the time to kick yourself. What he’s describing is a dangerous extortion scheme in which radicalized lawmakers threaten to hurt the country on purpose unless Americans start losing health care benefits.
The fact that Burr didn’t want to threaten a government shutdown was nice, but the fact that he does want to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States is madness — the severity of a sovereign debt crisis is vastly more serious than a shutdown.
Second, Politico mentioned in passing that the issue here is Congress “giving Obama a debt ceiling increase.” It’s time for the political world to stop thinking this way — raising the statutory debt limit isn’t “giving” the president anything.
Indeed, the political establishment’s understanding of this issue has become more than a little twisted. To see Republicans voting for a debt ceiling increase as some kind of concession is the height of absurdity. For those who rationalize threatening deliberate harm to the nation, and for much of the media, the idea is that we’re witnessing some sort of trade — Democrats get a debt-ceiling increase, Republicans get a laundry list of goodies they can’t pass through the legislative process.
The problem with this is that it’s not sane.
The legislative branch has the power of the purse, and appropriates government spending. When that spending is outpaced by federal receipts, it’s up to the executive branch to borrow the difference. Under a ridiculous quirk in the U.S. system, the executive is only allowed to borrow the difference after Congress, which spent more than it took in, gives its authority to do so.
This is called the debt ceiling. The Obama administration needs to borrow the funds to pay the bills for the stuff Congress already bought. There’s no real reason for the system to work this way — most modern democracies have no use for a statutory debt limit — but for now, this is the messy process we’ve created for ourselves.
The point, of course, is that when Congress raises the debt ceiling, as it must, it’s not doing the White House a favor. It’s not some kind of concession or gesture of goodwill. It’s not increasing the debt or giving Obama a blank check or spending any money. It’s just extending a legal authority to pay the bills lawmakers already racked up. Period. Full stop.
So when it comes to “negotiations,” for Congress to ask the White House, “What do we get for raising the debt limit” is insane because on a substantive level, the question is gibberish.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 26, 2013
September 29, 2013
Posted by raemd95 |
Debt Ceiling, Government Shut Down, Republicans | Affordable Care Act, Congress, Conservatives, media, ObamaCare, Richard Burr, Ted Cruz |
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