“Boehner Might Be A Pragmatist, But He’s No Moderate”: The Budget Deal Has Passed, But Don’t Hold Your Breath For Bipartisanship
For the first time in months, Washington seems…optimistic. Not only did House Republicans pass the budget deal brokered by Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and his counterpart in the Senate, Senator Patty Murray, but Speaker John Boehner made news with a small Howard Beale moment:
“Frankly I think they’re misleading their followers. I think they’re pushing our members in places where they want to be. And frankly I just think they’ve lost all credibility,” he told reporters at his weekly press conference Thursday. “There comes a point when people step over the line. When you criticize something and you have no idea what you’re criticizing, it undermines your credibility.” […]
“You know, they pushed us into this fight to defund Obamacare and shut down the government,” he said. “It wasn’t exactly the strategy I had in mind. But if you recall, the day before the government re-opened, one of the people at one of these groups stood up and said, ‘well we never really thought it would work.’ Are you kidding me?”
Asked if he thinks the groups should “stand down,” Boehner said, “I don’t care what they do.”
This looks like the establishment backlash we expected during the shutdown fight, or—as Molly Ball put it for The Atlantic—“House leaders stopped trying to get along with the enforcers of an impossible conservative standard and started fighting back.”
Now, the speculation is that, perhaps, Boehner is prepared to buck Tea Party Republicans on other issues. Immigration activists, for example, are hopeful that this development could change the calculus for reform, and give Boehner the room he needs to pass a bill with votes from pragmatic Republicans—who have an agenda they want to accomplish—and Democrats. Indeed, there’s the potential for a whole rush of activity around issues where Democrats and Republicans can come to narrow agreement, from an extension of unemployment insurance to the Employee Non-Discrimination Act.
The problem is that, aside from this budget deal, it doesn’t look like Boehner has broken from conservatives on much at all. In that same press conference, for instance, he repeated conservative boilerplate on repealing the Affordable Care Act. And afterwards he went to the House floor and blocked a vote on extending emergency unemployment benefits. Likewise, there’s no real indication that he’s changed his mind on the EDNA or unemployment insurance. The House Speaker might be a pragmatist, but he isn’t a moderate.
Earlier this year, Boehner bucked conservatives by violating the “Hastert rule”—the faux requirement that all legislation passed by the House have support by a majority of the majority—to pass a deal on the fiscal cliff, authorize aid for Hurricane Sandy, and renew the Violence Against Women Act. The prediction was that this could be the new normal, and that Boehner could restore a modicum of sanity to the House by refusing to rely on Republican votes for legislation.
What followed, instead, was a year of inaction, culminating in a government shutdown and a stand-off over the fiscal cliff.
All of this is to say that we shouldn’t hold our breath about Boehner and his “new” approach. The Ryan-Murray deal was a necessity: Not only does it preclude Tea Party conservatives from forcing another shutdown, but it preserves most of the sequester and hands Republicans a solid victory.
As for the other agenda items? Most Republicans don’t want them and there’s no reason for Boehner to go against the tide.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, December 13, 2013
“The Impoverished Republican Poverty Agenda”: Republicans Don’t Know Where They Are Headed Or What They Can Sell
What are Republicans for? We know they are against health-care reform. They voted en masse against it, shut down the government to stop it and have voted nearly 50 times to defund it. We know they are against government spending. They’ve voted for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s draconian budgets, which would slash spending so deeply that even some Republicans are in increasingly open revolt. But those budgets don’t go anywhere. So what do Republicans propose that actually addresses the challenges facing the nation or its people?
Republican leaders are clearly concerned that their policy house is largely vacant. In his dissection of the lost 2012 campaign, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus noted that Republicans suffer a “major deficiency” – the “perception that the GOP does not care about people.” He urged a renewed effort to become “the champion of those who seek to climb the economic ladder.”
All that advice was lost in the anti-Obama venom that unifies Republicans. But after the government shutdown sent Republican poll numbers plummeting to new depths, a new effort – or at least a new public relations push – has been launched. The early reports make the administration’s botched health-care takeoff look smooth by comparison.
Politico noted that Republicans trooping into House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s office received a paper titled “Agenda 2014.” The paper was blank. As of now, Politico reported, details are scant, but Republicans seem to be focused more on identifying the problems than the solutions. “The beginning should always be what are the problems we’re trying to fix,” said Republican policy chair James Lankford (Okla). Or as a GOP aide involved in the planning sessions was quoted: “Cantor wants to take us in a new direction, which is good. The problem is that we don’t know where we are headed, and we don’t know what we can sell to our members.”
Luckily, Cantor isn’t the only game in town. The Post published an adoring article on Ryan, Mitt Romney’s former running mate. The Post reported that Ryan and his staff have been “quietly” visiting “inner-city neighborhoods” and conservative think tanks, looking for creative ways to address poverty that can replace the “bureaucratic top-down anti-poverty programs” that Ryan’s budget would gut.
But the new ideas can’t include any new taxes or new spending – Ryan is staunchly against both. That doesn’t leave much. According to The Post, “his idea of a war on poverty so far relies heavily on promoting volunteerism and encouraging work through existing federal programs, including the tax code.” He’s repackaging private-school vouchers. And Ryan assumes that charity might take the place of the food stamps he’s cutting. “You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul,” he told a Heritage Foundation forum. “Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people.” Prayer is good, but when it comes to public policies, as The Post story concluded, “Ryan’s speeches have been light on specifics.”
Some of those “specifics” are being offered by the tea party. Ryan and Cantor may be casting about for ways to look compassionate, but the tea party remains on the hunt. Politico detailed that Rep. Tim Heulskamp (Kan.) and a group of conservatives are gearing up for yet another assault on health-care reform. Assuming that the budget negotiations don’t reach an agreement by the December deadline, Congress will have to pass a continuing resolution by mid-January to keep the government open and funded. Huelskamp and his allies think that’s a perfect time to cut $20 billion out of Medicaid and transfer it to the Pentagon. That would eliminate Medicaid expansion – the one part of Obamacare that is working well – and placate Republicans worried about the cuts the military faces next year.
Cut health protection for the working poor and give the money to a Pentagon that is the largest center of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government? Or slash food stamps while fending off every effort to close the tax dodges that allow companies like General Electric to avoid paying any taxes? The Republican “war on poverty” looks a lot like a war on the poor. It will take a lot of charity and volunteers and a lot more than “messaging” and “rebranding” to erase that indelible “deficiency.”
By: Katrina vandel Heuvel, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 26, 2013
“Notorious Republican Prevaricators”: The Wrong Message, The Wrong Messengers
Over the last five or six years, Republicans have gone after President Obama with quite a bit of ferocity, launching attacks that most Americans have no doubt heard many times. Indeed, we can recite them from memory: Obama’s a radical socialist, power-mad tyrant who hates American traditions, wants to grab your guns, and is too dumb to speak without a teleprompter.
Putting aside whether that critique is in any way sane, Republicans generally haven’t had too much to say about President Obama’s trustworthiness. That changed rather dramatically in recent weeks, as we learned that instead of 100% of Americans gaining health care coverage or keeping the health insurance they like, about 95% of Americans will gain health care coverage or keep the health insurance they like.
And this has led some poor messengers to deliver an odd message. Here, for example, is Dick Cheney:
In an interview with Larry King, former Vice President Dick Cheney said that President Obama’s famous “If you like your plan, you can keep it” remark was a lie that the president repeated “over and over and over again.”
And here’s Mitt Romney:
Republican Mitt Romney is accusing President Barack Obama of being “dishonest” about his health care law…. In an interview on “CBS This Morning,” Friday, Romney said several times that Obama had been “dishonest.”
And here’s Paul Ryan:
“The next time you have a famous politician coming through Iowa, breezing through the towns, talking about big government, let’s be a little more skeptical,” Ryan said after berating President Barack Obama and Democrats for the troubled rollout of the health-care law.
Look, reasonable people can disagree about the severity of the “if you like your plan…” claim. It strikes me as an oversimplification of a complex policy, a position folks realized at the time was more of a shorthand than a 100% guarantee for literally every consumer in the nation, but if Obama’s critics want to consider it the Most Important Lie Ever Told, that’s up to them.
But listening to Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Paul Ryan talk about honesty, credibility, and the need for skepticism is just a bit too much. Romney broke new ground as one of the most brazenly mendacious politicians of his generation; Ryan’s fondness for falsehoods is extraordinary even in a Congress where dishonesty is the norm; and Dick Cheney is, well, Dick Cheney.
Americans shouldn’t turn to Lance Armstrong for wisdom on performance-enhancing drugs in sports; we shouldn’t turn to Miley Cyrus for guidance on public modesty; and we shouldn’t turn to Cheney, Romney, and Ryan for lectures on honesty in politics. It’s not complicated: they have no credibility because they have a nasty habit for saying things that aren’t true.
It’s a subjective question and your mileage may vary, but on balance, I’d say President Obama’s track record on telling the truth has been very strong. Fair-minded observers can debate the efficacy of his agenda and the merit of his ideas, but it’s difficult for even the fiercest Obama detractor to say the president has established a track record of saying one thing and doing another, making promises he has no intention of keeping, or flat out lying.
He’s made predictions that haven’t panned out, and he’s changed direction based on circumstances, but thinking about some of the notable presidential whoppers, Obama hasn’t exactly offered his critics anything comparable to “Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa,” “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” or perhaps most alarmingly, “We did not – repeat, did not – trade weapons or anything else for hostages.”
So maybe notorious Republican prevaricators can pick something else to focus on?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 18, 2013
“It’s Still Extortion For The Sake Of Extortion”: Republicans Are Fighting For The Future Blackmail
We have two interesting theories today about what’s happening in the House. One is from Neil Irwin, who posits that it’s all about a sunk costs fallacy — Republicans are mistakenly continuing to ask for things they can’t get because that’s the only way to justify what they’ve already given up by following their current strategy. The other theory, well-articulated by Greg Sargent, Jonathan Chait and Danny Vinik, is that Republicans are still fighting for the principle of extortion.
I strongly agree with the latter theory — way back in May, I argued that radical Republicans were fighting over the principle of extortion for the sake of extortion:
[I]t’s not really about Republicans demanding debt reduction and using the best leverage they have available to get it. Nor is it about Republicans demanding tax reform — their other possible demand — and using the best leverage they have to get it.
No, it’s the other way around. The House crazy caucus is demanding not debt reduction, not spending cuts, not budget balancing, but blackmail itself. That’s really the demand: The speaker and House Republican leaders absolutely must use the debt limit as extortion. What should they use it to get? Apparently, that’s pretty much up for grabs, as long as it seems really, really, big — which probably comes down to meaning that the Democrats really, really don’t like it.
It shows up all the time. For example, today Speaker John Boehner has pulled a delay of the medical-device tax from his latest attempt to put together a package, because the radicals weren’t happy with it. Yes, they have a plausible reason. But my guess is that Democrats have indicated they really wouldn’t mind eliminating that tax, and so it’s no longer a ransom worth asking; asking for something the Democrats only mildly oppose (or don’t oppose at all) misses the whole point of why they’re doing what they’re doing. “Extortion for the sake of extortion” certainly seems to fit with the wild GOP swings from Obamacare, to spending, to contraception, to who knows next as the next reason for the shutdown and debt limit threat.
The reason all of this matters, still, is because if it’s just a sunk costs error then the costs for Democrats in bailing them out are limited to whatever it is they give up.
However, if it’s extortion, then any perceived success establishes an incentive for future use.
The key, by the way, is perceived success. So it matters a lot whether Republicans believe that they actually are getting something whenever the final deal happens — much more than whether, in some objective sense, they actually did get anything.
It’s hard to read exactly who is thinking what while these things are going on. But if it really is extortion for the sake of extortion, at least for the radicals, then there’s a very strong incentive to Democrats to hang very tough.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, October 15, 2013
“The Party Making No Demands”: Republicans Just Can’t Seem To Recognize Reality
Charles Krauthammer sticks to his party’s script in his new column this morning, complaining about President Obama’s “refusal to compromise or even negotiate.” It got me thinking about how best to explain to conservatives why this makes so little sense.
Maybe it’s time to flip the script to better illustrate the point. After all, when it comes to funding the government and protecting the integrity of the full faith and credit of the United States, we’re describing an inherently cooperative process — the White House needs Congress to pass legislation, the Congress needs a president to sign the legislation. One without the other doesn’t work.
With this mind, imagine a hypothetical.
Let’s say President Obama, feeling good after winning re-election fairly easily, adopted an overly confident posture with lawmakers. He started boasting about the fact that his approval rating is four times higher than Congress’ approval rating; his policy agenda enjoys broader public support than Republicans’ policy agenda; and he decided it’s time they start rewarding him before he considered engaging in basic governance.
“Sure,” Obama said to Republicans in this imaginary scenario, “I’ll sign the spending measures to prevent a government shutdown, but first you have to raise taxes on the wealthy. And end the sequestration policy. And pass comprehensive immigration reform. And approve universal background checks. The American people are with me, so I expect you to compromise and negotiate with me on these matters.”
The president then said to GOP lawmakers, “And sure, I’ll sign a bill to raise the debt limit, paying the bills you already piled up, but I’m not ready to sign a ‘clean’ bill. Instead, I also expect Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill, a public option for the health care system, universal pre-K, and billions in infrastructure investments. If you refuse, I’ll have no choice but to tell the public you refuse to compromise and negotiate.”
Much of the political establishment has come to accept a certain frame: the White House is going to have to accept some concessions to make congressional Republicans happy. Obama won’t like it, but voters did elect a House GOP majority.
What I’m suggesting is that this assumption is incomplete. No one seems to question, or even consider in passing, what Republicans will be asked to do to make the White House happy. Boehner & Co. won’t like it, but voters did elect a Democratic president.
Of course, the point of this apparently silly hypothetical is to help Krauthammer and others who share his ideology understand a basic truth: Obama isn’t making any demands. He’s offered no threats. There is no presidential wish list, filled with progressive goodies — unrelated to the budget or the debt ceiling — that Obama expects Congress to pass before the president fulfills his duties.
This notion that Obama “refuses to compromise or even negotiate” isn’t just deliberately misleading; it’s demonstrably silly. If the president was making extravagant demands, threatening to veto every bill lacking liberal treats, Republicans and their pundits would have a point.
But until then, can we at least try to recognize reality as it exists?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 4, 2013
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