“Hollowness Of GOP Arguments”: Where Was Republicans’ Concern for “Political Norms” When They Took The Debt Ceiling Hostage?
Else where on this site, Eric Posner argues that conservatives should celebrate President Obama’s immigration actions because they “may modify political norms that control what the president can do.” The idea, which will be familiar to everyone following the contretemps surrounding Obama’s immigration policy, is that Republicans will eventually be able to marshall the same powers Obama is asserting to more conservative ends.
But near the end of the article, Posner modifies his argument by observing that Obama didn’t actually create any new norms last week at all. Rather, he may have revived a long-dormant conservative inclination to “undermine the regulatory system itself,” from within the executive branch, by pushing the envelope of executive power. We’ve already been down this road before—only before, Republicans were at the wheel.
This is a crucial insight. You can’t understanding the shadowboxing over Obama’s immigration moves if you don’t recognize it as shadowboxing. To nearly a person, the conservatives complaining about the procedural implications of Obama’s actions are expressing substantive or political disapproval through other channels. The conservatives tenting their fingers, anticipating all the discretion a Republican president will use, would likewise have found reasons to support those acts of discretion whether Obama had acted unilaterally on immigration or not.
Two years ago, unilateral suspension of Obamacare requirements sat high on Mitt Romney’s 2012 agenda and Republicans loved it. They never considered it a threat to the right-size of the legislative branch, or worried that Mitt Romney was promising to exercise imperial powers.
Romney didn’t win, and thus his plan to dismantle Obamacare from within the executive branch never came to pass. But we don’t need to refer back to hypotheticals to expose the hollowness of precedential arguments like these. Three years ago, Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum identified several real instances in which Republicans ”figured out that old traditions are just that: traditions. There’s no law that says you can’t change them.”
Most of the examples are pretty arcane, and many evince a party committed to purpose, willing to use the rules to their advantage to win elections and shape policy, rather than a party contemptuous of democratic processes.
But the big glaring exception in all this, and the one that really underscores the argument that an abiding concern for traditions doesn’t really drive conservative opposition to Obama’s deportation relief, is the weaponization of the debt limit.
There, the precedent, and the danger to the constitutional order, was actually quite clear. Republicans in 2011 (and again, to less effect, in 2013) attempted to leverage their control over half of the legislature, to impose their substantive preferences on a Democratic president and the majority party in the Senate by using the threat economic calamity as a bargaining chip. To borrow from the right today, we had a situation in which the speaker of the House tried to usurp the Senate’s agenda-setting power and the president’s plenary power to determine which laws to sign and which to veto, by laying out an unprecedented choice between a right-wing vision without popular support, and default on the national debt.
The gambit paid off exquisitely in 2011 with the signing of the Budget Control Act, which brought us the indiscriminate spending controls of sequestration.
I don’t think there’s any way you can argue that Obama would’ve signed the BCA if you take the debt limit hostage-taking out of the equation. Boehner used the lawful powers at his disposal to settle a big fight over federal spending by fiat—remember the Boehner Rule?—except that since the legislature doesn’t enforce laws, the only way he could accomplish this was to threaten immense damage to the national and global economies as the price of non-compliance.
And it worked! It worked so well that he tried it again after Republicans lost the 2012 elections, by which point Obama had learned that Boehner’s leverage was actually illusory.
I think the Budget Control Act is a terrible law, and I think the precedent Boehner wanted to set would’ve been disastrous if it had taken hold. Fortunately, our political system proved resilient enough to prevent Republicans from turning this kind of brinksmanship into a matter of routine, and for that reason we don’t need to relitigate the normative questions Boehner raised over two-plus years of debt limit brinksmanship.
But if you dip into the archives at National Review—where we can now read about Obama’s similarity to Latin American military dictators—or into Ross Douthat’s old New York Times columns, which today center on the question of whether Obama is more like Caesar or a tin-pot caudillo—you’ll find that the right was much, much more concerned about whether Republicans were making wise tactical moves in debt limit negotiations, or whether conservatives would pocket satisfactory substantive concessions, in what was essentially a legislative mugging, than in questions of precedent.
Separation of powers questions almost never creeped in. Because conservatives were basically happy with what Republicans were setting out to accomplish.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, November 24, 2014
“Attack Of The Right”: Ryan Budget A Disappointment To Conservatives
The conservative group Club for Growth said Wednesday that a Republican House budget plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) is a “disappointment” to fiscal conservatives that falls short of making necessary cuts to balance the nation’s budget.
The group’s president said in a statement that Ryan’s plan does not put the country on a path to chop deficits quickly enough.
Chris Chocola also complained that that the budget largely waives massive cuts that are set to go into effect in January as a consequence for the failure of Congress’s special deficit reduction “supercommittee.”
According to the Budget Control Act — the hard-fought law that raised the nation’s debt ceiling over the summer — failure of the supercommittee was to trigger about $1.2 trillion in cuts over the next decade, split between military and domestic spending.
In Ryan’s budget, the so-called sequester–deeply unpopular to Republicans because of its powerful hit to defense–would be replaced. Tackling only the first year of the cuts—about $110 billion—his budget calls for instructing Congressional committees to come up with $18 billion in trims the first year and $116 billion over five years.
“It is hard to have confidence that our long-term fiscal challenges will be met responsibly when the same Congress that passed the Budget Control Act wants to ignore it less than one year later. On balance, the Ryan Budget is a disappointment for fiscal conservatives,” Chocola said in a statement.
Ryan’s budget also seeks to eliminate deficits by 2040. The Club for Growth has called for a budget that balances within the decade. Chocola said the budget contains “several important reforms and pro-growth policies” but is not enough.
“The Club for Growth urges Republicans to support a budget that balances in the near future and complies with the Budget Control Act,” he said.
The attack from the right comes as Ryan is facing a far more vigorous outcry from Democrats—who believe this plan slashes programs for the poor and elderly even while cutting taxes for the wealthy.
They have also complained that the Ryan plan slices agency budgets by $18 billion more than a year-long cap agreed to in the debt deal—a key concession made to conservatives whom Ryan will need to get his budget plan through the House.
With Democrats unified against Ryan’s plan, the Club for Growth statement could pose problems for its passage in the House if it persuades the GOP’s restive caucus to waver in its support.
Some centrist Republicans are also anxious about Ryan’s plan—fearful it will set the House on a path to another nasty clash with the Senate just weeks before the November election.
By: Rosalind S. Helderman, The Washington Post, March 21, 2012
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