A Fear Of Breaking “The Pledge”: Are Republicans And The Tea Party Serious?
This is not the Congress where I worked in the ’70s and ’80s. This is not the same caliber of leader, especially on the Republican side, that our country has been accustomed to over decades. In the past, people like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann were marginalized. They were not respected by their own party, let alone rewarded; they were relegated to the back bench.
It would have been a joke if someone predicted that a cable queen like Bachmann could raise $14 million for a House race or that South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson could raise over $2 million in a matter of weeks as an obscure member, after screaming at the president, “You lie!” at a State of the Union address. The notion that someone such as Bachmann would be so popular in polls and be in a position to win Iowa would have been unthinkable a few short years ago.
But more important than these personalities and their extreme positions is what they have done to the Republican party.
We have a unique opportunity to truly turn this nation around. President Obama, and it appears Speaker of the House John Boehner, were ready to truly change the direction of the country. In the past, I believe we could have made it work—with a Reagan, an O’Neill, a Mansfield, a Baker, a Dirksen. It is a long list.
But, sadly, the absolutism of no revenues—every tax cut, even temporary—is now permanent. Taxes can only go down… sort of like housing prices can only go up! Pledges to Grover Norquist are absurd, shortsighted, and counterproductive.
I truly wonder whether the extreme wing of the Republican Party wants to solve our problem or just play politics with it; is this just beat Obama and the democrats at all costs, the country be damned? Or is it an adherence to an ideology that is inflexible, a fear of breaking some “pledge?”
Regardless, the over $4 trillion budget fix is achievable—not popular—but achievable. It takes both parties to accept political responsibility. I wonder, though, if you asked a Tea Party member or a liberal democrat, “Would you sacrifice your seat in Congress to achieve real fiscal responsibility, to turn the nation around?” would they say “yes?” After all, why did they run for office in the first place? To be serious, to accomplish big things, I would hope.
A number of years ago a group of us were with Sen. Paul Sarbanes. He was retiring after a long and distinguished career in the House and Senate. One person asked him what was the biggest change he had seen in his 40 years. Sarbanes said that people come into office now with their minds made up; they are afraid to change or to listen to the other side. He pointed out that when he first came to the Senate, there used to be real debate on the issues of our time and that minds would be changed. There was a different spirit of cooperation and compromise and true listening. Relationships across the aisle were forged. There was give and take. There was an opportunity to come to an agreement without a total win-lose mentality.
If there ever was a time in our nation’s history to return to that spirit, it is now.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, July 13, 2011
Eric Cantor’s Slick Upper Lip: “I Want What I Want When I Want it”
Eric Cantor has perfected the strategic sneer.
It comes, frequently, when he answers a reporter’s question about something President Obama has said: The House majority leader’s lip curls up on the left side and a look of disgust washes over his face. This week, he has been coupling the sneer with lines such as:
“How in the world can you even accept that notion?”
And, “That is laughable on its face.”
And, “That doesn’t make sense. . . . That again is just nonsensical.”
And, “Come on — let us think about this.”
Cantor, who is establishing himself as the lead GOP negotiator with the White House as the Aug. 2 default deadline approaches, is answering calls for compromise with contempt. He shook his fist during a news conference Tuesday and said that Obama’s thinking is “unfathomable to me.” To Obama’s complaint that the wealthy are not sharing in the budget sacrifice, he scoffed: “There is plenty of so-called shared sacrifice.” Asked about Obama’s belief that people like him should pay more in taxes, Cantor retorts: “You know what? He can write a check any time he wants.”
He draws out the vowels in a style that is part southern, part smarty-pants. Had young Cantor spoken like this at his prep school in Richmond, the bigger boys may well have wiped that sneer off his face. Yet even then, Cantor was accustomed to having things his way. According to Cantor’s hometown Richmond Times-Dispatch, the quotation he chose to accompany his yearbook photo was “I want what I want when I want it.”
What Cantor wants now is power — and he is prepared to risk the full faith and credit of the United States to get it. In a primacy struggle with House Speaker John Boehner, he has done a deft job of aligning himself with Tea Party House members in opposition to any meaningful deal to resolve the debt. If the U.S. government defaults, it will have much to do with Cantor.
He pulled out of debt-limit talks with Vice President Biden. He shot down the outline of a compromise that Boehner attempted to negotiate. Now Cantor has essentially taken over talks with the White House, and he has tamped down any hint of conciliation.
On Monday, Boehner hinted that he could accept a tax-reform deal that brought “additional revenues to the federal government” — and his spokesman confirmed that the proposal would be “scored” by the Congressional Budget Office as increasing tax revenue. But Cantor was having none of it: “We are not raising taxes, so it has to be net revenue neutral.”
Cantor’s aides say he is merely reflecting his caucus. But Cantor, a veteran of a decade in the Capitol, surely knows that he is jettisoning the last chance in the next couple of years to make a serious dent in the national debt. The White House has so far offered up a tantalizing array of concessions — $4 trillion in budget cuts and overhauls of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – but Cantor has yet to offer anything but sneers.
He flashed the trademark facial expression even before taking his seat at a Monday news conference. Asked whether he would offer any concessions, Cantor responded by saying that the cuts he demanded from the White House were in fact concessions by him, too. “Nobody relishes the opportunity to go and cut these programs,” said the creator of the YouCut Web site that made budget-cutting into an online game. Cantor further said that it was a concession merely to avoid a government default.
The search for a Cantor concession continued. “In terms of shared sacrifice across the country, do you see that one as necessary?”
Cantor swung his arm over his chair back and raised his upper lip. “I think behind this notion of ‘We want shared sacrifice’ that they continue to say means, ‘We want to raise taxes,’ ” he said.
Claiming that there have been “concessions made already” by his side, Cantor was pressed to name some of them. “I don’t want to get into specifics now,” he said.
Leaving a House Republican caucus meeting Tuesday morning, Cantor approached the microphones, flashed the cameras a good-morning sneer and demanded to know “why in the world” Obama wants to increase taxes.
NBC’s Luke Russert asked what “sacred cows” Cantor would be willing to sacrifice. Cantor repeated his denunciation of Obama’s tax policy.
“Where do the Republicans feel pain here, though?” Russert persisted.
After a long and contemptuous day, the majority leader probably feels it most in his upper lip.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 12, 2011
Ideology Trumps Economics: Republicans’ Refusal To Raise Revenues Is Threatening The Economy With A Chaotic Default
There is a huge gap in logic at the heart of the Republican intransigence on a debt-ceiling deal, and President Obama helped to illuminate it on Monday.
The party claims, as an article of faith, if not evidence, that the government’s growing debt is the reason for persistent unemployment and economic stagnation. And yet Republicans are spurning the president’s compromise offers to reduce that debt by trillions over the next decade because he is sensibly insisting that any deal include some increase in tax revenue.
“Where are they?” Mr. Obama asked at his news conference. “I mean, this is what they claim would be the single biggest boost to business certainty and confidence. So what’s the holdup?”
The holdup, of course, is that Republicans are far more committed to the ideological goals of cutting government and taxes than they are committed to cutting the deficit. They rejected several compromise offers by the White House, even though any revenue increases would be far outweighed by spending cuts.
Republican rejectionism was on clear display Saturday night when John Boehner, the House speaker, was forced to abandon a plan he and the president had discussed to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.
The plan would have gone much too far in cutting discretionary spending and entitlements, taking too much money from the economy at a time when it desperately needs government investment. But it would have been better than the slashing and burning the Republicans have been demanding because it would have raised from $700 billion to $1 trillion in additional revenue beginning in 2013 by ending tax breaks and deductions for corporations and the rich, or by ending the Bush tax cuts for families making $250,000 or more.
The House Republican leader, Eric Cantor, insisted to Mr. Boehner that his members, shackled to antitax pledges, could not accept it, or anything similar. Now negotiators are trying to reach agreement on a deal to lower the deficit by $2 trillion or so over a decade. But the consequences for the economy and Americans’ lives would be just as disastrous if all of those “savings” come out of essential government programs, with no additional revenue.
Mr. Boehner’s refusal to push back against his party’s ideologues is only feeding their worst impulses. Many House Republicans have gone even further than Mr. Cantor and have rejected any deal that raises the debt ceiling, whether it contains revenue increases or not.
Representative Michele Bachmann and Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman, airily and irresponsibly insist that the government will find some other way to pay its bills. That’s dangerous nonsense. And as the president forcefully noted, a default could propel interest rates skyward, throw millions more Americans out of work, and create another recession.
It was good to see Mr. Obama challenging the Republicans’ illogic and pushing them to make a deal before it’s too late. But we fear the sort of deal he is willing to consider, based overwhelmingly on spending cuts, could still consign the country to more years of economic stagnation.
The president spoke about the need to create an infrastructure bank, to maintain unemployment benefits, and to protect the elderly and the poor. But keeping those goals will be nearly impossible with a debt deal that cuts three times as much spending as it raises revenue. A balanced plan, like the one Senator Kent Conrad is circulating among Senate Democrats, would cut spending and raise revenue equally, and would make it possible to pay for programs that kick-start the economy.
Americans need to hear the hard economic truth that there is no way to both cut the deficit and revive the economy without finding additional sources of revenue. As the president himself said on Monday, “If not now, when?”
By: Editorial, The New York Times, July 11, 2011
A False Equivalency: Don’t Blame ‘Both Sides’ For Debt Impasse
Washington has many lazy habits, and one of the worst is a reflexive tendency to see equivalence where none exists. Hence the nonsense, being peddled by politicians and commentators who should know better, that “both sides” are equally at fault in the deadlocked talks over the debt ceiling.
This is patently false. The truth is that Democrats have made clear they are open to a compromise deal on budget cuts and revenue increases. Republicans have made clear they are not.
Put another way, Democrats reacted to the “grand bargain” proposed by President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner by squawking, complaining and highlighting elements they didn’t like. This is known throughout the world as the way to begin a process of negotiation.
Republicans, by contrast, answered with a definitive “no” and then covered their ears. Given the looming Aug. 2 deadline for default if the debt ceiling is not raised, the proper term for this approach is blackmail.
Yet the “both sides are to blame” narrative somehow gained currency after Boehner announced Saturday that House Republicans would not support any increase in revenue, period. A false equivalence was drawn between the absolute Republican rejection of “revenue-positive” tax reform and the less-than-absolute Democratic opposition to “benefit cuts” in Medicare and Social Security.
The bogus story line is that the radical right-wing base of the GOP and the radical left-wing base of the Democratic Party are equally to blame for sinking the deal.
Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that in the Obama-Boehner proposal, there would be roughly three dollars’ worth of budget cuts for every dollar of new revenue. Don’t pause to ask whether it makes sense to slash government spending when the economy is still sputtering out of the worst recession in decades. Instead, focus narrowly on the politics of the deal.
It is true that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi howled like a blindsided politician when she learned that entitlement programs were on the table. But her objections — and those of Democrats in general — are philosophical and tactical, not absolute.
Progressives understand that Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable on their current trajectories; in the long term, both must have their revenue and costs brought into balance. Pelosi’s position is that each program should be addressed with an eye toward sustainability — not as a part of a last-minute deal for a hike in the debt ceiling that covers us for two or three years.
It’s also true that Democrats believe they can win back a passel of House seats next year by highlighting the GOP plan to convert Medicare into a voucher program. They don’t want Republicans to be able to point and say, “See, the Democrats want to cut Medicare, too.”
There’s nothing in these Democratic objections, however, that couldn’t be creatively finessed. You can claim you haven’t actually “cut” a benefit, for example, if what you’ve done is restrained the rate at which its cost will grow. You can offset spending with new revenue, and you can do so in a way that gives low-income taxpayers a break. Democrats left the door open and these options could have been explored.
The story on the Republican side is entirely different. There are ways to finesse a “no new taxes” pledge, too. Instead of raising tax rates, you close loopholes in the name of reform; you add an enhancement here, a “user fee” there, and you can manage to get the revenue you need and still claim you haven’t voted to raise taxes.
But Republicans are taking the position that not a cent of new revenue can be raised, no matter the euphemism. Some Democrats, yes, are being scratchy and cantankerous. But Republicans are refusing to negotiate at all. That’s not the same thing.
I understand why President Obama, in his news conference Monday, chided “each side” for taking a “maximalist position.” For political and practical reasons, it’s advantageous for him to be seen as an honest broker.
Meanwhile, though, the clock ticks toward Aug. 2 and the possibility of a catastrophic default becomes more real. And no one should be confused about what the president confronts: On one side, grousing and grumbling. On the other, a brick wall.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 11, 2011
“Norquistism”: Republican Zeal Runs Amok
To watch Republicans in action today, in Washington and in legislatures around the country, is to be reminded of Casey Stengel’s amazed query to the 1962 Mets, whom he had the cosmic misfortune to manage: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
In California, in Minnesota and here on Capitol Hill, Republican legislators in divided governments seem incapable of taking half or even three-fourths of a loaf — of recognizing when they’ve won. By holding out for more when they’ve already attained plenty, they run the risk of coming away with nothing for themselves or inflicting avoidable calamity on everyone else. As Daniel Bell once said of American socialists, they act as if they’re in but not of the world.
In California, for instance, where Republicans hold just over a third of the seats in each legislative house — enough to block any tax increase, which requires two-thirds support — Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown told reporters on June 16 that he was willing to submit to voters proposals to reduce both state pensions and business regulations if Republican lawmakers agreed to let voters also decide whether to extend some tax increases. Brown’s goal was to avoid having to cut more deeply into spending on schools, universities and medical care. California businesses, which have complained of overregulation for decades, were hot for the deal, but the
Republicans refused to budge. In consequence, in the state budget passed last week, without the tax extensions, the state’s public universities will have to raise tuition roughly 10 percent (on top of another 10 percent increase that will take effect in September); and the poor will pay more for medical care. Pensions and regulations will remain unrevised.
What makes the California Republicans’ intransigence so loony — “idiotic” is, I think, not too strong a term — is that they are likely to lose legislative seats as soon as next year as a result of redistricting, and they are sure to lose legislative seats over the next decade because of their ongoing estrangement of the state’s Latino voters. When Republicans drop beneath one-third representation in the statehouse, Democrats will be able to raise taxes without their support. In other words, this may well have been Republicans’ last chance to extract concessions they considered vital. And they blew it off.
What we have here is an extreme world view — let’s call it Norquistism — that ensures impasse, paralysis or perverse outcomes whenever control of government is divided. It’s the doctrine preached by GOP activist and lobbyist Grover Norquist, who trots around the country collecting pledges from GOP candidates and elected officials that commit them to never, ever raise taxes, no matter what they may be offered in return. In Minnesota, a state with a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature, Gov. Mark Dayton sought to raise taxes on only the relative handful of Minnesotans with annual incomes in excess of $1 million. The legislature opposed that, insisting on cuts (including to services for those with disabilities) that Dayton wouldn’t countenance. Absent a budget, most state services in Minnesota closed down on July 1; it’s not clear when, or how, some compromise can be reached to reopen the state.
In the nation’s capital, Republicans also seem to have lost their capacity for compromise — even when that compromise looks to be a GOP victory. Senate Republicans, for instance, have been urging President Obama since before he took office to finalize three trade accords — with South Korea, Colombia and Panama — and bring them before Congress. Obama has now done so, asking in return only that Republicans approve the renewal of Trade Adjustment Assistance, a program that aids workers who lose their jobs as a result of these kinds of trade deals. But Republicans are balking — boycotting last week’s meeting of the Senate Finance Committee at which these treaties were to be taken up — because they don’t like TAA. This is hardly a major program, mind you, but the GOP’s loathing of any program that provides government assistance to workers (who really shouldn’t need any assistance, as free trade is good for us all) has eclipsed its long-term commitment to American corporate priorities.
When zeal runs amok, the sense of proportion suffers. Today’s Republicans remind me of some leaders of the American Communist Party whom I got to know decades ago, after they’d left the fold. “We believed in the party line, in its infallibility, so completely,” one ex-commie told me, “that we’d forget the larger strategy for the momentary tactic.” So it was with Communists of yore; so it is with Republicans today.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 5, 2011
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