“Republican Collapse”: They Picked A Goal They Couldn’t Achieve And A Means They Couldn’t Sustain
Congress has finally worked out a deal to end the government shutdown and dodge default, but not before the Republican Party demonstrated to Americans just how conflicted and dangerous it is.
Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, this week described our current Congress as a greater danger to national security than Al Qaeda, writing, “We don’t tend to talk about Congress as — at this stage — what it plainly is: the clearest and most present danger in the world to the national security of the United States.”
That is what the G.O.P.-led House has brought us. Conservatives outside the chamber know defeat when they see it, and want to live to fight another day. But they beat their chests in vain as their laments fall on the deaf ears of the far-right political death squads.
On Tuesday, the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial pages blasted:
“This is the quality of thinking — or lack thereof — that has afflicted many GOP conservatives from the beginning of this budget showdown. They picked a goal they couldn’t achieve in trying to defund ObamaCare from one House of Congress, and then they picked a means they couldn’t sustain politically by pursuing a long government shutdown and threatening to blow through the debt limit.”
Senator John McCain said this week, “Republicans have to understand we have lost this battle, as I predicted weeks ago, that we would not be able to win because we were demanding something that was not achievable.”
Senator Lindsey Graham put it more bluntly: “We really did go too far. We screwed up.”
But, far-right elements of the House cannot be reasoned with. They prefer to go down in a blaze of glory — or at least take the country down in one.
And arguably no one is more the face of this disaster than Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, labeled by one New York Republican representative, Peter King, as a “fraud” and “false prophet,” who helped orchestrate it.
The Houston Chronicle editorial board on Tuesday took the extraordinary step of trying to withdraw its endorsement of Cruz, an endorsement that no doubt helped get him elected. An editorial posted to the paper’s Web site began, “Does anyone else miss Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison?”, the senator Cruz replaced. It went on:
“When we endorsed Ted Cruz in last November’s general election, we did so with many reservations and at least one specific recommendation — that he follow Hutchison’s example in his conduct as a senator. Obviously, he has not done so. Cruz has been part of the problem in specific situations where Hutchison would have been part of the solution.”
It seems everyone is waking up to what a disaster this current Republican contingent of extremists has become and how poisonous they are to the functioning of our democracy. Better late than never, I suppose.
Cruz’s favorable ratings are underwater in Pew’s, Gallup’s, Fox News’ and Quinnipiac’s polling.
But then, Cruz doesn’t put much stake in polls, with their pesky numbers.
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll taken last week, views of the Republican Party sank to record lows and 70 percent of respondents thought Republicans in Congress were putting their own political agenda ahead of what was good for the country.
The poll also found that negative feelings about the Tea Party had risen, with 47 percent saying they had negative feelings about the group, including 34 percent who described their feelings as “very negative.” Just 21 percent of Americans now say they feel positive about the group.
But when Cruz was asked Friday about the poll, he dismissed it as having a problematic methodology. He said: “If you seek out liberal Obama supporters and ask them their views, they’re going to tell you they’re liberal Obama supporters. That’s not reflective of where this country is.” In fact, it is Cruz’s methodology that is flawed. His grandiloquence may well be the undoing of the Grand Old Party.
According to a Pew Research report released Tuesday:
“A record-high 74% of registered voters now say that most members of Congress should not be reelected in 2014 (just 18% say they should). By comparison, at similar points in both the 2010 and 2006 midterm cycles only about half of registered voters wanted to see most representatives replaced.”
The report also found:
“An early read of voter preferences for the 2014 midterm shows that the Democrats have a six-point edge: 49% of registered voters say they would vote for or lean toward voting for the Democratic candidate in their district, while 43% support or lean toward the Republican candidate.”
Republicans terribly misplayed a weak hand on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling. There was never any chance of success other than scaring the president and the Democrats into caving. President Obama and Harry Reid called their bluff and they were left with no real options.
This is an embarrassment for the country, yes, but it’s also an embarrassment for the Republican Party that lays bare their motives, tactics and intention. It may not be so easy for voters to forget this come next November.
As the conservative Matt Drudge tweeted on Wednesday: “Speaker Pelosi Part 2: Opening Jan 5, 2015.” If only.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 16, 2013
“Standing Wrong”: Old Conservatives Can’t Learn New Tricks
If President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats wanted to maximize the political advantage they’re getting from the shutdown/default crisis, they’d agree to at least one part of the short-term deals Republicans have offered, raising the debt ceiling for only six weeks at a time. Then we’d have one default crisis after another, and the standing of the GOP would keep on its downward trajectory until—let’s just pick a date at random here—November 2014. But Republicans won’t do that; they’re now insisting (and good for them) that the deal has to extend at least a year into the future so we don’t have to keep going through this. If they get that deal, though, the issue will fade and voters could start to forget how reckless Republicans have been.
They could forget, but I’m guessing Republicans won’t let them. It isn’t as though the ultimate conclusion of this crisis is going to result in a chastened GOP, ready to be reasonable and assure the public it can govern responsibly. The Republicans are falling fast, but their problems could be just beginning.
That’s because the people driving this crisis are still going to be the loudest voices in the party even after it ends. They won’t get what they want, and when that happens they’ll make sure everyone knows that they were right all along. It’s critical to understand that for them, tactics and ideology are inseparable. You don’t compromise with Democrats because that means you’ve taken a position that is impure, contaminated with the stench of liberalism. Even a drop is too much, just as you wouldn’t put just a little rancid meat in your stew. And regardless of the substance of any issue, you don’t compromise because compromise is by definition betrayal, and compromise is failure. Taking the maximal position on everything, they sincerely believe, doesn’t just produce the best policy, it produces political victory.
Imagine it’s a few months from now, and a Republican representative running for re-election gets asked by a reporter whether he thinks the shutdown/default crisis of 2013 was a good idea and whether his party ought to use the same tactic again to try to achieve its policy goals. If he says no, there are people just waiting to charge him with being a traitor to the cause of conservatism, with the inevitable primary challenge from the right to follow. If he says yes, he’s just made his general-election opponent’s first television ad.
The Republican Party is in a bad place right now, as a series of polls released last week showed. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the party with a 24 percent favorability rating, an all-time low in that poll. Gallup has it at 28 percent, a record low in that poll as well. A poll from Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has the party at 26 percent. Among independent voters, the numbers are even worse.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in an echo of the “unskewed polls” nonsense from the 2012 election, Senator Ted Cruz has been telling conservatives to ignore it. He assures them that his own private polls show that Republicans are winning and will triumph if they keep “standing strong.” This is just what conservatives want to hear, which is why many of them are likely to believe it. So if and when a deal is struck, almost regardless of what it contains, they’ll still be convinced that complete victory could have been theirs if only their leaders had held out a little longer. You might have thought that unlike previous Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Cruz is no dummy. Yet tactically, he turns out to be just as foolhardy as the rest of them. He told Republicans to jump off a cliff, and they did.
To them, the tactical formula will always be the same. Was shutting down the government a disaster? It would have gone better if we had only been firmer in our demands and held out longer! Did a Democrat win the White House? We would have won if we had nominated a “true” conservative! Did your Senate candidate lose the general election? We’ll win next time if only we nominate someone more conservative!
They can’t learn from their mistakes if they don’t understand them. It isn’t hard to imagine that these activists and voters, who are so incredibly hard to satisfy, could produce a never-ending churn within the party. Believe it or not, the current Republican caucus is even more conservative than the one that swept into Washington in 2010. With a sufficient number of conservative states and congressional districts in no danger of falling to Democrats, the next election inevitably will see a new group of primary winners who are hailed as heroes, then eventually branded as traitors, to be replaced by a new cadre of even more doctrinaire right-wingers. Just look at what happened to Marco Rubio, who swept into the Senate as a Tea Party star but was cast out once he tried to achieve immigration reform. The personnel will keep changing even as the basic dynamic—a GOP establishment cowering in fear of newly minted members of Congress delighting in blowing up the system—remains the same.
A party can evolve in only one of two ways: It changes its people, or its people change. The first doesn’t seem likely. It’s hard to imagine a wave of Republican moderates winning over Tea Party candidates in primary elections. The second doesn’t seem likely either, since the people driving the Republican Party are the truest of true believers.
Anything can happen, of course. The Democratic Party turned to the right with the nomination of Bill Clinton in 1992 and won two presidential elections. On the other hand, Democrats also won control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 while being firmly opposed to an unpopular Republican president; no trimming of ideological sails was necessary. But those Democrats were capable of rationally assessing their political prospects. It’s possible to be ideologically extreme and still be careful about the fights you pick. Today’s conservative Republicans are both ideologically and tactically extremist; indeed, they see them as one and the same.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 15, 2013
“Was It Worth It?”: Republicans Are Now Competing With Shingles And Herpes For Popularity
Remember back when this government shutdown started and the Republicans had so many ambitions? They were going to defund ObamaCare, or at least delay the individual mandate for a year. They were going to introduce a “conscience clause” that would allow employers to deny their workers access to contraception. They were going to compel the administration to bypass the deliberative process at the State Department and preemptively license the Keystone XL pipeline. They were going to gut coal-ash regulations and expand offshore drilling. They were going to get fast track authority for tax reform legislation based on Rep. Paul Ryan’s principles. They were going to cripple the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and rip apart the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. They’d means-test Medicare and finally get tort reform. They had these dreams and many more besides.
But where are we now? All the various deals and negotiations have collapsed, and it’s down to a one-on-one between Reid and McConnell.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, spoke cordially by telephone but remained deadlocked. The stumbling block is over spending levels, the length of a debt ceiling increase and how long a temporary spending measure should keep the government open until a longer-term budget deal can be reached.
Translation: the talks are about how much new spending will be added to the sequester, how much the borrowing limit will be expanded, and how much time will be covered under the continuing resolution.
Further translation: the Republicans aren’t even asking for anything on their wish-list anymore.
Which is as it should be, because they never offered the Democrats a damn thing in return.
Republicans reacted with frustration over what they saw as the shifting demands of a Democratic leadership intent on inflicting maximum damage on adversaries sinking in the polls and increasingly isolated.
“The Democrats keep moving the goal posts,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and a lead negotiator, said Sunday. “Decisions within the Democratic conference are constantly changing.”
But Democratic aides said a deal taking shape among a bipartisan group of senators offered Democrats nothing beyond a reopening of the government and temporary assurances that the government will not default in the coming days. Those should be seen not as concessions but as basic obligations of Congress, they say.
How many times have I heard this president be criticized for giving the store away? I think all that talk is almost as delusional as the ambitions the Republicans took into this showdown. Back in 2011, during the last debt ceiling fiasco, the Republicans had the ability and the motivation to cripple the economy to such a degree that the president probably could not have been reelected. Would they have actually done it?
I guess we’ll never know, but who can blame the president for being unwilling to hand that decision to his political opponents? All he ever asked was for a balanced approach that included some new tax revenue, and his opponents have not yet ever come close to taking ‘yes’ for an answer if it required violating their pledge to Grover Norquist. What we got instead was sequestration. That was the only way the Republicans could keep some of the president’s concessions without making any of their own. In order to get the president to give away the store, they had to eschew most of what they said they really wanted and appropriate with a sledgehammer that removed all discretion, wisdom, and values from the system.
And where has it gotten them?
Now they are competing with shingles and herpes for popularity. Now they are hopelessly divided and business leaders are furious with them. And they’re back to square one, facing budget negotiations that will no longer allow them to pocket gains without making concessions. They will have to spell out what they want, which appears to be to diminish the value of their base’s earned benefits in return for agreeing to raise their base’s taxes.
Good luck with that.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Ploitical Animal, October 13, 2013
“A Party At The Crossroads”: GOP In-Fighting With Multiple Axes
In the mid-1970s, the Republican Party had fallen on such hard times, there was a fair amount of talk about it changing its name. The argument was that the Republican brand had been tarnished so badly — it was associated with Watergate, country clubs, and the Great Depression — that it might just be better to start over with some other name.
We now know, of course, that this wasn’t necessary, and by 1981, the party at the national level was thriving once more. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the Republican Party is in even worse shape now.
John Judis has an interesting item in The New Republic today, noting among other things what happened when he reached out to Republican insiders this week to discuss the effects of the shutdown.
The response I got was fear of Republican decline and loathing of the Tea Party: One lobbyist and former Hill staffer lamented the “fall of the national party,” another the rise of “suburban revolutionaries,” and another of “people alienated from business, from everything.” There is a growing fear among Washington Republicans that the party, which has lost two national elections in a row, is headed for history’s dustbin. And I believe that they are right to worry.
The battle over the shutdown has highlighted the cracks and fissures within the party. The party’s leadership has begun to lose control of its members in Congress. The party’s base has become increasingly shrill and is almost as dissatisfied with the Republican leadership in Washington as it is with President Obama. New conservative groups have echoed, and taken advantage of, this sentiment by targeting Republicans identified with the leadership for defeat. And a growing group of Republican politicians, who owe their election to these groups, has carried the battle into the halls of Congress. That is spelling doom for the Republican coalition that has kept the party afloat for the last two decades.
This may seem a little hyperbolic, but given recent developments — in polling, within the party, from outside groups allied with the party — the GOP’s fractures aren’t quite normal.
Indeed, while much of the focus of late has been on a dispute between congressional Republicans and the White House, this only tells part of the story. It’s actually a fight with multiple axes — a Democratic president vs. congressional Republicans, and Republicans against themselves.
Jon Chait had a good piece on this earlier.
Conservative activists and the party’s pro-business Establishment have split more deeply and rapidly than anybody expected. It is startling to see the head of the National Federation of Independent Businesses — a group so staunchly partisan and conservative that liberals had to form a competing small business lobby — deliver quotes in public like this: “There clearly are people in the Republican Party at the moment for whom the business community and the interests of the business community — the jobs and members they represent — don’t seem to be their top priority.” The mutual recriminations run in both directions, with figures like the conservative organizer Erick Erickson muttering threats to form a third party.
Intra-party schisms have a long history in American politics. But they are usually rooted in policy — the Republicans splitting half a century ago over progressivism and the role of government, the Democrats slowly rending a half century ago over white supremacy. Mainstream Republicans and the tea party have fallen out almost entirely over political tactics.
If anything, I think Jon’s probably understating the case. There are clearly strategic differences — some Republicans are reluctant to compromise, while other Republicans consider compromise to be a horrible crime that must never be committed — that have led GOP officials to shut down the government and threaten a sovereign debt crisis for reasons they can neither identify nor explain.
But these differences over tactics are compounded by disagreement over policy and direction. Republican policymakers and their allies are divided on immigration and the culture war, for example, and have reached the point at which the party no longer really has a foreign policy consensus anymore.
Big Business and the Tea Party are at odds, as are libertarians and social conservatives, as are the House GOP and the Senate GOP. It’s a party with no leaders, no elder statesmen (or women), and an older, white base in an increasingly diverse nation.
For generations, parties see their power and popularity ebb and flow, and in a two-party system, it’s hard to imagine Republicans staying down indefinitely. But in the post-Civil War era, we haven’t seen a party quite as radical as today’s GOP, and we haven’t seen many parties with quite so many internal and external crises to deal with all at once.
There are no easy fixes for a catastrophe this severe.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 11, 2013
“Dealing With Default”: Let’s Hope We Don’t Find Out What Will Happen If We Hit The Debt Ceiling
So Republicans may have decided to raise the debt ceiling without conditions attached — the details still aren’t clear. Maybe that’s the end of that particular extortion tactic, but maybe not, because, at best, we’re only looking at a very short-term extension. The threat of hitting the ceiling remains, especially if the politics of the shutdown continue to go against the G.O.P.
So what are the choices if we do hit the ceiling? As you might guess, they’re all bad, so the question is which bad choice would do the least harm.
Now, the administration insists that there are no choices, that if we hit the debt limit the U.S. government will go into general default. Many people, even those sympathetic to the administration, suspect that this is simply what officials have to say at this point, that they can’t give Republicans any excuse to downplay the seriousness of what they’re doing. But suppose that it’s true. What would a general default look like?
A report last year from the Treasury Department suggested that hitting the debt ceiling would lead to a “delayed payment regime”: bills, including bills for interest due on federal debt, would be paid in the order received, as cash became available. Since the bills coming in each day would exceed cash receipts, this would mean falling further and further behind. And this could create an immediate financial crisis, because U.S. debt — heretofore considered the ultimate safe asset — would be reclassified as an asset in default, possibly forcing financial institutions to sell off their U.S. bonds and seek other forms of collateral.
That’s a scary prospect. So many people — especially, but not only, Republican-leaning economists — have suggested that the Treasury Department could instead “prioritize”: It could pay off bonds in full, so that the whole burden of the cash shortage fell on other things. And by “other things,” we largely mean Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which account for the majority of federal spending other than defense and interest.
Some advocates of prioritization seem to believe that everything will be O.K. as long as we keep making our interest payments. Let me give four reasons they’re wrong.
First, the U.S. government would still be going into default, failing to meet its legal obligations to pay. You may say that things like Social Security checks aren’t the same as interest due on bonds because Congress can’t repudiate debt, but it can, if it chooses, pass a law reducing benefits. But Congress hasn’t passed such a law, and until or unless it does, Social Security benefits have the same inviolable legal status as payments to investors.
Second, prioritizing interest payments would reinforce the terrible precedent we set after the 2008 crisis, when Wall Street was bailed out but distressed workers and homeowners got little or nothing. We would, once again, be signaling that the financial industry gets special treatment because it can threaten to shut down the economy if it doesn’t.
Third, the spending cuts would create great hardship if they go on for any length of time. Think Medicare recipients turned away from hospitals because the government isn’t paying claims.
Finally, while prioritizing might avoid an immediate financial crisis, it would still have devastating economic effects. We’d be looking at an immediate spending cut roughly comparable to the plunge in housing investment after the bubble burst, a plunge that was the most important cause of the Great Recession of 2007-9. That by itself would surely be enough to push us into recession.
And it wouldn’t end there. As the U.S. economy went into recession, tax receipts would fall sharply, and the government, unable to borrow, would be forced into a second round of spending cuts, worsening the economic downturn, reducing receipts even more, and so on. So even if we avoid a Lehman Brothers-style financial meltdown, we could still be looking at a slump worse than the Great Recession.
So are there any other choices? Many legal experts think there is another option: One way or another, the president could simply choose to defy Congress and ignore the debt ceiling.
Wouldn’t this be breaking the law? Maybe, maybe not — opinions differ. But not making good on federal obligations is also breaking the law. And if House Republicans are pushing the president into a situation where he must break the law no matter what he does, why not choose the version that hurts America least?
There would, of course, be an uproar, and probably many legal challenges — although if I were a Republican, I’d worry about, in effect, filing suit to stop the government from paying seniors’ hospital bills. Still, as I said, there are no good choices here.
So what will happen if and when we hit the debt ceiling? Let’s hope we don’t find out.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, the New York Times, October 10, 2013
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