“Governing By Blackmail”: The Game Republicans Are Playing Is Not A Political Impasse Or Partisan Gridlock, It’s Pure Extortion
Suppose President Obama announced:
Unless Republicans agree to my proposal for gun control, I will use my authority as commander in chief to scuttle one aircraft carrier a week in the bottom of the ocean.
I invite Republican leaders to come to the White House and negotiate a deal to preserve our military strength. I hope Republicans will work with me to prevent the loss of our carrier fleet.
If the Republicans refuse to negotiate, I will be compelled to begin by scuttling the U.S.S. George Washington in the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench, with 80 aircraft on board.
In that situation, we would all agree that Obama had gone nuts. Whatever his beefs with Republicans, it would be an inexcusable betrayal to try to get his way by destroying our national assets. That would be an abuse of power and the worst kind of blackmail.
And in that kind of situation, I would hope that we as journalists wouldn’t describe the resulting furor as a “political impasse” or “partisan gridlock.” I hope that we wouldn’t settle for quoting politicians on each side as blaming the other. It would be appropriate to point out the obvious: Our president had tumbled over the edge and was endangering the nation.
Today, we have a similar situation, except that it’s a band of extremist House Republicans who are deliberately sabotaging America’s economy and damaging our national security — all in hopes of gaining leverage on unrelated issues.
The shutdown of government by House Republicans has already cost at least $1.2 billion, with the tab increasing by $300 million a day. Some estimates are much higher than that.
The 1995 and 1996 shutdowns cost the country $2.1 billion at today’s value, and the current one is also likely to end up costing billions — a cost imposed on every citizen by House Republicans, even as members of Congress pay themselves.
The government shutdown and risk of default also undermine America’s strength around the world. It’s not just that 72 percent of the intelligence community’s civilian work force has been furloughed. It’s not simply that “the jeopardy to the safety and security of this country will increase” daily, according to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence.
Nor is it just that the White House telephone number is now answered with a recording that says to call back when government is functioning again. It’s not simply that several countries have issued travel advisories about visiting America. It’s not just that we’re mocked worldwide, with the French newspaper Le Monde writing: “Jefferson, wake up! They’ve gone crazy!”
Rather, it’s that America’s strength and influence derive in part from the success of our political and economic model. When House Republicans shut our government down and leave us teetering on the abyss of default, we are a diminished nation. We have less influence. We have less raw power, as surely as if we had fewer aircraft carriers.
Some Americans think that this crisis reflects typical partisan squabbling. No. Democrats and Republicans have always disagreed, sometimes ferociously, about what economic policy is best, but, in the past, it was not normal for either to sabotage the economy as a negotiating tactic.
In a household, husbands and wives disagree passionately about high-stakes issues like how to raise children. But normal people do not announce that if their spouse does not give in, they will break all the windows in the house.
Hard-line House Republicans seem to think that their ability to inflict pain on 800,000 federal workers by furloughing them without pay gives them bargaining chips. The hard-liners apparently believe that their negotiating position is strengthened when they demonstrate that they can wreck American governance.
The stakes rise as we approach the debt limit and the risk of default — which the Treasury Department notes could have an impact like that of the 2008 financial crisis and “has the potential to be catastrophic.” Astonishingly, Republican hard-liners see that potential catastrophe as a source of bargaining power in a game of extortion: We don’t want anything to happen to this fine American economy as we approach the debt limit, so you’d better meet our demands.
In this situation, it strikes a false note for us as journalists to cover the crisis simply by quoting each side as blaming the other. That’s a false equivalency.
The last time House Republicans played politics with this debt limit, in 2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating. In the long run, that may mean higher debt payments and higher taxes.
My opening example of a president scuttling naval ships was ludicrous. No one would do that. But if we default because of extremist House Republicans, the cost could be much greater to our economy and to our national security than the loss of a few aircraft carriers.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 5, 2013
“A Functioning Government Is A Problem”: Shutdown Isn’t Symptom of Tea Party Ideology, It Is Tea Party Ideology
It’s easy to wonder how a group of people hired to do one job — simply to keep a country running — could be bungling it so terribly. That is, until you remember that a powerful faction of those people were never interested in doing that one job in the first place.
Today’s government shutdown, hitched to an unrealistic laundry list of demands, isn’t a symptom of Tea Party ideology — it is Tea Party ideology. The Tea Party and its allies in Congress have never been interested in using the government to solve problems. Instead, they believe that a functioning government is a problem in itself. And they are willing to risk untold damage to the country in order to get their way.
In previous partisan budget disputes, at least we’ve had the comfort of imagining that neither party wanted to completely destroy the government. Not so this time.
The Republican Party under Tea Party control is in such denial about reality that it is willing to deal a blow to the nation’s economy just because it can’t believe, and won’t admit, that it lost the last two presidential elections. They’re also hoping that their antics will play to their advantage in future elections, deliberately planning votes they hope will back vulnerable Senate Democrats into tight corners.
Just look at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who somehow has managed to wrest control of the Republican Party after less than a year in the Senate. Cruz explained during his long imaginary filibuster last week that “if we listen to the American people, the vote would be 100 to 0 to defund Obamacare.” Apparently, holding a national election in which the candidate who created Obamacare handily defeated the candidate who wanted to repeal it doesn’t count as “listening to the American people.”
In fact, Cruz told us (and then shamelessly denied that he had told us) that those who criticize his defunding efforts are just like Neville Chamberlain, who wanted the British people to “accept the Nazis” and “appease them.”
Rep. John Culberson of Texas went even further, likening Republicans threatening to shut down the government to the 9/11 heroes on United Airlines Flight 93: “I said, you know like 9/11, ‘Let’s roll!'”
Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, likened the all-out fight to defund Obamacare to helping free Americans from drug addiction, saying, “President Obama can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care.”
This is the alternate reality that is driving the government shutdown.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — far from a liberal group — has warned that a shutdown will hurt business. Wall Street is skittish. Even the majority of Americans who oppose Obamacare don’t want to see it fail. In all, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the plan to shut down the federal government to block the implementation of the ACA. A Quinnipiac poll this week found that 72 percent opposed the shutdown.
Now even Republican members of Congress are coming out to say that the shutdown is nuts and that it’s entirely the fault of a party that’s letting the Tea Party take the reins.
The Republican establishment and big business groups like the Chamber worked to get Tea Party senators and congressman into power and encouraged the rigid anti-government ideology that fueled the movement. They got what they paid for. Unfortunately, the rest of us are now paying too.
By: Michael Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, October 1, 2013
“Growing Numb To Mass Violence”: We Need To End The Sound Of Silence In Congress
What if we had a mass shooting and nobody noticed?
That gloomy thought came to mind as I listened to the unsettling sound of silence that followed the September 16 Navy Yard shooting in the nation’s capital that killed 12 people, plus the shooter.
Three days later it came to mind again as a shooting spree in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood made national news. Thirteen were injured, including a 3-year-old boy who was shot in the face. Four people have been charged in the reportedly gang-related incident.
President Obama eloquently expressed the grief, outrage and frustration that every decent American should feel about “yet another mass shooting” at the Navy Yard.
But overall reaction to the workplace slaughter by a reportedly deranged gunman was sadly and noticeably subdued compared to the national outrage that reignited the national gun debate following the massacre of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut.
That’s because after all the anguish, debate and proposed legislation that emerged from the Newtown tragedy, the legislation was voted down in the Senate and everyone returned to other matters — like House Republicans voting uselessly to repeal Obamacare more than 40 times. Opposition to even modest measures was too strong, especially from rural centers of pro-gun culture.
If even the massacre of children and the shooting of then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, could not move Congress to pass new gun safety measures, it’s no wonder that the energy for gun safety seems to have drained out of Capitol Hill.
But that doesn’t mean that we Americans can’t do anything but wring our hands over the continuing carnage. As even mass shootings lose their ability to shock us, both sides of the gun debate need to face a bracing reality: The gun violence problem is not only local and it’s not only about guns.
Those points were urgently expressed by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter in a joint speech in Washington last Thursday. They called for a new “surge” in attention and national action to the “virus” of gun-related violence.
Calls for national action are hardly new, but I was encouraged by the mayors’ refusal to be, as Landrieu put it, bogged down by the “seemingly mind-numbing debate about gun control.”
Instead they emphasized remedies everyone should be able to agree on. They included more cops on the street, as in a stronger COPS program — Community Oriented Policing Services — passed by Congress under President Bill Clinton; stronger cooperation with the federal government to target criminals with illegal guns and stronger measures against straw purchases and interstate gun traffickers.
Yet the two mayors also called for more personal responsibility and engagement by parents, pastors, coaches and neighbors. “Babies having babies just doesn’t work,” Landrieu said.
I’ve heard Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who reportedly left some scheduled meetings with members of Obama’s cabinet in Washington early after hearing of the mass shooting back home, express a similar agenda in his slogan: “Policing, prevention, penalties and parenting.”
Bottom line: A problem as complex as urban violence must be pushed back the same way it emerged: in every sector of community and political life.
But first we have to care. Citing the number of black men killed by homicide in his city in 2012, Nutter observed: “If the Ku Klux Klan came to Philadelphia and killed 236 black men, the city would be on lockdown.”
The same would be true if “international terrorists killed 236 Philadelphians of any race,” he said. “And, yet, 236 African-American men murdered in one city — not one word. No hearings on the Hill, no investigations … nothing but silence.”
We need to end the sound of silence. It was easier to take national political action in the ’90s. The economy was doing well and Congress was not as fiercely divided as it is today. But, as the two mayors said in Washington, we should not be more willing to pay for safe streets in Afghanistan than to make our streets safer at home.
By: Clarence Page, The National Memo, Featured Post, October 2, 2013
“Government Shutdown Deja Vu”: House Republicans Forgot The Lessons Of The Clinton Shutdowns
Regardless of what you think of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), the Republican effort to derail it through the government shutdown currently underway is miserably poor politics and even worse public relations.
I tried to resist writing about this topic because the partisans are hopelessly locked into their positions and my opinion on the law isn’t of any value to anyone other than my dog, who hangs on my every word. But communications is my business, and I happen to have been a young, Republican congressional chief of staff during the two shutdowns of 1995, and what I see today is worse than what happened then.
The shutdowns of ’95 were part of a budget fight between cocky new Republican majorities in both the House and Senate and a stumbling Democratic president who was about to begin his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. Hardly anyone today remembers that the issue then was about getting the president to agree to a plan to balance the budget over the next seven years. In ’95, Newt Gingrich was the first Republican Speaker of the House in half a century, and he had just led a 100-day legislative assault on business as usual that resulted in a series of popular reforms to make government smaller, more responsive and transparent known as the “Contract with America.”
That summer, Republicans were looking for ways to keep the ball rolling and the prospect of using a government shutdown as a cudgel in this struggle between the legislative and executive branches was already on the table. If the government shuts down, Gingrich told Time magazine, President Clinton “can run the parts of the government that are left, or he can run no government. Which of the two of us do you think worries more about the government not showing up?”
By November, the freshmen Republicans in the House were practically chanting “shut it down” in the hallways. Many of them thought this would be popular back home, almost to the degree that the Contract had been.
First came a brief shutdown for a few days in November. And then, when negotiations with the White House broke down, came a shutdown that began on December 15 and which lasted for 21 days.
Guess what happened? People stopped talking about the need for a plan to balance the budget and began talking about all the government services they couldn’t get. Basic services halted. Fears arose about Social Security checks not going out and missing paychecks to members of the military. Thousands of federal workers were forced on furlough days before Christmas.
Republicans had made a fundamental political error – we shifted the debate from the topic on which we really wanted victory (balancing the budget) to one that not only was off-topic, but reminded people that there actually is a lot about government that they like, want and need. Oh, and we scared and hurt a lot people whose confidence and support we were trying to win.
Does this sound familiar?
Here in Central Florida, the front page of my local newspaper features the story of a couple who have been planning a wedding at the Jefferson Memorial for months. Now their plans are in jeopardy. That’s not a story about health care; it’s a story about how politicians are screwing up somebody’s nice event.
A few weeks after the shutdown ended in January 1996, President Clinton masterfully exploited the nation’s mood in his State of the Union Address. Near the end of the speech, standing in the well of the House of Representatives, Clinton turned toward the first lady’s balcony in a move that has been used by every president since Ronald Reagan, and introduced a special guest:
I want to say a special word now to those who work for our federal government. Today our federal government is 200,000 employees smaller than it was the day I took office as President. (Applause.) Our federal government today is the smallest it has been in 30 years, and it’s getting smaller every day. Most of our fellow Americans probably don’t know that. And there’s a good reason — a good reason: The remaining federal work force is composed of hard-working Americans who are now working harder and working smarter than ever before to make sure the quality of our services does not decline. (Applause.)
I’d like to give you one example. His name is Richard Dean. He’s a 49 year-old Vietnam veteran who’s worked for the Social Security Administration for 22 years now. Last year he was hard at work in the Federal Building in Oklahoma City when the blast killed 169 people and brought the rubble down all around him. He reentered that building four times. He saved the lives of three women. He’s here with us this evening, and I want to recognize Richard and applaud both his public service and his extraordinary personal heroism. (Applause.)
But Richard Dean’s story doesn’t end there. This last November, he was forced out of his office when the government shut down. And the second time the government shut down he continued helping Social Security recipients, but he was working without pay.
On behalf of Richard Dean and his family, and all the other people who are out there working every day doing a good job for the American people, I challenge all of you in this Chamber: Never, ever shut the federal government down again. (Applause.)
Clinton’s State of the Union address ended all talk among Republicans that the shutdowns had been successful.
Around this time, Gingrich was fond of calling for dramatic change by citing the saying that one of the definitions of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
What are we to make of this situation now?
By: Keith Lee Rupp, U. S. News and World Report, October 2, 2013
“A Series Of Near-Death Experiences”: Republicans Threatening National Harm Every Few Months
Against the backdrop of a government-shutdown deadline, Karen Tumulty noted yesterday the “cumulative effect of almost three years of governing by near-death experience.” It’s phrasing that rings true for a reason — since Republicans retook the House majority in January 2011, no major legislation has become law, but we have endured quite a few crises.
In April 2011, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In July 2011, congressional Republicans created the first debt-ceiling crisis in American history. In September 2011, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In April 2012, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. In December 2012, congressional Republicans pushed the nation towards the so-called “fiscal cliff.” In January 2013, congressional Republicans briefly flirted with the possibility of another debt-ceiling crisis. In March 2013, congressional Republicans threatened a government shutdown. And right now, in September 2013, the odds of a government shutdown are quite good once again.
That’s eight self-imposed, entirely unnecessary, easily avoidable crises since John Boehner got his hands on the Speaker’s gavel — a 33-month period in which Congress racked up zero major legislative accomplishments.
Josh Marshall had a good item on the trend over the weekend.
Years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan coined the phrase ‘defining deviancy down.’ James Q. Wilson popularized the conceptually related “broken windows” theory of crime and crime prevention. Whether or not these theories and catch phrases work as sociology is separate question; subsequent research has not been kind. But they capture the toxic consequences of the normalization and expanded acceptance of destructive behavior — something that not only applies to individuals and communities but to states and their internal workings. Stepping back from the latest Washington debacle, you quickly see how far down this road we’ve gone without really even realizing it.
It has started to feel normal that two or three times a year we have a major state/fiscal crisis and maybe once every 18 months or two years, there is a true breakdown with fairly grave consequences….. [T]his is really unprecedented stuff — deep attacks on the state itself inasmuch as the state requires for it to function a penumbra of norms surrounding the formal mechanisms of government.
Quite right. In fact, I think it creates unsettling conditions and raises uncomfortable questions about the future of the American experiment.
Put simply, great nations can’t function this way. The United States can either be a 21st-century superpower or it can tolerate Republicans abandoning the governing process and subjecting Americans to a series of self-imposed extortion crises. It cannot do both.
We can be the indispensable nation — we can even be a shining city on a hill — but not with a radicalized major party that throws seasonal tantrums that threaten the nation’s wellbeing. The cost is simply too great.
In the abstract, I imagine Americans who don’t pay attention to day-to-day developments have come to expect routine gridlock and partisan bickering. Democrats and Republicans arguing is arguably the ultimate in dog-bites-man stories.
But those same Americans should search their memories: have they ever seen a governing party threaten five government shutdowns in less than three years, while sprinkling two debt-ceiling crises on top?
The American tradition has no experience with our own elected officials imposing deliberate crises on the nation — as if one of our major political parties is mad at us and feels the need to punish us for offending them.
I realize Republicans consider the Affordable Care Act an example of such profound outrage that they have no choice but to threaten Americans on purpose. I can’t begin to fathom why they hate a moderate law based on Republican principles with such wild-eyed contempt, but it’s currently the world we live in.
My suggestion to them, however, is that they introduce legislation that would deliver their preferred goals. If it passes, they’ll get what they want. If it fails, they can try winning more elections. Either way, watching Republican officials — ostensibly elected to advance our interests — threaten national harm every few months has quite tiresome.
By: Steve benen, The Maddow Blog, September 30, 2013
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 