“Rebels Without A Clue”: Republicans Are Delusional About Both Economics And Politics
This may be the way the world ends — not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.
O.K., a temporary government shutdown — which became almost inevitable after Sunday’s House vote to provide government funding only on unacceptable conditions — wouldn’t be the end of the world. But a U.S. government default, which will happen unless Congress raises the debt ceiling soon, might cause financial catastrophe. Unfortunately, many Republicans either don’t understand this or don’t care.
Let’s talk first about the economics.
After the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 many observers concluded that such events, while clearly bad, aren’t catastrophes: essential services continue, and the result is a major nuisance but no lasting harm. That’s still partly true, but it’s important to note that the Clinton-era shutdowns took place against the background of a booming economy. Today we have a weak economy, with falling government spending one main cause of that weakness. A shutdown would amount to a further economic hit, which could become a big deal if the shutdown went on for a long time.
Still, a government shutdown looks benign compared with the possibility that Congress might refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
First of all, hitting the ceiling would force a huge, immediate spending cut, almost surely pushing America back into recession. Beyond that, failure to raise the ceiling would mean missed payments on existing U.S. government debt. And that might have terrifying consequences.
Why? Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests. In particular, Treasury bills — short-term U.S. bonds — are what investors demand when they want absolutely solid collateral against loans. Treasury bills are so essential for this role that in times of severe stress they sometimes pay slightly negative interest rates — that is, they’re treated as being better than cash.
Now suppose it became clear that U.S. bonds weren’t safe, that America couldn’t be counted on to honor its debts after all. Suddenly, the whole system would be disrupted. Maybe, if we were lucky, financial institutions would quickly cobble together alternative arrangements. But it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis set off by the failure of Lehman Brothers five years ago.
No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don’t have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party’s delusional wing. For they are delusional, about both the economics and the politics.
On the economics: Republican radicals generally reject the scientific consensus on climate change; many of them reject the theory of evolution, too. So why expect them to believe expert warnings about the dangers of default? Sure enough, they don’t: the G.O.P. caucus contains a significant number of “default deniers,” who simply dismiss warnings about the dangers of failing to honor our debts.
Meanwhile, on the politics, reasonable people know that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t let himself be blackmailed in this way, and not just because health reform is his key policy legacy. After all, once he starts making concessions to people who threaten to blow up the world economy unless they get what they want, he might as well tear up the Constitution. But Republican radicals — and even some leaders — still insist that Mr. Obama will cave in to their demands.
So how does this end? The votes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling are there, and always have been: every Democrat in the House would vote for the necessary measures, and so would enough Republicans. The problem is that G.O.P. leaders, fearing the wrath of the radicals, haven’t been willing to allow such votes. What would change their minds?
Ironically, considering who got us into our economic mess, the most plausible answer is that Wall Street will come to the rescue — that the big money will tell Republican leaders that they have to put an end to the nonsense.
But what if even the plutocrats lack the power to rein in the radicals? In that case, Mr. Obama will either let default happen or find some way of defying the blackmailers, trading a financial crisis for a constitutional crisis.
This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, September 29, 2013
“Angry Men Against Democracy”: GOP Government Shutdown Isn’t About Obamacare, It’s About Obama
The House Republicans are like really bad boyfriends in a break-up. The moment is upon us, when the Capitol lantern will be dimmed and dark, with the U.S. government closing down for … who knows how long?
This is what they came here to do, the Class of 2010 House Republicans, which created a new majority overnight. They did not come here to govern or to be part of government. Stone cold crazy, they came to our town of Washington to take it down from within. They came from states like, say, Tennessee. Ever hear of Frog Jump? The tea party has such diversity! They are largely angry white men. They are not legislators or policymakers. They are not respecters of the usual traditions of Congress. They are not much but a band of marauders, an unhappy few.
It doesn’t take many unruly House Republicans to stamp out the spirit of a perfectly nice democracy. Roughly 40 will accomplish what the British did not when they burned down the Capitol in 1814, and what the terrorist hijackers failed to do on 9/11 a dozen years ago.
If I read the tea leaves right, they are going to make a demoralized country even more so. People will start to lose more faith in our national institutions and with the very idea of America: fairness and “playing by the rules,” as Bill Clinton used to say. Our highly skilled and dedicated federal workforce, which has had its pay nearly frozen for years, will feel more disrespected if they are furloughed. The world will be watching in utter disbelief.
And then what happens one minute after midnight Tuesday morning? The light goes out in the dome. The more sensible Senate will not be party to this crime. House Speaker John Boehner will flail about, helpless and humiliated because he can’t control this lawless faction.
Then the babble will start about Obamacare. That’s what they would like us to think this is all about. My fellow Americans, this is not about Obamacare; it’s about President Obama. It’s about taking down his presidency. Attacking Obamacare is just the means to that end. I don’t think Obama sized up their intent and plan to take him down, from the day they arrived in January 2011. Unfortunately, he did not recognize the depth of their hostility when the government debt ceiling hung in the balance in August 2011. He kept trying to be friends with Boehner and the other side.
We have another debt limit deadline hanging over us, which makes this showdown look like a prologue to an even more disastrous event.
Here’s the cruelest cut of all. Never has a landmark piece of legislation, passed by both houses in the usual manner, been subject to this kind of relentless attack well after its passage. Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader of the tea party band, tells anyone who will listen at 4 a.m. that the American people are on their side. That is erroneous, and besides which, it wouldn’t make the tea party plot right. Obamacare passed before many of them got here, back in 2010.
It wasn’t pretty, but Obamacare passed fair and square. President Obama was re-elected handily. So let’s keep the lantern lit. Don’t let 40 angry men undo the results of American democracy.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 30, 2013
“A Different America”: Where The G.O.P.’s Suicide Caucus Lives
The geography of Congress’s so-called suicide caucus. Click to expand.
On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.
Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out.
Back home in Meadows’s congressional district, the idea was quite popular. North Carolina’s Eleventh District had been gerrymandered after the 2010 census to become the most Republican district in his state. Meadows won his election last November by fifteen points. The Presidential contest there was an even bigger blowout. Romney won the district by twenty-three points, sixty-one per cent to thirty-eight per cent. While the big story of the 2012 election was about demographics and a growing non-white population that is increasingly Democratic, that was not the story in the Meadows race. His district is eighty-seven per cent white, five per cent Latino, and three per cent black.
Before Meadows sent off his letter to Boehner, he circulated it among his colleagues, and with the help of the conservative group FreedomWorks, as well as some heavy campaigning by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, seventy-nine like-minded House Republicans from districts very similar to Meadows’s added their signatures.
“Since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect,” the letter said, “we urge you to affirmatively de-fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”
They ended the letter with a stirring reference to Madison:
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon … for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We look forward to collaborating to defund one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.
Not everyone thought it was a terrific idea or one worthy of comparison to the brilliance of the Founders. Noting the strategic ineptness of threatening a government shutdown over a policy that neither the Democratically controlled Senate nor the President himself would ever support, Karl Rove railed against the idea in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed the eighty Republicans the “suicide caucus.”
And yet, a few weeks later, Boehner adopted the course demanded by Meadows and his colleagues.
The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity. It’s especially strange when you consider some of the numbers behind the suicide caucus. As we approach a likely government shutdown this month and then a more perilous fight over raising the debt ceiling in October, it’s worth considering the demographics and geography of the eighty districts whose members have steered national policy over the past few weeks.
As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.
The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).
The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.
As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.
Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.
By: Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, September 26, 2013
“The Revised GOP Ransom Note”: House Republicans Now Willing To Fund Government In Exchange For One Year Obamacare Delay
House Republicans are preparing to introduce a new, last minute Continuing Resolution that would fund the operations of government for a few more months in exchange for an agreement by Senate Democrats and the White House to delay the execution of Obamacare for one year.
This newest bid is being presented as a “compromise” as the initial proposal put forward by the House—one that was rejected by the Senate—hinged the funding of government on the full defunding of the Affordable Care Act.
Compromise?
I suppose it is if you consider that someone holding a gun to your head and demanding ten million dollars to spare your life becomes a “compromiser” when he suddenly drops the price to seven million after you’ve told your assailer that you can’t or won’t pay.
Or maybe you would consider a foreign power threating our country with thermonuclear destruction unless we surrender to them as being willing to compromise if they modify their demand so as to leave us with everything east of the Mississippi if we are prepared to give up all the territory to the west?
For those who would fool themselves into believing that the latest House offer is some effort to find “middle ground”, ask yourself this question—
Why do these people wish to delay enforcement of the Affordable Care Act for one year?
Does anyone imagine that those who have been seeking to deny funding to government absent the delay or destruction of a law that was passed by Congress, signed into being by the President, and approved by the Supreme Court actually want to hold off the implementation of that law so they can improve it?
At no time—since the blitzkrieg of misinformation and outright lies that have been peddled by Obamacare opponents following the Act’s creation–have the House Republicans so much as once suggested that they would like to improve the law. Having voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund the law, have they ever, since passage, voted on proposed amendments to the law that they claim would improve the healthcare reform act?
Never.
Indeed, they are not even pretending to want to make it better via a delay as not so much as one Republican elected official who has paraded in front of the TV cameras today to pitch defunding or delay has so much as hinted than an extra year would give Congress time to make some ‘fixes’ or ‘changes.’
So, again, why the one year extension?
The better to keep the issue ‘hot’ for Republicans going into the 2014 midterm elections.
After all, nothing is going to change in the next year that would improve the Republicans’ chances of doing away with the law.
Should the GOP hold the House in the 2014 elections and pick up enough seats in the Senate to gain a majority, absolutely nobody believes for a moment that the GOP could gain enough Senate seats so as to grant them the capability of overturning a presidential veto.
And, like it or not, the Democrats will hold the White House through 2016.
And yet, every Republican mug I see on the television screen today tells me that they are doing this for me.
Really?
My premium rates are scheduled to go down rather dramatically upon the opening of the healthcare exchange in my state. So, what exactly are these House Republicans doing for me—and the millions of other Americans who cannot get coverage due to preexisting conditions (like acne) or face using up their lifetime maximums when a serious illness strikes? What exactly are Ted Cruz and his friends doing for those who are denied their paid for coverage after they get sick by insurance companies who don’t want to pay off and can find a spelling error on the insured’s application? What about the millions of Americans who simply have been unable to afford health insurance coverage without the benefit of the government subsidies or those who are married forever to their job—whether they like it or not— because, to leave it, would mean putting their family in jeopardy should someone get sick?
Still, if the GOP continues to feel the need to use healthcare policy to hold up funding of the government, and they are truly doing this for my benefit, I have an additional policy change I’d like Speaker Boehner to add to the new House legislation—things that would truly be for my benefit and the benefit of my family—
I would like the Speaker to make the Continuing Resolution to keep the government’s doors open contingent upon gun control legislation that requires registration of all weapons at the time of purchase. That would be doing something that could truly help me and my family.
And before anyone tries to tell me that this would be unacceptable because—unlike Obamacare where the majority of the country currently opposes the law, the majority of Americans love their guns—I suggest you review the polls revealing that more Americans favor changes in gun registration laws than the number of Americans who oppose the Affordable Care Act.
I could go on with more ransom demands for the Speaker but I’ll settle for just this one. After all, Boehner only plans to fund the government through this December in exchange for destroying the Affordable Care Act so I don’t want to be too greedy as to what I would expect for a three month extension of an operating government.
If the House Republicans are unwilling to link the funding of government to the things that will really be of value to me, then I can only hope that the Senate Democrats and the President hold the line and allow the GOP to get what is coming to them for their behavior.
While I hate to see so many of my fellow Americans suffer the problems and serious inconveniences that are inevitable in a government shut down, I—like so many Americans that the right-wing prefers to pretend do not exist—have had enough of these eighty to one hundred extremists in Congress standing in the way of trying to make life better for so many Americans just so they can be re-elected . These are, after all, elected officials that come from congressional districts where constituents continue to be incapable of grasping that the debt ceiling debate is about paying for debts we’ve already incurred and not some limitation on what government can borrow or spend in the following year.
I also highlight that these people on the right prefer to pretend I do exist because of their continued suggestion that “Americans” do not want the healthcare reform law. Not so much as one supporter of defunding or delaying Obamacare, who has spoken to the cameras today, has said “some Americans” or “most Americans”. They simply say that this law is a train wreck and Americans don’t want it.
Like it or not, I am an American and I do want this alleged train wreck as do enough of my fellow Americans to constitute at least forty percent of the electorate. So, I would very much appreciate it if Rep. Jeb Henserling and the remaining band of the GOP talking heads haunting the airwaves would stop lumping me in with their political distortions.
The President is flat-out right on this one. If the Republicans want to argue over what should—or should not—be included in the next fiscal year’s budget, I’m all for it. Each branch of Congress can pass their version of a budget and the two can get into the conference committee room and beat each other up until they come to a budget agreement they can send over to the White House for signature.
But if these 100 or so Members of Congress want to screw up people’s lives because they have a fundamental problem with our system of government, we should give them no quarter.
And make no mistake, it is precisely these people’s resentment of how our government was created to operate that drives them to these extremist positions—no matter how much they pretend to be ‘strict constitutionalists’.
Just because GOP legislators like to carry a copy of the Constitution in their suit pocket doesn’t mean they’ve ever read it or could care less what it actually says. It just means they have pockets large enough to hold fat oil company checks and a tiny copy of our founding document at the same time.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 29, 2013
“The Height Of Absurdity”: What Republican Political Regression Looks Like
In July, when several far-right lawmakers started pushing a government-shutdown scheme in earnest, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who isn’t exactly a moderate, had the good sense to reject the idea as silly.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Burr said at the time. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”
I mention this, of course, because the North Carolina Republicans’ reasoned, sensible approach to extortion politics has apparently disappeared over the last two months.
Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who dubbed Cruz’s threat to shut down the government over Obamacare the “dumbest idea” he’d ever heard, said Congress shouldn’t give Obama a debt ceiling increase without attaching strings, and the president “is going to pay some price for it, which is a benefit for the American people.”
“I hope [an Obamacare] delay is either part of the next [continuing resolution] or I hope it’s part of the debt ceiling,” Burr said.
There are a couple of important angles to this. First, if anyone was inclined to give Burr points for being an adult in July, now is the time to kick yourself. What he’s describing is a dangerous extortion scheme in which radicalized lawmakers threaten to hurt the country on purpose unless Americans start losing health care benefits.
The fact that Burr didn’t want to threaten a government shutdown was nice, but the fact that he does want to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States is madness — the severity of a sovereign debt crisis is vastly more serious than a shutdown.
Second, Politico mentioned in passing that the issue here is Congress “giving Obama a debt ceiling increase.” It’s time for the political world to stop thinking this way — raising the statutory debt limit isn’t “giving” the president anything.
Indeed, the political establishment’s understanding of this issue has become more than a little twisted. To see Republicans voting for a debt ceiling increase as some kind of concession is the height of absurdity. For those who rationalize threatening deliberate harm to the nation, and for much of the media, the idea is that we’re witnessing some sort of trade — Democrats get a debt-ceiling increase, Republicans get a laundry list of goodies they can’t pass through the legislative process.
The problem with this is that it’s not sane.
The legislative branch has the power of the purse, and appropriates government spending. When that spending is outpaced by federal receipts, it’s up to the executive branch to borrow the difference. Under a ridiculous quirk in the U.S. system, the executive is only allowed to borrow the difference after Congress, which spent more than it took in, gives its authority to do so.
This is called the debt ceiling. The Obama administration needs to borrow the funds to pay the bills for the stuff Congress already bought. There’s no real reason for the system to work this way — most modern democracies have no use for a statutory debt limit — but for now, this is the messy process we’ve created for ourselves.
The point, of course, is that when Congress raises the debt ceiling, as it must, it’s not doing the White House a favor. It’s not some kind of concession or gesture of goodwill. It’s not increasing the debt or giving Obama a blank check or spending any money. It’s just extending a legal authority to pay the bills lawmakers already racked up. Period. Full stop.
So when it comes to “negotiations,” for Congress to ask the White House, “What do we get for raising the debt limit” is insane because on a substantive level, the question is gibberish.
By: Steve Benen, The Madow Blog, September 26, 2013
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