“High Cost Of An Ego Trip”: Republicans Mucking Up The Gears Of Government To Earn Them Favor In The Primaries
Very few Americans know how close the country came to catastrophe this week.
The final tally shows that the Senate voted by a wide margin Wednesday, 67 to 31, to break Sen. Ted Cruz’s filibuster of an increase in the debt limit, thus avoiding a default on the United States’ full faith and credit.
But 15 minutes after the voting should have ended, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell had apparently secured only two of the five Republican votes he needed to join all 55 members of the Democratic caucus to pass the measure. He raised three fingers in the air and worked his way among his members but was met with folded arms and shakes of the head. Looking queasy, he patted his thigh nervously and drummed his fingers. In the hubbub, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) knocked a full glass of water and coaster from McConnell’s desk to the floor.
Democrats, watching the spectacle, took the extraordinary step of ordering the Senate clerk not to read aloud the ongoing vote tally to avoid setting off a market panic; because the House had already left on a two-week recess, a failure of this vote would have left little chance of avoiding default on Feb. 27, when the Treasury was to run out of funds.
Watching the chaos from the side of the chamber was the man who caused it: Cruz, his hands in his pants pockets and a satisfied grin on his face. The Texas Republican strolled to the clerk’s table to check on the vote count and was met with a look of disgust from Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). And the feeling was widespread: Moments after Cruz walked into the Republican cloakroom, four senators emerged from it and changed their votes to “aye.”
Cruz reemerged from the cloakroom, chewing gum, his hands again in his pockets. He smirked as his colleagues finally overcame his filibuster after a 59-minute struggle.
Cruz’s ego trip had come at a high cost. He had forced McConnell, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and other Republicans to cast votes that could cause them to lose primaries to weaker general-election candidates, and he had risked getting his party blamed for a default.
The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page dubbed Cruz “the Minority Maker” for making his GOP colleagues “walk the plank” on a “meaningless debt ceiling vote.”
But Cruz doesn’t care about all that. Leaving the chamber, he told reporters McConnell’s fate would be “ultimately a decision . . . for the voters in Kentucky.”
His actions suggest Cruz has put himself before his party and even the nation’s solvency. And in this sense his actions are typical of the 2016 GOP presidential field. Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul are mucking up the gears of government in ways that will earn them favorable attention in the primaries.
Rubio, of Florida, is pushing legislation that would undo Obamacare in such a way that would cause chaos in the insurance market and likely leave tens of millions of people without health coverage and cost the government billions.
Vying with Cruz to be the most reckless of the 2016 aspirants is Paul, of Kentucky, who in recent days has injected the 1990s Monica Lewinsky scandal into the national debate as a means of discrediting Hillary Clinton. He also claimed her failure to send “reinforcements” to diplomats in Benghazi before they were attacked “should limit Hillary Clinton from ever holding high office.” Multiple investigations have confirmed that secretaries of state do not make decisions about security at each diplomatic post.
Now, Paul has politicized his court challenge to the NSA surveillance program. It would have been an important legal case, but Paul pushed aside the constitutional lawyer who had drafted the legislation and abandoned efforts to get a Democratic senator to be a co-plaintiff; instead, he added President Obama’s name to the list of defendants, brought in the tea party group FreedomWorks as a plaintiff and hired failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, another tea party politician, to be his lead lawyer.
To nobody’s surprise, Paul and Rubio sided with Cruz in Wednesday’s debt-ceiling filibuster. Had they prevailed, and had 12 of their GOP colleagues not been more responsible, the likely default would have added far more to the national debt than the legislation did. It also would have caused markets to crash, the economy to swoon and American standing to decline.
But for Messrs. Paul, Rubio and Cruz, those aren’t the top considerations.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2014
“Inequality, Dignity And Freedom”: People Least Inclined To Respect Efforts Of Ordinary Workers Are Winners Of The Wealth Lottery
Now that the Congressional Budget Office has explicitly denied saying that Obamacare destroys jobs, some (though by no means all) Republicans have stopped lying about that issue and turned to a different argument. O.K., they concede, any reduction in working hours because of health reform will be a voluntary choice by the workers themselves — but it’s still a bad thing because, as Representative Paul Ryan puts it, they’ll lose “the dignity of work.”
So let’s talk about what that means in 21st-century America.
It’s all very well to talk in the abstract about the dignity of work, but to suggest that workers can have equal dignity despite huge inequality in pay is just silly. In 2012, the top 40 hedge fund managers and traders were paid a combined $16.7 billion, equivalent to the wages of 400,000 ordinary workers. Given that kind of disparity, can anyone really believe in the equal dignity of work?
In fact, the people who seem least inclined to respect the efforts of ordinary workers are the winners of the wealth lottery. Over the past few months, we’ve been harangued by a procession of angry billionaires, furious that they’re not receiving the deference, the acknowledgment of their superiority, that they believe is their due. For example, last week the investor Sam Zell went on CNN Money to defend the 1 percent against “envy,” and he asserted that “the 1 percent work harder. The 1 percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society.” Dignity for all!
And there’s another group that doesn’t respect workers: Republican politicians. In 2012, Representative Eric Cantor, the House majority leader, infamously marked Labor Day with a Twitter post celebrating … people who start their own businesses. Perhaps Mr. Cantor was chastened by the backlash to that post; at a recent G.O.P. retreat, he reportedly urged his colleagues to show some respect for Americans who don’t own businesses, who work for someone else. The clear implication was that they haven’t shown that kind of respect in the past.
On the whole, working Americans are better at appreciating their own worth than either the wealthy or conservative politicians are at showing them even minimal respect. Still, tens of millions of Americans know from experience that hard work isn’t enough to provide financial security or a decent education for their children, and many either couldn’t get health insurance or were desperately afraid of losing jobs that came with insurance until the Affordable Care Act kicked in last month. In the face of that kind of everyday struggle, talk about the dignity of work rings hollow.
So what would give working Americans more dignity in their lives, despite huge income disparities? How about assuring them that the essentials — health care, opportunity for their children, a minimal income — will be there even if their boss fires them or their jobs are shipped overseas?
Think about it: Has anything done as much to enhance the dignity of American seniors, to rescue them from the penury and dependence that were once so common among the elderly, as Social Security and Medicare? Inside the Beltway, fiscal scolds have turned “entitlements” into a bad word, but it’s precisely the fact that Americans are entitled to collect Social Security and be covered by Medicare, no questions asked, that makes these programs so empowering and liberating.
Conversely, the drive by conservatives to dismantle much of the social safety net, to replace it with minimal programs and private charity, is, in effect, an effort to strip away the dignity of lower-income workers.
And it’s something else: an assault on their freedom.
Modern American conservatives talk a lot about freedom, and deride liberals for advocating a “nanny state.” But when it comes to Americans down on their luck, conservatives become insultingly paternalistic, as comfortable congressmen lecture struggling families on the dignity of work. And they also become advocates of highly intrusive government. For example, House Republicans tried to introduce a provision into the farm bill that would have allowed states to mandate drug testing for food stamp recipients. (A commenter on my blog suggested mandatory drug tests for employees of too-big-to-fail financial institutions, which receive large implicit subsidies. Now that would really cause a panic.)
The truth is that if you really care about the dignity and freedom of American workers, you should favor more, not fewer, entitlements, a stronger, not weaker, social safety net.
And you should, in particular, support and celebrate health reform. Never mind all those claims that Obamacare is slavery; the reality is that the Affordable Care Act will empower millions of Americans, giving them exactly the kind of dignity and freedom politicians only pretend to love.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 13, 2014
“John Boehner’s Sunshine Band”: A Cartoon Festival Of Illusions That Would Embarrass Disney’s Brilliant Fantasists
From now on, it’s the Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House.
The political world stopped for a moment when Speaker John Boehner broke into the jaunty old Disney tune — “My, oh my, what a wonderful day” — after a news conference in which he threw in the towel on the debt ceiling fight. He found himself trapped between the immovable object of Democrats determined that they’d never again let Republicans take the nation’s credit hostage and the irresistible force of a dysfunctional, crisis-addicted GOP majority of which he is the putative leader. Boehner decided to skip away in song.
Feb. 11, 2014, was , in fact, a wonderful day. It marked the end of a dismal experiment that saw the right wing of the conservative movement do all it could to make the United States look like a country incapable of governing itself rationally. We were so caught up in our own nasty politics that we forgot that we’re supposed to be a model for how democracy should work. There will be other episodes of foolishness, but the debt-ceiling bomb finally has been defused.
Moreover, there were lessons here that should be applied from now on. The first is that refusing to negotiate over matters that should not be subject to negotiation is the sensible thing to do. President Obama learned this the hard way after the debilitating budget battle of 2011.
It’s true that both parties have played political games around the debt ceiling. But until our recent tea party turn, politicians kept these symbolic skirmishes within safe limits. The 28 House Republicans who faced reality by voting to move on for another year sent a signal that they want to return to those prudent habits.
But this means that 199 Republicans voted to go over the cliff. Or, to be more precise, many pretended they were willing to take that leap to appease big conservative funders and organizations, knowing that a minority of their GOP colleagues and the Democrats would bail them out. These profiles in convenience included Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), chairman of the Budget Committee, and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Republican Conference.
This tells us something important: The House Republican majority now governs largely through gestures and is driven almost entirely by internal party fractiousness and narrow political imperatives. When Boehner tried to tie the debt ceiling vote to a popular proposal to restore modest cuts to military pensions, Rep. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) complained that he could not vote to raise the debt limit but also didn’t want to vote against the pension restoration.
It’s a perfect parable: Cotton, an Army veteran who is trying to unseat Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, this fall, felt a need to placate pro-spending and anti-spending interest groups at the same time and didn’t want Boehner to call his bluff. No wonder the speaker gave up on mollifying his caucus and, bless him, offered his ironic melody about all the sunshine coming his way.
Something else happened on Tuesday: Fully 193 of the 195 Democrats voting were prepared to shoulder the burden of hiking the debt ceiling. This vote, like many before it, proved that there is a moderate governing majority in the House. It could work its will again and again if only Boehner were willing to put bills on the floor and give practical-minded Republicans a chance join with Democrats to enact them.
This proposition deserves a test on immigration reform. Supporters should be thinking about a discharge petition to force Boehner’s hand — or maybe even to allow him to do what he’s said privately he’d like to do. If a majority of House members signed it, there could be a successful vote for the immigration bill the Senate already passed.
The largest lesson is to those who make a living bemoaning Washington gridlock and demanding a return to old-fashioned, bipartisan, good-faith negotiations.
That would be very nice if we were dealing with the GOP of yesteryear. We’re not. The debt-ceiling vote confirms what has long been obvious: Getting to yes on anything begins with an acknowledgment of how many members of Boehner’s caucus are ready to blow up our governing process and how many others feign a desire to do so to avoid political pain from their right.
The Zip-a-dee-doo-dah House has become a cartoon festival of illusions that would embarrass Disney’s brilliant fantasists. Exposing the fantasies is the first step toward sunshine.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 12, 2014
“Troublesome Ted”: Ted Cruz Is The Symptom, Not The Disease
Ted Cruz seems to be becoming something of a Republican bogeyman. One can imagine Republican lawmakers trudging home and telling their recalcitrant kids that if they don’t brush their teeth and go to bed, Ted Cruz is going to bring a mob of torch-bearing tea partiers over to take them away. But they should remember that Ted Cruz is a particularly irritating symptom, not the problem.
So per the San Francisco Chronicle (h/t Hot Air’s Allahpundit), House Republicans lay the blame for immigration reform stalling in their chamber at … Cruz’s feet:
Then there was the debt ceiling near-fiasco – or, depending on your point of view, actual fiasco – this week. The House passing the clean debt ceiling suspension teed up Senate Republicans perfectly: They could all vote against the legislation but it would still pass. The GOP would avoid crashing the economy but still get an issue with which to beat Democrats.
It was Cruz who put the kibosh on that plan, compelling a 60-vote threshold for passage (as is his prerogative as a senator), prompting the vote to last an hour before GOP leaders Mitch McConnell (facing a serious primary) and John Cornyn (facing a farcical primary) fell on their proverbial swords and cast the votes necessary to nudge the majority north of 60.
These antics have won Cruz no friends among Senate GOPers, but as Byron York points out today, he’s a cipher for a particularly problematic part of the party:
Many in the GOP believe Cruz is just out for himself. But even if that’s true, they have to remember that he represents more than just Ted Cruz. There are a lot of Republicans — it’s not clear how many, but a significant portion of the party’s base — that cheers Cruz on when he battles with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. They want to see a Republican throw a wrench in the Washington spending machine, even if it creates chaos and damages the GOP’s standing with independent voters. And it is that conviction that is really behind the party’s problems; it is why Republicans would not enjoy smooth sailing even if Cruz were to retire tomorrow.
Cruz is adept at whipping up that section of the GOP and is equally skilled at self-promotion. But make no mistake: He’s riding a wave of sentiment, not causing it. If there was no Ted Cruz someone else would fill that role; it might be someone in the Congress, like Utah Sen. Mike Lee, or it might be one of the professionally aggrieved outside conservative groups like Heritage Action or the Senate Conservatives Fund, who know a rich fundraising vein when they see one.
As Hot Air’s Allahpundit writes:
So go ahead, GOPers, roll your eyes at Troublesome Ted. But remember that there are many more where he came from.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 14, 2014
“Gird Thy Loins, War Is Nigh”: Bobby Jindal Tries To Become A General In The Eternal War On American Christians
Tonight at the Ronald Reagan presidential library—America’s greatest library—Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will deliver a speech that will be seen (probably correctly) as an early component of the Jindal for President ’16 campaign. Its subject is an old favorite, the religious war currently being waged in America. It’s partly Barack Obama’s war on Christianity, but since Obama will be leaving office in a few years, it’s important to construe the war as something larger and more eternal. The point, as it is with so many symbolic wars, isn’t the victory but the fight.
Here’s how Politico describes the speech, which they got an early copy of:
“The American people, whether they know it or not, are mired in a silent war,” Jindal will say at the Simi Valley, Calif., event. “It threatens the fabric of our communities, the health of our public square and the endurance of our constitutional governance.”
“This war is waged in our courts and in the halls of political power,” he adds, according to the prepared remarks. “It is pursued with grim and relentless determination by a group of like-minded elites, determined to transform the country from a land sustained by faith into a land where faith is silenced, privatized and circumscribed.”
The speech sounds like pretty standard stuff; Jindal reiterates his support for Duck Dynasty homophobe/Jim Crow nostalgist Phil Robertson, saying, “The modern left in America is completely intolerant of the views of people of faith. They want a completely secular society where people of faith keep their views to themselves.” Which is not actually true; what Jindal (and some others) seem to want is a society where conservatives can say ignorant, bigoted things and no one is allowed to criticize them for it. But what interests me is the religious war stuff.
“Our religious freedom was won over the course of centuries of persecution and blood,” Jindal says, “and we should not surrender them without a fight.” Maybe he explains in the actual speech about the centuries of persecution and blood—is he talking about here in America? Because I don’t really remember all the Christians being tossed in jail or rounded up for massacres during the colonial period, culminating in the First Amendment, but maybe I missed something. In any case, this is a little more complex than simply appealing to social conservative voters, though it certainly is that.
Jindal is rather shrewdly attempting to tap into something that’s universal, but particularly strong among contemporary conservatives: the urge to rise above the mundane and join a transformative crusade. It’s one thing to debate the limits of religious prerogatives when it comes to the actions of private corporations, or to try to find ways to celebrate religious holidays that the entire community will find reasonable. That stuff gets into disheartening nuance, and requires considering the experiences and feelings of people who don’t share your beliefs, which is a total drag. But a war? War is exciting, war is dramatic, war is consequential, war is life or death. War is where heroes rise to smite the unrighteous. So who do you want to get behind, the guy who says “We can do better,” or the guy who thunders, “Follow me to battle, to history, to glory!”
Not that candidates haven’t tried to ride the “war on Christianity” thing before, with only limited success. But Fox News does crank up the calliope of Christian resentment every December, and there’s enough of a market there to keep it going. Can Bobby Jindal—slight of build, goofy of mien, dull of voice—be the Henry V of the 2016 version of this unending war? Let’s just say I’m a wee bit skeptical.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 14, 2014
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