“The President’s Pivot”: The Tactical Move To Immigration Reform Is Brilliant, And Republicans Know It
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
That quote, from Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese treatise “The Art of War,” perfectly captures President Obama’s strategic victory over Tea Party members of Congress on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling debate. It also explains his immediate pivot to another topic that Tea Partyers hate and over which their obstinacy is likely to get the party hammered again: comprehensive immigration reform.
This is a brilliant tactical move on the president’s part. And Republicans know it.
As the G.O.P. was nearing its moment of collapse on the shutdown and debt ceiling, Representative Raúl Labrador, Republican of Idaho, said, “I think it’d be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into negotiations with him on immigration.” He continued: “And I’m a proponent of immigration reform. So I think what he’s done over the last two and a half weeks — he’s trying to destroy the Republican Party. And I think that anything we do right now with this president on immigration will be with that same goal in mind: which is to try to destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies.”
The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer laid out the president’s calculus more bluntly on Fox News: “With immigration, he wins either way. I’m not sure he thinks he can get it passed, seeing the resistance among the Republicans to the deal over the budget. I think he knows he’s not going to have a good chance of getting immigration through, but he thinks — and he’s probably right — that he can exploit this for the midterm election as a way to gin up support, for the Democrats to portray the Republicans as anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, etc.”
Republicans have a tough choice.
They can ride shotgun once again with the politically suicidal Tea Party faction, a group that the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found this week to be “less popular than ever.” They can allow the most strident voices on the far right that oppose comprehensive immigration reform — Rush Limbaugh has likened it to the Republican Party’s “authoring its demise” — to direct their path and further alienate Hispanic voters, who are increasingly coming to see the party as an unwelcoming place. Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote by 44 points last year, and the Republican National Committee’s own autopsy on that loss surmised:
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a G.O.P. nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”
Or Republicans can take the less likely path and demonstrate that they’ve been cowed enough to move ahead on a major piece of legislation that is supported by the majority of the American people — a July Gallup poll found that 71 percent of Americans believe that passing immigration reform is important. And that would be good not just for the president’s legacy but for the health of the country as a whole.
In a 2012 paper published by the Cato Institute, Raúl Hinojosa Ojeda, director of the North American Integration and Development Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, used computing models to estimate the following:
“Comprehensive immigration reform generates an annual increase in U.S. G.D.P. of at least 0.84 percent. This amounts to $1.5 trillion in additional G.D.P. over 10 years. It also boosts wages for both native-born and newly legalized immigrant workers.”
Comprehensive immigration reform is the right thing and the thing that Americans want. But the far right is hardly concerned with what’s right and has little appetite for agreeing with the will of the majority of the American people (despite talking ad nauseam about standing up for the American people).
The far right is angry at the government and the man at the top of it. According to a Pew Research report released Friday: “Anger at the federal government is most pronounced among Tea Party Republicans. Fully 55 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say they are angry with the federal government — about double the percentage among non-Tea Party Republicans (27 percent) and Democrats and Democratic leaners (25 percent).”
They have been blinded by that anger. The president knows that. And he knows that blind soldiers don’t often win battles. In choosing to pivot to immigration reform, he has created a win-win scenario for himself and the Democrats. Clever, clever.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 18, 2013
“Invincible Arrogance”: Ted Cruz’s Conceit And Fringe Politics Is A Recipe For A Very Scary Personality
Since we are for the time being required to think of Sen. Ted Cruz as a significant force in American politics, it’s helpful now and then to consider how the world looks from his perspective. TPM’s Josh Marshall suspects that being told his whole life how incredibly smart he is has not been good for his character:
[B]ack when he showed up at Harvard Law School in 1992, he stunned his fellow classmates by putting up flyers around campus for an ‘elite study group’ with the instructions ‘only magnas from top Ivys need apply.’ In other words, at a place where arrogance is like air and self-awareness a precious commodity, Cruz managed to stand out on day one as a triple-ply arrogant ass.
Cruz never seems to have grasped that there are people every bit as sharp as him who didn’t go to an Ivy League School (even a ‘top Ivy’). My read on Cruz, from talking to people who knew him very well in college and law school, is that he’s so confirmed in his belief in his own rectitude and genius that he’s likely impervious to what most of us would interpret as rejection or failure. This didn’t work? Well, too many stupid people or cowards who didn’t flock to my banner. That seemed to be the gist of his speech before the vote. And my guess it wasn’t just puffing but represented his genuine belief.
Moreover, in a “populist” wing of the Republican Party that is very self-conscious about its lack of ethnic diversity, its transparent anti-intellectualism, and its tendency to lionize pols that are aggressively proud of their ignorance, Cruz has been an all-purpose antidote, and hears more testimony to his brilliance every day than most very smart people hear in a lifetime.
His situation reminds me of the central character in Walker Pecy’s novel Lancelot, who gets an unearned reputation for brilliance among his teammates on the LSU football team:
Being “smart” on the football team meant that you read Time magazine and had heard of the Marshall Plan. (“You don’t believe he can tell you about the Marshall Plan? Ask him! He’s one more smart sapsucker.”) They, my teammates, admired “smartness” more than anybody I’ve met before or since.
Now add in the fact that Ted Cruz happens to espouse a political philosophy (and for that matter, a religious faith) based on a very rigid concept of what’s right and wrong at all times and in all circumstances, along with Cruz’s legendary rhetorical skills, and you have a recipe for a very scary personality.
I once read a letter to the editor from a man who explained that in opposing legalized abortion and homosexuality he was expressing “the mind of God.” “Now that’s self-confidence,” I thought. Add into that equation a mind that’s used to being described as almost God-like, and invincible arrogance–if not an actual God Complex–will be the result every single time.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 18, 2013
“You Need This Mr. Speaker”: How To Make John Boehner Cave On Immigration
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) generally adheres to the unwritten Republican rule that bars him from allowing votes on bills opposed by a majority of Republicans, even if they would win a majority of the full House.
But he’s caved four times this year, allowing big bills to pass with mainly Democratic support. They include repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; providing Hurricane Sandy relief; expanding the Violence Against Women act to better cover immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT survivors of abuse; and this week’s bill raising the debt limit and reopening the federal government.
Many presume the Republican House is a black hole sucking President Obama’s second-term agenda into oblivion. But the list of Boehner’s past retreats offers a glimmer of hope, especially to advocates of immigration reform. Though it has languished in the House, an immigration overhaul passed with bipartisan support in the Senate, and was given a fresh push by Obama in the aftermath of the debt limit deal.
The big mystery that immigration advocates need to figure out: What makes Boehner cave? Is there a common thread? Is there a sequence of buttons you can push that forces Boehner to relent?
Two of this year’s caves happened when Boehner was backed up against hard deadlines: The Jan. 1 fiscal cliff and the Oct. 17 debt limit. Failure to concede meant immediate disaster. Reject the bipartisan compromise on rolling back the Bush tax cuts, get blamed for jacking up taxes on every taxpayer. Reject the Senate’s three-month suspension of the debt limit, get blamed for sparking a global depression. Boehner held out until the absolute last minute both times, but he was not willing to risk blowing the deadline.
A third involved the response to an emergency: Hurricane Sandy. Conservative groups were determined to block disaster relief because — as with other federal disaster responses — the $51 billion legislative aid package did not include offsetting spending cuts. Lacking Republican votes, Boehner briefly withdrew the bill from consideration, unleashing fury from New York and New Jersey Republicans, including Gov. Chris Christie. While there wasn’t a hard deadline to meet, disaster relief was a time-sensitive matter, and the pressure from Christie and his allies was unrelenting. Two weeks after pulling the bill, Boehner put it on the floor, allowing it to pass over the objections of 179 Republicans.
The fourth cave occurred in order to further reform and expand a government program: The Violence Against Women Act. The prior version of the law had been expired for over a year, as conservatives in the House resisted the Senate bill in the run-up to the 2012 election. But after Mitt Romney suffered an 18-point gender gap in his loss to Obama, and after the new Senate passed its version again with a strong bipartisan vote, Boehner was unwilling to resist any longer. Two weeks later, the House passed the Senate bill with 138 Republicans opposed.
Unfortunately for immigration advocates, there is no prospect of widespread pain if reform isn’t passed. There is no immediate emergency, nor threat of economic collapse.
But there is a deadline of sorts: The 2014 midterm elections.
If we’ve learned anything about Boehner this month, it’s that he’s a party man to the bone. He dragged out the shutdown and debt limit drama for weeks, without gaining a single concession, simply so his most unruly and revolutionary-minded members would believe he fought the good fight and stay in the Republican family. What he won is party unity, at least for the time being.
What Boehner lost for his Republicans is national respectability. Republican Party approval hit a record low in both the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and Gallup poll.
Here’s where immigration advocates have a window of opportunity to appeal to Boehner’s party pragmatism. Their pitch: The best way to put this disaster behind them is for Republicans to score a big political victory. You need this.
A year after the Republican brand was so bloodied that the Republican National Committee had to commission a formal “autopsy,” party approval is the worst it has ever been. You’ve wasted a year. Now is the time to do something that some voters will actually like.
There’s reason to hope he could be swayed. In each of the four cases in which he allowed Democrats to carry the day, he put the short-term political needs of the Republican Party over the ideological demands of right-wing activists.
Boehner will have to do another round of kabuki. He can’t simply swallow the Senate bill in a day. There will have to be a House version that falls short of activists’ expectations, followed by tense House-Senate negotiations. Probably like in the most formulaic of movies, and like the fiscal cliff and debt limit deals, there will have to be an “all-is-lost moment” right before we get to the glorious ending. Boehner will need to given the room to do all this again.
But he won’t do it without a push. A real good push.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 18, 2013
“The Damage Done”: Estimates Of Damage From GOP Hostage-Taking Understate The True Harm Done
The government is reopening, and we didn’t default on our debt. Happy days are here again, right?
Well, no. For one thing, Congress has only voted in a temporary fix, and we could find ourselves going through it all over again in a few months. You may say that Republicans would be crazy to provoke another confrontation. But they were crazy to provoke this one, so why assume that they’ve learned their lesson?
Beyond that, however, it’s important to recognize that the economic damage from obstruction and extortion didn’t start when the G.O.P. shut down the government. On the contrary, it has been an ongoing process, dating back to the Republican takeover of the House in 2010. And the damage is large: Unemployment in America would be far lower than it is if the House majority hadn’t done so much to undermine recovery.
A useful starting point for assessing the damage done is a widely cited report by the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimated that “crisis driven” fiscal policy — which has been the norm since 2010 — has subtracted about 1 percent off the U.S. growth rate for the past three years. This implies cumulative economic losses — the value of goods and services that America could and should have produced, but didn’t — of around $700 billion. The firm also estimated that unemployment is 1.4 percentage points higher than it would have been in the absence of political confrontation, enough to imply that the unemployment rate right now would be below 6 percent instead of above 7.
You don’t have to take these estimates as gospel. In fact, I have doubts about the report’s attempt to assess the effects of policy uncertainty, which relies on research that hasn’t held up very well under scrutiny.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Macroeconomic Advisers overstated the case. The main driver of their estimates is the sharp fall since 2010 in discretionary spending as a share of G.D.P. — that is, in spending that, unlike spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare, must be approved by Congress each year. Since the biggest problem the U.S. economy faces is still inadequate overall demand, this fall in spending has depressed both growth and employment.
What’s more, the report doesn’t take into account the effect of other bad policies that are a more or less direct result of the Republican takeover in 2010. Two big bads stand out: letting payroll taxes rise, and sharply reducing aid to the unemployed even though there are still three times as many people looking for work as there are job openings. Both actions have reduced the purchasing power of American workers, weakening consumer demand and further reducing growth.
Putting it all together, it’s a good guess that those estimates of damage from political hostage-taking understate the true harm done. Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Republican victories in the 2010 midterms has been a still-weak economy when we could and should have been well on the way to full recovery.
But why have Republican demands so consistently had a depressing effect on the economy?
Part of the answer is that the party remains determined to wage top-down class warfare in an economy where such warfare is particularly destructive. Slashing benefits to the unemployed because you think they have it too easy is cruel even in normal times, but it has the side effect of destroying jobs when the economy is already depressed. Defending tax cuts for the wealthy while happily scrapping tax cuts for ordinary workers means redistributing money from people likely to spend it to people who are likely to sit on it.
We should also acknowledge the power of bad ideas. Back in 2011, triumphant Republicans eagerly adopted the concept, already popular in Europe, of “expansionary austerity” — the notion that cutting spending would actually boost the economy by increasing confidence. Experience since then has thoroughly refuted this concept: Across the advanced world, big spending cuts have been associated with deeper slumps. In fact, the International Monetary Fund eventually issued what amounted to a mea culpa, admitting that it greatly underestimated the harm that spending cuts inflict. As you may have noticed, however, today’s Republicans aren’t big on revising their views in the face of contrary evidence.
Are all the economy’s problems the G.O.P.’s fault? Of course not. President Obama didn’t take a strong enough stand against spending cuts, and the Federal Reserve could have done more to support growth. But most of the blame for the wrong turn we took on economic policy, nonetheless, rests with the extremists and extortionists controlling the House.
Things could have been even worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on the road to nowhere.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 17, 2013
“Captain Of The USS Republican”: Raking In The Money, Ted Cruz Discovers The Fringe Benefits Of Failure
The recent political turmoil in Washington was multifaceted and involved quite a few personalities, motivations, and working parts. No one person was ultimately responsible for the entire nightmare.
But if we were to focus in on one main culprit, it’s safe to say Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) would lead the list of suspects. He spent the August recess demanding his party follow his shutdown plan; he offered leadership to House Republicans; the right-wing senator even made himself the public face of this fiasco with a 21-hour speech that served no legislative purpose, but made it easy for Ted Cruz to celebrate his fondness for Ted Cruz.
The freshman Republican became so notorious that when he campaigned for Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia a couple of weeks ago, the gubernatorial hopeful didn’t want any photographs taken of the two of them together.
But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Cruz led his party into a ditch and drew the ire of Republicans who blame him for his misguided crusade, but the far-right Texan appears to still be in the midst of a long con.
If you were curious, talking on television for 21 straight hours is very lucrative. Over the last quarter, Ted Cruz’s still-young political action committee pulled in $797,000 during the period that included his extended C-SPAN advertorial. It’s nearly twice what Cruz pulled in the quarter prior. […]
His October report, which covers July 1 to September 30, notes that his PAC has $378,000 on-hand after the nearly $800,000 haul, money that will be used to support conservative candidates and issues close to Cruz’s heart.
Cruz isn’t making many friends among his Senate colleagues; he has no prospects for actually passing bills; and he’s cultivated a public reputation as a dangerous extremist. This may seem like a poor combination, but the senator clearly doesn’t see it that way.
While pushing his party over a cliff, Cruz has also positioned himself as a guy capable of winning straw polls, quickly raising a lot of money, and collecting a massive new database of conservative donors and activists – which may come in handy if a certain someone intends to launch a bid for national office in a couple of years.
Cruz’s party shut down the government and caused a debt-ceiling crisis for reasons that still don’t make any sense, leading to a surrender in which Republicans gained nothing. In fact, it was worse than nothing – the GOP has seen its support collapse, ending up with a deal that could have been better for the party had it been less ridiculous weeks ago.
But from Cruz’s perspective, these developments, while unfortunate, are a small price to pay for advancing his personal ambitions.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 17, 2013
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