“Making The Tea Party Feel Better”: Republicans Finally Admit What The Shutdown Is About
The conservative media began to report strange rumblings from Republicans on Wednesday, the second day of the government shutdown. Suddenly, Tea Partiers were saying that the government shutdown wasn’t about Obamacare, though they refuse to vote for a continuing resolution passed by the Senate because all their amendments related to the Affordable Care Act have been stripped out.
What is the shutdown about, then? What do Republicans want?
“We’re not going to be disrespected,” Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) told The Washington Examiner. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”
I repeat: “And I don’t know what that even is.”
It’s reminiscent of a classic scene from The Godfather II, when Fredo Corleone explained to his brother Michael why he was angry at being passed over by his father: http://youtu.be/2X9E9n6GHC8
Stutzman is a member of the so-called Suicide Caucus, 80 members of the House who signed a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) urging him to pursue a strategy of defunding Obamacare in exchange for funding the government. But given that this strategy could never work and the government is now shut down, Tea Partiers want “something,” but they “don’t know what that even is.”
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) told Fox News’ Sean Hannity Wednesday night, “This is about the happiest I’ve seen members in a long time because we’ve seen we’re starting to win this dialogue on a national level.”
Despite a new poll showing that show more voters blame Republicans and nearly three-quarters didn’t want a shutdown, Bachmann is still sure Republicans are finally winning.
Now they just need to figure out what they’re winning.
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, October 3, 2013
“Plan Beats No Plan”: In This Clash, Democrats Deserve The Victory
“Plan beats no plan.”
That was Tim Geithner’s political axiom in internal White House debates as the president’s team worked to mend the financial meltdown. Today his slogan does duty nicely as a preview of the public’s judgment on the shocking Republican choice to shut down the government over Obamacare.
Communications strategy in politics generally involves people in power crafting messages for less knowledgeable people (the press) to transmit to even less knowledgeable people (voters). (If you doubt this, have a look at the brilliant man-on-the-street segment Jimmy Kimmel did asking people whether they prefer “Obamacare” or “The Affordable Care Act.”). The idea in these messaging wars is to convey “values” that resonate with the public and trump your opponent’s.
Consider the current showdown in this context. President Obama championed a plan through which government will spend hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of low- and middle-income Americans buy decent private health coverage. As can never be said often enough, Obama’s plan also happens to have been based on a sensible Republican design that Mitt Romney enacted successfully in Massachusetts.
Republicans have no plan — literally, nothing serious whatsoever — to help more than a handful of the roughly 50 million uninsured Americans get such coverage. Yes, the GOP offers little talking points around the edges so that its team has something to say. But all of its “ideas” — from group purchasing for small business to buying coverage across state lines — are pseudo-plans. Nothing the Republican leadership has offered reaches more than 3 million people.
Once you understand this, you understand how deeply disingenuous Republican messaging has been. House Speaker John Boehner delivered a sound bite Monday night: “ We think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare .” That’s why the GOP wouldn’t budge.
Is Boehner kidding? Is that all they have? By “fairness” Boehner means the law’s individual mandate should be delayed for a year, just like the employer mandate has been put off. To save people from “the harms” of Obamacare, in Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) irritating collegiate debate lingo. Democrats are on the side of big business, you see, while the GOP is fighting for the little guy.
Now, to say that this message is an insult to our intelligence isn’t the end of the discussion, because no one ever lost a political fight by insulting the American public’s intelligence.
But that Republicans are staking the shutdown on this thin gruel is revealing. They’re not saying, “we have a better plan to help Americans achieve health security.” They can’t say that, because the president already enacted the Republican plan. Instead, they’re ginning up a phony “fairness” issue and trying to make it sound real.
But the employer mandate is a sideshow in Obamacare. It’s there for one reason: to keep employer money in the game to reduce the cost on public budgets of extending health-care coverage. Ending the employer role in health-care coverage and shifting these costs to public ledgers would be economically rational — better both for citizens and for businesses. Politically, however, the White House judged this to be untenable.
So let’s stipulate that over time the employer mandate should be scrapped. The individual mandate, by contrast — the “unfairness” the GOP now bemoans — is essential. As conservatives taught us via Romneycare, you can’t move toward universal coverage with private health-insurance plans without requiring everyone to be in the insurance pool (and also without subsidizing folks who need help buying coverage). Without a mandate and subsidies, younger, poorer and healthier folks opt out, making rates spiral. This is Insurance 101.
Trying to equate these mandates as a “fairness” issue is to assume the press and the public are idiots. Crafting a message that works only if people are idiots is a grim way to do politics — and deeply cynical. Republicans hardly have a monopoly on cynical political tactics, but to use cynicism in the service of denying basic health security to millions is morally unattractive, to put it mildly. Not something you want to tell the kids about.
“What did you do today, Daddy?” asks the son of one of these House Republicans in my imagination.
‘Hey, Junior, I twisted truth and logic to make sure millions of poor American workers can still go broke if someone in their family gets seriously ill. . . . Junior, why are you looking at me like that?”
John Boehner may look tanned and rested, but the suave speaker has a Dorian Gray problem. Somewhere in the attic, his likeness in a painting is rotting.
There’s a wonderful poster from World War II in which Churchill exhorts British citizens to “Deserve Victory.”
In this clash, Democrats do.
By: Matt Miller, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 2, 2013
“Drunk And Disorderly”: Republican Extremists Are Shredding Every Principle The GOP Claims To Uphold
By Washington standards, the current government shutdown is an everyday disaster – of a kind we are gradually learning to expect whenever the Republican Party controls Congress. The impending breach of the nation’s credit, however, when those same Republicans refuse to raise the debt limit to cover the funds they have spent, threatens a singular catastrophe: unpredictable, global, yet entirely avoidable.
The blame for this disgrace seems to be apportioned properly by most Americans, according to the latest polling data. But the future of the country and the world may well rest on whether voters understand the roots of this crisis – in a party controlled by an extremist faction that is violating every public value that party has supposedly espoused for 30 years and more.
Republicans used to tell us, often with a self-righteous air, that they were the true upholders of constitutional order, the rule of law, fiscal probity, personal responsibility, majority rights, and market principles. In their unquenchable zeal to oppose President Obama and all his works, they have discarded every one of those ideals.
They have closed down the government, with all the costs and sorrows that has imposed on the American people, in order to save us all from the Affordable Care Act – a law duly passed under the Constitution and declared to be so by a majority of the Supreme Court, including its very conservative chief justice. (Following that decision, the Republicans spent the next year campaigning to defeat the president on a platform of repealing health care reform – and were soundly defeated by him instead.)
To measure just how grossly the current attempts to obstruct Obamacare violate their supposed devotion to “law and order,” just imagine the Republican reaction if House Democrats had shut down government to force George W. Bush to repeal his beloved tax cuts.
Such hypocrisy is business as usual. But what about the substance of the Republican complaint against health care reform? To anyone aware of the law’s historical context, the fanatical Republican opposition simply seems bizarre. Here, after all, is a market-based system, originally conceived and promoted at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation as an alternative to Democratic plans for universal coverage. Its fundamental premises are individual responsibility and the power of competition to control costs and stop waste. Its first proven success occurred in a state governed by a Republican business executive — whom they later nominated for president.
Nevertheless, the Tea Party Republicans remain so determined to eradicate Obamacare that they are willing to jeopardize the economic recovery and the nation’s future prospects. They justify these outrages in the name of the budget, which they insist will be ruined by the costs of subsidizing health care for the country’s uninsured millions. But there is nothing fiscally responsible about shutting down government, an act that costs the U.S. economy at least $300 million each day – not including the additional burdens likely to arise from cancelled food inspections, disease monitoring, flu vaccinations, and weather reporting, to mention a few vital services that actually save enormous amounts of money and prevent untold suffering.
Should they continue to foment anarchy by causing a debt default, the ultimate costs are totally unpredictable – except that they will be very large. Even the threat of a shutdown in 2011 caused an immediate slowdown and an increase in unemployment. What will the real thing do? Nobody knows for certain, but the resulting market chaos and economic downturn will cause deeper fiscal problems as well as enormous public pain – at a time when deficits are falling faster than at any time in the past seven decades.
That is why the president and Senate Democrats are right to reject the House leadership’s demand for “negotiations.” Encouraging the destructive strategies of the extremists would convey precisely the wrong message to them and to the world. No doubt many Republicans, appalled at the shame that the Tea Party has brought upon their once Grand Old Party, are quietly applauding the president’s newfound firmness.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 3, 2013
“The GOP Insanity Is Not Temporary”: A Radical Vision For America That Goes From Here To Way Back Then
A lot of the talk from progressives (and I plead guilty to doing this myself on occasion) about the government shutdown and/or the impending possibility of a debt default suggests House Republicans are suffering from some sort of temporary insanity, or are indulging some sort of temporary temper tantrum by a faction they cannot ignore but can outlast. This habit flows from the broader sense that the Tea Party movement is some sort of temporary phenomenon–a “fever,” as the president famously put it–that will go away to be replaced by good, stolid, “moderate” conservatism sooner rather than later. You see it in the high hosannas raised every time yet another poll shows the percentage of voters identifying with the Tea Party–as opposed to the Republican Party that has largely internalized Tea Party policies and strategies–declining.
This attitude is perfectly understandable, but risks a major misunderstanding of what conservatives are up to at any given moment. Yes, many of them have a remarkably radical vision for America all right, which involves bringing back the idyllic government of the Coolidge administration and patriarchal culture of the Eisenhower administration. But they are pursuing an entirely rational if risky strategy for getting from here to way back there, based on three overlapping perspectives that are reasonably common in the conservative commentariat:
1) Radicalism on spending is the hand voters have dealt the GOP. The “defunding Obamacare” strategy has always been based on the leverage Republicans had after 2012 in maintaining control of just one congressional chamber. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare or enact the Ryan Budget, but they could refuse to fund the Obama Era welfare state, which meant threatening a government shutdown or a debt default. Obamacare was the natural target for this strategic brinkmanship since it polled worse than, say, Medicare or food stamps.
2) Resisting a new entitlement is easier and more effective than rolling back an established entitlement. For all the conservative talk about the hatred Americans feel for Obamacare, there is a widespread fear on the Right that once the law is in place for a few years, it will become part of the landscape, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or the Rx drug prescription before them. And this fear coincides with the “tipping point” argument that the Welfare State is now ensnaring so many Americans that “takers” are outnumbering “makers,” and will defend their theft of “maker” resources fiercely at the polls.
3) In divided government, implacable unity is the winning formula. There is an intense belief among conservatives that Republican back-stabbing–RINOism!–and tactical surrender to liberals explains every defeat for the Right going back for decades. Add in the inevitable “war of nerves” that characterizes politics in an era of divided government, and the conviction that red-state Democrats will side with Republicans if pushed to the wall, and you have an argument against compromise of any sort, at any price.
You can see how these three factors reinforce each other in Ted Cruz’s basic “defund Obamacare” rap as expressed back in August in an interview with the Daily Caller:
The Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse, the most important check we have on an overreaching executive. Now is the best chance we have to exercise this power in order to defund Obamacare. It can be done as part of passing the Continuing Resolution (CR) — a piece of legislation that funds the government and must be renewed by September 30th.
The Continuing Resolution gives us real leverage to defund Obamacare. Fighting this fight won’t be easy, but it’s now or never. President Obama’s strategy is simple: on January 1, the subsidies kick in. President Obama wants to get as many Americans addicted to the subsidies because he knows that in modern times, no major entitlement has ever been implemented and then unwound. That’s why the administration announced that it won’t enforce eligibility requirements-essentially encouraging fraud and “liar loans”-because that way the most people possible will get addicted to the sugar.
To stop that from happening, the House should pass a new Continuing Resolution to fund the entire federal government except Obamacare. The House should include a rider in that bill that explicitly prohibits any federal dollars – discretionary and mandatory – from being spent on it. Republicans control the House, and have already voted some 40 times to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this.
Then the bill comes to the Senate. Republicans need just 41 votes to prevent Democrats from passing legislation that funds Obamacare – 45 Republicans in the Senate have already voted to repeal Obamacare, so if we stand together, we can do this also.
At that point, we simply have to continue to stand together and not blink. If Republicans are truly against Obamacare, they will not vote to fund it.
Cruz obviously miscalculated that Senate Republicans would block any vote on a continuing resolution that “funded Obamacare,” but his argument still stands that the side that doesn’t “blink” will ultimately win; that it’s now or never for killing Obamacare; and that exploiting the House veto power over spending and debt limit increases is the one point of leverage that Obama’s re-election did not eliminate.
So Cruz’s revolt, into which John Boehner and the House Republican Caucus have been dragged because they can’t pass any bill opposed by Democrats without the support of conservatives who agree with his approach, wasn’t some adolescent outburst that will pass like a moment of hormonal rage, but a consistent strategy for using limited leverage on behalf on an extremist agenda. If it’s “insane,” the insanity is not temporary, and won’t just go away.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 1, 2013
“See You In Hell Orange Man”: President Obama Should Have A “Come To Jesus” Talk With John Boehner
So at the risk of getting ahead of myself here just a bit, the appropriations crisis is merging with the debt limit crisis. And as everybody’s favorite source for GOP thinking, National Review‘s Robert Costa, tells us today, John Boehner is determined not to relent on what just about everyone is calling an insanely untenable position on the CR because he’s got to keep GOPers together for the real ball game, the debt limit. Why? Kathleen Parker says that’s the rainbow that yielded a pot of gold for Boehner last time it appeared:
What Republicans hope to accomplish by tying demands to the debt ceiling is a grand bargain to include a package of entitlement and tax reform. Sound familiar? The president can refuse to negotiate, but at 3 a.m. when the phone rings and it’s Angela Merkel inquiring just what the hell is going on, it won’t be John Boehner’s phone ringing. It will be President Obama’s. That’s leverage. During the last debt-ceiling battle, Boehner managed to secure more than $2 trillion in cuts and no taxes.
So the conviction that Obama will eventually cave on the debt limit is what is making it possible for Boehner to walk the path Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint and their House minions have laid out for him.
Now I don’t know anything about the president’s relationship with Boehner. But it’s becoming a matter of national security for him to find some way to take him aside, maybe give the Speaker a cigarette from his secret stash, and say: “I will see you in Hell before I negotiate over the debt limit. And if you let a default happen, I will devote the rest of my presidency to making sure you, personally, bear the blame, and go down in history with our most despised traitors and criminals. For generations, little school children in Ohio will cross themselves and make hex signs when your name is mentioned. So do not, do not, go back and tell your crazy people they can win if they just stick together.”
This sort of attitude adjustment needs to happen sooner rather than later, before Boehner takes another step down the path he is currently contemplating.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 2, 2013
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