“The Anti-Everything Party”: The Finger Of Blame For A Government Shutdown Points Only One Way
Sorry to subject you to another post about the pending government shutdown (It’s Friday—shouldn’t I be writing about robots? Maybe later.), but I just want to make this point briefly. As we approach and perhaps reach a shutdown, Republicans are going to try very hard to convince people that this is all Barack Obama’s fault. I’m guessing that right now, staffers in Eric Cantor’s office have formed a task force to work day and night to devise a Twitter hashtag to that effect; perhaps it’ll be #BarackOshutdown or #Obamadowner or something equally clever. They don’t have any choice, since both parties try to win every communication battle. But they’re going to fail. The public is going to blame them. It’s inevitable. Here’s why.
1. Only one side is making a substantive demand
The Democrats’ position is let’s not shut down the government, because that would be bad. They aren’t asking for any policy concessions. The Republican position, on the other hand, is if we don’t get what we want, we’ll force the government to shut down. So from the start, Republicans look like (and are) the ones forcing the crisis.
2. The demand Republicans are making is absurd and everyone knows it
Even many Republicans admit that it’s ridiculous to think Barack Obama would destroy his signature accomplishment, the most meaningful piece of domestic legislation in decades. If I say to you, “Would it be OK if I took your car, killed your dog, and burned down your house?” and you say “No, that would not be OK,” no one is going to accuse you of being the unreasonable one.
3. The Republicans have done this before
It happened when Bill Clinton was president (you can look here if you’ve forgotten how that turned out), and we’ve been through this cycle of threats of a shutdown more recently. Everyone is familiar with the pattern, and nothing about this particular iteration is going to be understood any differently. Which leads us to the most important reason:
4. Republicans are the ones who hate government, and Democrats are the ones who defend it
This is the heart of it. After so many decades of Republicans saying that government is evil, trying to slash it in a hundred ways, and more recently saying that they don’t think a shutdown would be all that bad, it will be all but impossible for them to convince people that they’re the ones who want government to stay open. Even if it were true (which it isn’t) they wouldn’t be able to convince people of it. They’re the anti-government party. That’s who they are. They worked very hard to create that image. So the universal default assumption is that when there’s a question of who’s responsible for shutting down the government, Republicans are the ones who are doing it, and persuading people that the opposite is true just isn’t going to happen.
I’m sure that at some point, Republicans will start arguing that because of some procedural detail (i.e. that the House passed a continuing resolution), they’re the ones who are moving forward while responsibility for the shutdown lays with Barack Obama. No one bought that when Newt Gingrich was Speaker (remember, that shutdown was triggered by a Clinton veto of a spending bill), and no one’s going to buy it now.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 20, 2013
“Hostages Are A Pre-requisite”: Coming To Terms With The Normalization Of Republican Extortion Politics
President Obama spoke yesterday to the Business Roundtable, and used some language to describe Republican tactics that raised a few eyebrows — not because he was incorrect, but because his word choice was provocative.
In his remarks, Mr. Obama accused what he called “a faction” of Republicans in the House of trying to “extort” him by refusing to raise the nation’s debt ceiling unless the president’s health care plan is repealed.
“You have never in the history of the United States seen the threat of not raising the debt ceiling to extort a president or a governing party,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s irresponsible.”
Mr. Obama called upon the business leaders to try to convince lawmakers to avoid the kind of “brinksmanship” that would lead to promises of “apocalypse” every few months. “What I will not do is to create a habit, a pattern whereby the full faith and credit of the united states ends up being a bargaining chip to make policy,” he said. “I’m tired of it,” he added. “And I suspect you are too.”
For the president to publicly reference Republican “extortion” tactics struck some as excessive. That’s a shame; Obama’s right.
Let’s step back for a moment. A traditional, transactional method of governing was in place in Washington for generations, and it worked fairly well. In some cases, policymakers would rely on intra-policy cooperation (“I’ll go along with some of the provisions you want if you go along with some of the provisions I want”), and in other cases it’s been inter-policy cooperation (“I can help move that bill you like if you help me move this other bill that I like”).
The transactional model was never easy, of course, and parties that were supposed to disagree usually did, but governing happened. Bills passed. Policymaking and compromises existed. The nation did not simply bounce from one self-imposed, manufactured crisis to the next.
In the wake of the radicalization of Republican politics, the system broke down, largely because GOP officials came to believe they can no longer accept concessions on anything, and anyone who dares compromise with those they disagree with deserves to lose in a Republican primary.
What matters, of course, is what’s replaced transactional politics.
I tend to describe it as extortion politics, which we may be getting used to, but which has no modern precedent in the American system of government.
Consider an example from earlier this year. House Republicans approved a budget plan and challenged Senate Democrats to do the same, assuming they’d fail. The GOP miscalculated and Senate Dems approved their own budget plan in the spring.
From there, lawmakers were supposed to enter bipartisan, bicameral negotiations, which is what always happens when the House and Senate approve competing budget blueprints. But a funny thing happened — Republicans refused to enter the budget talks they said they wanted.
It hasn’t generated much attention, but it’s important to understand why. GOP lawmakers couldn’t go to the negotiating table because that would mean … negotiating. Republicans weren’t prepared to compromise on anything, so why bother with budget talks? What GOP officials wanted instead was to wait until the fall when they might at least try to claim leverage in an extortion plot.
In other words, hostages have become a prerequisite to Republican governance.
We’ve actually reached the point at which the GOP seems genuinely and literally confused about the meaning of the word “compromise.” Consider this item from a week ago:
One group of conservatives on Thursday pressed what they called a compromise: a one-year stopgap spending bill that would raise the debt ceiling for a year, delay all aspects of the health care law for a year, and give back some of the Pentagon cuts as a sweetener. Backers insisted on Thursday that it was a package Mr. Obama should be able to accept.
Got that? In this approach, Republicans would get the health care delay they want and the spending levels they want. What would Democrats get? Nothing except the relief that comes with knowing that the hostage the GOP was threatening would live to see another day.
This, in the delusional minds of congressional Republicans, is not only a “compromise,” it’s the kind of deal the White House might actually go for.
This has become the norm in every major legislative fight since January 2011. Faced with a challenge, Republicans won’t compromise or consider possible concessions; they’ll instead reach for the nearest hostage and start making threats. The nation shifts from one crisis to the next, not because we have to, but because Republicans have made it their m.o. In the last Congress, Republicans created a debt-ceiling crisis and three separate shutdown threats. In this Congress, we’re only nine months in and we’re already facing a shutdown crisis this month and a new debt-ceiling crisis next month.
In each instance, the GOP approach is the same: so long as our demands are met, and we don’t have to compromise, we won’t have to hurt anyone on purpose.
So before the Beltway gets too bent out of shape over Obama using the word “extort” in a speech, I have a question: can anyone think of a more apt description of what’s tragically become the new status quo in Washington?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 19, 2013
“Fraticidal Rage”: Ted Cruz Turns Obamacare Defunding Plan From Disaster To Utter Fiasco
Now that the House of Representatives has passed its bill to keep the government open and rid the world of Obamcare, the full strategic disaster the Republicans have embarked upon is coming into focus. The procedure is a little confusing, but once we disentangle the steps, it quickly becomes clear that the Republicans have started a dumpster fire they have no obvious way to extinguish.
It’s important to keep in mind that a government shutdown does not, in and of itself, stop Obamacare from going forward. Most of the money for that law has been appropriated through channels (tax credits, state-based exchanges, etc.) immune to shutdown. The Obamacare-shutdown method relies on the hope that keeping the government shut down proves so annoying to the president that he (or a filibuster-proof majority in both houses) submits to abolishing his health-care reform in return for reopening the government. That is the only way shutting down the government could result in the defunding of Obamacare.
Step one of this far-fetched scheme was the passage of a “continuing resolution,” which keeps the government open, attached to abolishing Obamacare. Now it goes to the Senate. Once that bill comes up for a vote in the Senate, the majority can vote to strip away the provision defunding Obamacare. That vote can’t be filibustered. It’s a simple majority vote, and Democrats have the majority.
What Senate Republicans can do is filibuster to prevent the bill from coming to a vote at all. That’s the only recourse the Senate defunders have. And Ted Cruz is promising to do just that: “ I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together,” he says, “and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.” A “committed defunder” in the Senate likewise tells David Drucker, “Reid must not be allowed to fund Obamacare with only 51 votes.”
In other words, the new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.
But what if it succeeds? Well, success means the government shuts down because the Senate Republican majority has successfully filibustered a vote on the House bill preventing a shutdown.
Remember, the whole Republican plan to win the shutdown fight is to pin the blame on Obama. Obama is trying to shut down the government, they are already saying, and we’re trying to keep it open. That message depends on both houses of Congress passing a law that defunds Obamacare, and Obama refusing to sign it. Then they can present themselves as having acted to keep the government open, and Obama refusing to go along merely because he doesn’t want to snatch health insurance away from 20 million people.
It’s a patently disingenuous argument that stands no chance of success. But even that patently disingenuous message relies on establishing the optics of Obama refuses to sign our bill. Now the Republican plan relies instead on maintaining a Republican filibuster in the Senate, in perpetuity, to prevent a vote on a bill to open the government. They have maneuvered themselves into the least tenable position to defend a plan that never stood a chance of succeeding in the first place.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, September 20, 2013
“Overwhelmed With Madness”: House Republicans Beat John Boehner Into Submission
Following up on an earlier item, it’s not official — House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told his members at their weekly conference meeting that he’s prepared to abandon his own plans and try things their way. As such, with a government-shutdown deadline just 12 days away, the House will vote on a spending bill that defunds the Affordable Care Act, just like the far-right demands.
When reporters asked whether he had lost control of his conference, Boehner replied, “The key to any leadership job is to listen.” That’s a generous way of saying he’s being told what to do by those he ostensibly leads.
What’s more, the woefully weak Speaker seemed eager to punt the whole mess to the upper chamber, in the hopes that he won’t take all of the blame for the fiasco he and his caucus created: “[W]e’re going to send it over to the Senate, so our conservative allies over there can continue the fight. That’s where the fight is….. The fight over here has been won. It’s time for the Senate to have that fight.”
And when Boehner said the fight in the House “has been won,” the Speaker is referring to the victory of the extremists he hoped to lead in a more responsible direction, but who blew him off.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, doesn’t have a lot of choices, and can’t force congressional Republicans to be less foolish. It can, however, prepare for the worst.
The White House told federal agencies on Tuesday to prepare for a government shutdown.
President Obama’s budget director Sylvia Matthews Burwell in a memo to agencies said they should set their plans in case Congress fails to pass a funding measure by the end of the month. The government would shut down on Oct. 1 without action by Congress.
While there is time for Congress to act, Burwell wrote that “prudent management” requires agencies to prepare for a shutdown.
It’s tempting to think the White House would be scrambling to figure something out right now, but there’s just not much President Obama and his team can do. They can’t negotiate with Republican leaders because rank-and-file GOP lawmakers aren’t listening to their leaders anyway, and they can’t focus on common ground because Republican demands are too ridiculous.
So what happens now?
The House will almost certainly approve their stopgap spending measure this week, marking the 42nd time House Republicans have voted to gut the Affordable Care Act. The bill will then go to the Senate, which will swiftly reject it, before passing a bill of its own.
The House will then have to decide whether to approve the Senate bill or shut down the government. All of this will have to happen within the next 12 days.
Also keep in mind, the new House Republican strategy not only pushes Washington closer to a shutdown, but also raises the possibility that conservatives are acting against their own interests — if the Senate spending measure is to the left of Boehner’s original plan, the right may have to swallow a bill that’s friendlier to Democrats than the one they could have had just a week ago.
It would have been quite easy to avoid this showdown, if only Boehner were a more effective Speaker and his members weren’t so overwhelmed with madness.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 18, 2013
“Terrified That Obamacare Will Succeed”: Why Republicans Are Desperate For A Government Shutdown
The coming battles over budgets, the debt ceiling, a government shutdown and Obamacare are not elements of a large political game. They involve a fundamental showdown over the role of government in stemming rising inequality and making our country a fairer and more decent place.
Anyone who doesn’t see this should be forgiven. The stakes in this battle are almost always buried in news accounts about tactics and obscured by an unquenchable desire across the media to provide the latest take on whether President Obama is growing “weak” and has already become the lamest of lame ducks.
Yes, Obama has work to do in quelling doubts about his leadership. But little of what we’re hearing offers enlightenment as to why this big argument is happening in the first place, and why it matters.
To begin with, this is not just a fight between Republicans and Democrats. The GOP is clearly divided between those who take governing seriously — they still believe in government enough to accept responsibility for keeping it open — and those who see in every issue the “final conflict” that Marxists kept predicting. Stopping Obamacare, in their view, is necessary to prevent the country from reaching the end of the road to serfdom. Compared with this hellish prospect, who cares about shutdowns?
What’s fascinating, and this speaks to the perceived power of the tea party in primaries, is that it has taken only a small minority of House Republicans to push toward Armageddon. The Post’s Lori Montgomery and Paul Kane estimated that roughly 40 conservatives revolted against their leadership’s efforts to keep the government open past Sept. 30. That’s 40 in a 435-member House of Representatives. What’s become of us when less than 10 percent of one chamber of Congress can unleash chaos? What does this say about the House Republican leadership gap?
But it’s also important to understand why the Republican right is so fixated on killing or delaying Obamacare before it goes into effect. Its central worry is not that the program will fail but that it will succeed.
In an interview on Fox News this summer, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) a leader of the stop-Obamacare forces, gave the game away. After ritualistically declaring that “Obamacare isn’t working,” he said this: “If we’re going to repeal it, we’ve got to do so now or it will remain with us forever.” Why? Because once the administration gets the health insurance “exchanges in place . . . the subsidies in place,” people will get “hooked on Obamacare so that it can never be unwound.”
In other words, Obamacare, like Medicare and Social Security, could work well enough and improve the lives of enough people that voters will get “hooked” on it. For fear of this, the tea party’s champions would shut down the government and risk financial calamity over the debt ceiling? Even the Wall Street Journal’s reliably anti-Obama editorial page on Tuesday upbraided the “kamikazes” of the right.
There is a thread running through the antics of the kamikaze caucus. Almost everything it is doing is designed to keep government from acting against inequality and addressing the stagnation or decline of incomes among both poor and middle-class Americans. Foiling Obamacare, which would relieve economic pressure by getting health insurance to 25 million Americans who wouldn’t have it otherwise, is part of this larger story.
As Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, noted, this week’s census figures showed the poverty rate “remaining unchanged at a high 15.0 percent in 2012” and median household income “unchanged at $51,017, some 8.3 percent — or $4,600 — below its level in 2007, before the recession.”
Things would be even worse without food stamps which, as Greenstein pointed out, kept 4 million Americans out of poverty last year. And what is the House’s main priority this week? To toss 3.8 million people off the program next year. More generally, conservatives want to keep reducing government spending at a time when the unemployed most need public policy that stimulates growth rather than drags the economy down. Continued cuts will mean more economic sluggishness.
It’s hard to decide which is worse: utter indifference on the right wing to the damage that win-at-all-costs politics could cause the overall economy, or its coldhearted effort to block any attempt to ease the burdens on Americans who are struggling. One way or the other, this is what we should be talking about.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 19, 2013
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