“Make ’Em Pay”: House Republicans Act As If They Are Immune From Majority Sentiment, But Each Is Up For Re-Election In 2014
Where do you go if you’re a “Deadliest Catch” kind of guy, manliest of manly men, but couldn’t fish for king crab because some jelly-bellied Republicans threw a tantrum 5,000 miles away and shut down the government?
What do you do if you’re a farmer in Kansas who could not put winter wheat in the ground or get this year’s cattle vaccine because your government agriculture office was deemed nonessential? Whom do you see about the home loan that was held up, the family restaurant near the federal building that couldn’t meet October’s payroll, the bookings lost at season’s end in dozens of national parks?
Real Americans, the wind-chapped toilers so often invoked by politicians in a phony froth, lost real money from the real pain inflicted on their livelihoods by the extortionists in Congress this month.
How much money? At least $24 billion was the estimate given by Standard & Poor’s. Small business was hit particularly hard. And it’s a rolling pain, affecting consumer confidence, that will be felt through a holiday buying season that can make or break many retailers.
“I am a small businessman in a big ocean with big bills,” said Captain Keith Colburn, an Alaska crab fisherman, in Senate testimony during the shutdown. “I need to go fishing,” said the skipper, who is featured in the reality TV show “Deadliest Catch,” but was being held back by “a bunch of knuckleheads,.” who prevented marine regulators from doing their jobs.
So, who pays? For years, Republicans have been trumpeting the idea that when a government action hurts a private business, the government should compensate for the loss. This principle is based on a broad reading of the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment; it’s usually summoned as leverage against environmental regulation.
But in the case of the federal shutdown, of course, the economic hit on millions of Americans didn’t come from government — it came from one political faction in the House of Representatives. You could sue the Tea Party, but what is that? A bunch of costumed zealots on Fox are not responsible for anything that comes out of their mouths and lands in the porous mind of someone like Representative Ted Yoho of Florida.
You could sue Ted Cruz of Texas for initiating the calamity with a marathon of self-absorption. But the senator, like all members of Congress, has broad protection to pretty much say or do anything he wants inside the thick-walled refuge of the Capitol, a free speech guarantee that is warranted even when abused by vanity projects like Cruz.
What’s left is the ballot box. And here, Red State America can do a huge service for the rest of country. The states hit hardest by the shutdown, it now appears, were those where Republicans prevail. Virginia, with its wealth of government jobs and businesses that depend on those jobs, is Exhibit A. There, Republicans are likely to lose the governor’s race next week in part because their party disrupted so many lives in October’s meltdown.
The more difficult job will be ousting, from hardened, gerrymandered districts, the people who put ideology ahead of common sense and commerce. They seem faceless and buffoonish. They act as if they are immune from majority sentiment. But each of them is up for re-election a year from now, and the good news is that almost 75 percent of voters say most Republicans in Congress don’t deserve to be sent back to Washington.
In some districts, it will be civil war. What’s left of moderate Republicans are organizing to go after the crazies. “Hopefully, we’ll go into eight to 10 races and beat the snot out of them,” former Representative Steve LaTourette of Ohio told the National Journal. His group of fed-up Republicans, Defending Main Street, plans to raise $8 million to target the looniest of the loons.
Make Steve King of Iowa pay. As key government offices across the country were shuttered, as farmers in his district could not get their loans processed, King crowed, “We’re right!” He exists because political theater requires new players in clown makeup. The Des Moines Register recently suggested a slogan for King: “Send me back to Washington so I can continue to embarrass Iowa.”
Make Darrell Issa of California pay. Using the vast apparatus of his House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, he is going after National Park Service rangers. Having shut down the government, Issa wants to know why popular parks and monuments were closed. The audacity! During an earlier hearing, a fellow congressman provided an answer: He held up a mirror and aimed it at Republican lawmakers.
And certainly make Marlin Stutzman of Indiana pay. This congressman gave history the money quote on the shutdown. “We have to get something out of this,” he said. “And I don’t know what that even is.” A year from now, he can find out.
By: Timothy Egan, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, October 28, 2013
“We Got ‘Em Now”: No, Healthcare.gov’s Problems Will Not Offer The GOP Political Deliverance
Today marks the beginning of what will surely be a series of hearings in Congress at which members will fulminate and shake their fists at various people who had responsibility for creating Healthcare.gov. It’s quite something to see some congressman who’s still struggling to figure out how to work the Blackberry his staff gave him asking questions about beta testing and error logs and a bunch of other stuff he doesn’t begin to understand. But maybe the weirdest thing is the feeling one gets from the GOP over the last few days, which can be summarized as, “We got ’em now!” They seem to believe that the website problems are going to provide the deliverance they’ve been waiting for after the political disaster of the government shutdown.
Here’s a little prediction: Feigned Republican outrage over the ACA web site is going to be just as effective in reversing the GOP’s current fortunes as feigned Republican outrage over Benghazi was in undoing Barack Obama’s re-election bid.
Nevertheless, they’ve got a new spring in their step, as The New York Times reports today. “If the Web site glitches are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Representative Greg Walden, who as chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee is responsible for making sure his party holds the House in 2014, “it’s only a matter of time before the law sinks and takes with it those Democrats who wrote it, voted for it and are proud of it.” All they have to do is sit back and wait for Obamacare to implode, then reap the political benefits.
I wouldn’t get too excited if I were them. First of all, if you’re arguing about why the website isn’t working, you’ve implicitly accepted the premise that the website ought to work, so people can use it and get insurance. Which is quite different from arguing, as some Republicans have, that people who are now uninsured just shouldn’t bother getting insurance at all. When you stand before the cameras to shout, “I will not rest until these problems are fixed and Obamacare works properly!” and you then turn around and say, “I will not rest until Obamacare is destroyed!”, you’re not exactly convincing the voting public that you’re the one they want running things.
Furthermore, as Greg Sargent reminds us, “when it comes to supplying genuine oversight, previous House GOP probes — into Benghazi and the IRS scandal – devolved into circus stunts. Those investigations got knocked off kilter by lurid and fanciful charges that seemed directed at a hard right audience that remains firmly in the grip of the conservative closed information feedback loop.” In today’s Republican party, efforts at embarrassing the Obama administration quickly get taken over by the the party’s tin foil hat brigade, and even the sane ones end up playing to Sean Hannity’s audience instead of to the country as a whole.
If you’re a Republican member of Congress, this is coming at a critical time, because it’s around now when your potential primary opponents are deciding whether they want to run against you in next year’s election. That gives you an incentive to prove to the folks back home that you’re as conservative as the nuttiest Tea Partier. It isn’t hard to do, really—all that’s necessary is to go on television and tell the Fox News host that you’re deeply concerned that Healthcare.gov was intentionally made to work improperly as a pretext for the socialist Obama administration to collect all our DNA to facilitate herding us into FEMA concentration camps (or something like that). Which helps make your primary challenge less likely, but doesn’t serve the party’s larger purpose of convincing the American public that the GOP is not, in fact, a party of extremists who don’t care about governing.
Hearings like these seldom produce any useful information, but if they increase the pressure on the administration to get things fixed quickly, then that’s all to the good. But if I were a Republican, I wouldn’t get too excited about what they’re going to do for my party.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editro, The American Prospect, October 24, 2013
“Woefully Ignorant”: Congressional Republican Lawmakers Who Struggle With Basic Concepts
Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) knows exactly how he plans to deal with the debt ceiling and the full faith and credit of the United States.
“I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke,” Yoho said. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, that will sure as heck be a moment. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt.
Now, Ted Yoho isn’t some random guy who called into a talk-radio show, or some troll in online comments thread. He’s a member of Congress. This elected federal lawmaker believes world markets would be more stable if the United States chose default on purpose.
While every day brings new evidence of policymakers saying foolish things about important issues, I feel like there are more examples than usual crossing the radar right now.
* Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wants to replace “Obamacare” with a federal benefits program that’s eerily similar to the Affordable Care Act.
* Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) demanded to know why a reporter with health care insurance didn’t enter an exchange marketplace designed for people with no health care insurance.
* Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) argued this morning that there’s “no such thing as a debt ceiling in this country,” and we won’t “default” on our debt by failing to raise the debt limit.
* Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) is convinced the government shutdown is about entitlement spending.
The list goes on (and on), but the larger point is, the country is in a difficult spot right now. The government is shut down, a debt-ceiling crisis is underway, and there’s no clear way out of the ongoing, self-imposed fiascos. The nation would benefit from sensible, knowledgeable policymakers showing sound judgment.
Instead we have these guys.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 7, 2013
“Incentivizing Harmful Behavior”: Sabotaging Obamacare Is A Lucrative Endeavor For Many Republicans
To gain steam for his initiative to tie funding of the government to defunding Obamacare, Senator Ted Cruz appeared at events over the summer with the Tea Party Express, a political action committee. “Either continue funding the government without giving one more dime to Obamacare, or shut down the government,” demands Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer.
The Tea Party Express, in turn, has sponsored fundraising drives to help “elect more leaders like Ted Cruz.”
One problem for Cruz-acolytes hoping to make their way into office? The Tea Party Express PAC has spent nearly every dollar of the $2.1 million it has raised this year on campaign consultants and fundraising fees, but not a dime in transfers to candidates or on independent expenditures. In previous years, the PAC has funneled much of its proceeds to Russo Marsh and Rogers, a Republican consulting firm in Sacramento, California.
The frantic crusade to screw up the launch of the Affordable Care Act is a sad tale in American politics. If conservatives are successful, even with a short-term government shutdown Cruz and his House GOP allies might achieve, patients will suffer. If young people fail to sign up for health insurance—the stated goal of one Koch-backed front group now airing television advertisements—more will drown under crushing debt if they find themselves in need of serious medical care. But Washington, DC, has a bizarre way of incentivizing harmful behavior, and the sabotage Obamacare campaign is not without its winners.
A set of campaign consultants and insurance agents stand to profit from confusing Americans on the eve of the healthcare reform enrollment date.
The conservative media frenzy over the defunding debate has invigorated donors to many PACs, not just Tea Party Express. The Senate Conservative Fund PAC recorded its largest-ever fundraising hauls last month, though it spends way more on candidates and on candidate ads than the Tea Party Express. Still, the Jim DeMint–linked PAC expended nearly half its coffers on administrative, research and fundraising payments this year. FreedomWorks, the RNC and the Club for Growth have hopped on the Cruz campaign to raise funds by advocating the repeal of Obamacare. For a non-federal election year, at least these PACs are doing well.
The rigid anti–healthcare reform politics of the Koch brothers is also having a stimulative effect upon a small circle of Republican consultants. Americans for Prosperity, the largest Koch-owned front, pays the traditional 15 percent commission rate on all their television buys—the latest round going to Target Enterprises, a Sherman Oaks, California-based GOP media company. And with a seemingly endless appetite for anti-Obamacare paid media and anti-Obamacare grassroots organizers, Koch makes good on its claim of being a stellar job-creator, at least for jobs in right-wing political advocacy.
The New York Times rightfully notes in an editorial that many other conservative advocacy groups, like the National Liberty Federation, have latched onto the Obamacare fight, viewing the healthcare reform debate as little more than opportunity to raise a few bucks.
The second and less noticed benefactor of some of the more malicious attacks upon healthcare reform are health insurance brokers. Health insurance brokers make a living by selling health insurance and collecting a commission for every person or group they enroll. With healthcare reform set to provide easy access to health insurance options, free of charge, many in the health insurance agent industry view the Obamacare rollout as a death sentence. In recent months, the broker industry has mobilized to erect obstacles for the dozens of community group “navigators,” organizations tapped to spread the word about how to enroll in the exchanges.
In Georgia, under influence from health insurance agent lobbyists, the state passed a law that prohibits navigators from providing advice “concerning the benefits, terms, and features of a particular health benefit plan.” Other states have thrown up licensing laws in an effort to curtail navigators from being able to do, well, anything.
The Center for Public Integrity’s Nicholas Kusnetz has done some of the most interesting investigative reporting on this side of the story, revealing that the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America and the National Association of Health Underwriters have orchestrated a multi-pronged attack on Affordable Care Act navigators. The industry, which has secured anti-navigator laws in sixteen states, has poured some $7.5 million into state campaigns since 2010.
While brokers claim they seek only to ensure patients are not scammed by “unlicensed” navigators, in reality, blocking competition seems to be the primary motivation. Last month, the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of America released a statement endorsing an effort by Congresswoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) to repeal all of the funding for the navigators programs. Notes from a lobbying association for insurance agents in California warned brokers before a visit to Sacramento: “If we don’t [lobby lawmakers] they will not think it will matter that much when they allow the unlicensed “navigators” to solicit your book of business!!”
Several community groups that had signed up to participate in the navigators program have now backed out, citing political pressure from Republican politicians. The House Oversight Committee, led by Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), and Republican attorneys general have harassed several navigator groups with lengthy questionnaires and other demands.
Some anti–healthcare reform activists are truly motivated by their convictions. But others stand to gain financially from making sure their fellow Americans have problems signing up for health insurance.
By: Lee Fang, The Nation, September 25, 2013
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