“Camouflaging What They’re Up To”: GOP Bets Voters Aren’t Paying Attention To Their Obamacare Obstructionism
The House GOP leadership reportedly feels confident that they’ve defused the fanatical right’s push for a government shutdown fight over defunding Obamacare. The leaders apparently think that shutting down the government is, as a general matter, a bad idea because it tends to irritate voters who want those elected to govern to actually, you know, govern.
This prompts Greg Sargent to wonder why the GOP doesn’t get in more trouble for its general refusal to govern. The short answer, I think, is that Republicans think voters aren’t paying attention.
Sargent cites a new report from NRO’s Robert Costa outlining the House GOP leaders’ plans to avoid a shutdown and continue the battle to derail Obamacare. The latest idea: Demand an Obamacare delay in exchange for raising the debt ceiling (a legislative version of “delay Obamacare or the economy gets it”). Costa quotes veteran GOP pollster David Winston as saying that the GOP wants to avoid a shutdown because people expect them to govern.
Sargent writes:
The idea appear[s] to be that staging a shutdown to force the destruction of Obamacare — rather than offering an alternative — constitutes a failure to govern. But if that is so, why is not doing everything Republicans can to sabotage the law short of pushing for a shutdown, while offering no alternative, also a failure to govern?
I would think the answer is fairly obvious: A government shutdown is a high-profile and very unusual event and one that generally involves a fairly clear villain. If there’s a shutdown, it’s because one side is being obstinate – to wit, if House Republicans refuse to pass a bill to keep the government open without simultaneously defunding an existing law, they’ll be responsible for it regardless of how many times they claim that it’s Obama’s fault because he refuses to go along with their demands.
On the other hand, everything else the GOP is doing to make sure the law doesn’t work – from refusing to work on bills which would correct its faults to refusing to accept federal funding for a Medicaid expansion (Jonathan Chait has a great rundown of these tactics) – is not as eye-catching as a shutdown and falls into a different media narrative, one of generalized congressional gridlock. If Congress can’t pass a bill which would, to take an example from Chait, fix the law so it doesn’t force many church health insurance plans to disband, it’s easy to ascribe it to generalized gridlock (a pox on both their houses!) rather than GOP obstinacy in the larger context of a refusal to cooperate with the very routine legislative work of trying to fix a law’s problems.
Political junkies understand what the GOP is up to. But the party is gambling that medium- and low-information voters who couldn’t help but notice a shutdown won’t bother themselves with the ins and outs of daily governance (or lack thereof).
It seems a safe bet in the short term, but we’ll see whether voters figure it out as they actually start to tune in and get ready to vote next year.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 13, 2013
“We’re Done Getting Mugged”: Hey Republicans, Obamacare Is Off The Table!
There’s an increasingly obvious problem with the efforts of GOP congressional leaders to tamp down “base” support for a “defunding Obamacare” drive linked to a continuing resolution to keep the federal government operating this fall: they’re talking about other measures to cripple Obamacare–e.g., a delay in key provisions like the individual mandate–perhaps linked to other “hostages” like the debit limit, instead of talking about using whatever leverage they have to achieve other Republican objectives.
On Wednesday I compared these leaders to a parent trying to bribe an unruly child demanding ice cream with a double scoop sometime later. But what if ice cream production has come to a halt? Can the kids be talked into gorging themselves on some other kind of sugary treat?
I don’t know, but at Salon, the exceptionally well plugged-in Brian Beutler thinks it’s time for Republicans to stop talking about ice cream:
Even in the dour days of 2011, when Dems were defeated, morose, and willing to negotiate away almost anything, major provisions of Obamacare were off the table. In 2013, almost everything is off the table. They’re done getting mugged by the GOP. Funding the government and increasing the debt limit are fundamental responsibilities of Congress, and Republicans won’t get more than a couple fig leafs for marshalling enough votes to accomplish them….
I can imagine Democrats putting something genuinely marginal to the ACA on the table. Like I said, a fig leaf. But not the individual mandate. Getting many people into the insurance exchanges, and particularly young healthy people, is crucial to the law’s success, and the mandate is the only stick they have (and it’s a pretty flimsy one) to prod them in there. Everything else is carrots. It’s conceivable to me that the inducements, and the national enrollment outreach effort, will be successful enough on their own to render the mandate ancillary in 2014. But postponing it is too big of a risk.
Republicans should know this. I think GOP leaders do know it, and for the sake of stability and a calming autumn, I sure hope they do. If they don’t, they’ll blunder into these discussions completely blind to how empty they’re about to come up. They’ll feel like they got rolled, when in reality they’ll have simply been mistaken about the terms of the negotiation. And that’s the only way I can imagine these crazed theatrics transforming into a genuine crisis.
If, of course, GOP leaders talk their firebrands out of a frontal assault on Obamacare that they really, really want to undertake on grounds that it’s more realistic to pursue delays that Democrats won’t agree to under any circumstances, then the consequences will go beyond a turbulent autumn in Washington. The GOP congressional leadership really will suffer a massive loss of grassroots conservative confidence, and you could be looking at a national party unmistakably under the heel of Ted Cruz.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 16, 2013
“Not Conservative Enough”: In The Republican Party, The Hard Right Is Where The Enthusiasm Is
It’s become an article of faith among some Republican elites that the GOP doesn’t have an outreach problem, it has a turnout problem. During a recent interview with Greta Van Susteren of Fox News, for instance, Rush Limbaugh boiled down the argument to its core. It’s not that the GOP has an issue with racial minorities or that most voters—whites included—have no interest in its policies or approach. Its problem is that it isn’t conservative enough. “The people that sat home,” he explained, were “mostly white Republican voters,” who were “dissatisfied with the Republican Party’s rejection of conservatism.”
Now, to most observers, the GOP has done everything but reject conservatism. Mitt Romney may have made his name as a moderate governor of Massachusetts, but his platform as Republican presidential nominee was a grab bag of proposals from the wish lists of conservative activists: large tax cuts for the wealthy, larger cuts to the social-safety net, prohibitions on abortion, opposition to same-sex marriage, and a hardline stance on immigration.
And indeed, in the nine months since Romney lost the presidential election, Republicans have only moved further to the right, falling deeper into the “fever” of intransigence and obstruction. Just this past week, for example, House Republicans had to give up on appropriating funds for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Why? Because their right-wing members demanded massive cuts to key programs, and less doctrinaire Republicans wouldn’t go along.
The problem for potential reformers in the GOP, however, is that the rank and file is on the side of the zealots. According to the latest survey from the Pew Research Center, 67 percent of self-identified Republicans say the party needs to “address major problems” if it’s going to be competitive in national elections. For them, however, this isn’t a case of being too conservative. Indeed, it’s the opposite: 54 percent of Republicans say the party’s leadership isn’t conservative enough. And 35 percent say that GOP leaders have compromised too much in their dealings with President Obama. Presumably, this minority wanted Republicans to hold out on the debt ceiling and refuse to deal on the fiscal cliff and is pushing for a standoff over funding the government this fall.
This wish for a more conservative Republican Party holds for a variety of issues. Thirty-six percent say that the party should be more conservative on immigration—compared with 17 percent who say it’s “too conservative”—and 46 percent say it should be more conservative on government spending, compared with just 10 percent who say it’s too conservative. Guns are the only area where a majority say the party is in a right place, and recall, the GOP’s position on guns is that regulations—of any sort—are verboten, even when they have support from the vast majority of Americans.
None of this would be a huge problem for efforts to move the GOP to the center of American politics if the most moderate Republicans were also the most active. In reality, the opposite is true. The most conservative voters are also most likely to vote in all elections, including primaries. Of the 37 percent of Republicans who agree with the Tea Party, 49 percent say they always vote in nomination contests, compared with 22 percent of moderate and liberal Republicans.
In other words, hard-right conservatism is where the enthusiasm is, and it’s reflected in the broader state of Republican politics. To wit, it’s hard to imagine how Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell could do more to satisfy the conservative base. For the last four years, he has all but led the GOP opposition to Barack Obama, setting Republicans on a path of complete opposition to the president’s priorities and nearly derailing his signature accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.
From the beginning, he understood—correctly—that Obama’s popularity depends on a broader perception of cooperation and bipartisanship in Washington. By denying that, he harmed the president’s core appeal and helped turn a critical mass of the electorate against the White House, setting the stage for the GOP’s massive win in the 2010 midterm elections.
But despite all this, Mitch McConnell faces a primary challenge. Matt Bevin is a Louisville businessman and Tea Party favorite who sees the five-term senator as a patsy and a squish. “McConnell has voted for higher taxes, bailouts, debt-ceiling increases, congressional pay raises, and liberal judges,” said Bevin in his first ad.
Given McConnell’s actual actions, it’s tempting to dismiss Bevin as delusional. The truth of the matter, however, is that he speaks for a large plurality—if not majority—of Republicans who believe that success can only come when the party moves far, far to the right. And at the moment, there’s nothing—not electoral defeat, not public opprobrium—that will disabuse them of that conviction.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, August 5, 2013
“Richard Nixon Runs The Republican Party, Again”: A Contempt For The Regular Norms And Institutions Of Politics
The current Republican Party isn’t the party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It isn’t a conservative party. It’s the party, instead, of Nixon and Gingrich. And that’s why it’s a dysfunctional mess, and a problem for the nation.
I said something to that effect the other day, and a commenter got all upset about it:
The party of Nixon? The guy who created and implemented the EPA? The guy who normalized the US international relationship with China? The guy who intervened in escalating fuel markets to fix prices, in order to protect consumers?
They are so far away from Nixon’s policies and governance.
I’ve seen this reaction before, and because it’s such an important point it’s worth spelling it out. It’s not about ideology. It’s not about specific policies. A healthy party, one that is able to cut deals and work with others, can be healthy even if their policies are far from the mainstream.
We can get at this a couple of ways. One is that everyone should be very careful about what “Nixon” did, as opposed to what the government did while he was president. Give Nixon the Congress and the policy environment of 1947 — or 1997 — and you get very different results.
But I suppose more to the point is that there’s just no way to read the contemporary Republican Party as some sort of principled ideological party. It just isn’t.
Think, on the one hand, how easily they took to George W. Bush’s support of an intrusive federal government program on education, or to Bush’s support of a major Medicare expansion.
Or think about their convoluted path on healthcare reform over the last 20 years – how an outline originally concocted by Republicans as a reaction to Bill Clinton’s initiative, and eventually implemented in one state by a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature, became (once adopted by Democrats) the essence of tyranny.
And don’t even get started on Republicans and the federal budget deficit.
That’s not a principled conservative party.
As no one knows better than real hardcore ideologues, the ones who know well that George W. Bush and the Republican Congresses he served with were never “real” conservatives. They’re right about that! Even though most of those saying that now are wannabes who never dissented during those years.
Unlike those ideologues, I’m not complaining about pragmatism; I think ideological parties are a terrible idea in a democracy. But while they aren’t the ideal conservative party that some want, they’re certainly not a healthy (conservative) pragmatic party, either.
That’s where Nixon and Newt come in.
Both of these very successful (pre-disgrace, anyway) Republicans became national figures as conservatives. Neither, however, was a principled conservative. Nixon was covered above; Gingrich was a Rockefeller Republican when he first ran for Congress, and both of them shifted back and forth as they saw opportunities to exploit.
But that kind of opportunism isn’t what make Newt and Nixon stand out. No, what they have bequeathed to Republicans is a contempt for the regular norms and institutions of the American political system, along with a Leninist belief that contradictions must always be heightened. Nixon broke laws, to be sure, but other presidents have broken laws. What made Nixon different – what made everyone, including his own party, so eager to be rid of him – was that he refused to accept that others within the system, whether in Congress or the press or the bureaucracy, were as legitimate as the president. What made Gingrich different is his consistent strategy of tearing down institutions (the House, and then the presidency) in order to save them. For both, politics was never about the normal promotion of interests and reconciliation of differences, but instead, very simply, about destroying their opponents.
Because they are the party of Newt and Nixon, the principles that today’s GOP worships aren’t market economics or personal liberty; look instead at a “principle” such as a refusal to compromise.
Or brinkmanship as a principle. The quintessential GOP stance, in a lot of ways, is the current insistence by many in the party that they must shut down the government to prove they are serious about the Affordable Care Act. What makes it such a great example — so much a Newt-inspired example — is that they’ve been flailing around all year trying to figure out what to ask for when they blackmailed the nation over the debt limit and funding the government. And that half or more of the party is insisting on it even as experienced legislators and analysts tell them that it can’t possible work. Because as I said back in the spring, the faction that wants the shutdown isn’t really sure about what it wants to demand; it’s only certain that it wants to take hostages. Extortion for the sake of extortion. As principle.
It’s of a piece with the series of almost-shutdowns we’ve endured (all of them echoing the Gingrich train wreck of 1995-1996). With the debt limit showdown of 2011. With the explosion of the filibuster far beyond previous use in the Senate. With a series of “constitutional hardball” examples over the years. With the choice to attempt to undermine the ACA rather than fix or improve what they could, with the goal – the goal! – of causing as much policy failure as possible.
A party only does those things if its leaders and many of its members have taken as a principle Nixon’s standard operating procedure of treating the rest of the United States government beyond the White House as illegitimate; a party only does those things if it no longer accepts the basic constitutional constraints that most politicians, no matter what their views on public policy, have by and large accepted. And a party only does this if it believes, as Newt Gingrich did, that the best way to gain control of institutions is to first destroy them.
That’s the Republican Party we have. Not every single member of it, of course, but it’s a strong enough influence that it’s what really matters. And while I have no brilliant suggestions for how to do it, I do believe that the most urgent task facing the political system right now is to figure out some way for Republicans to shake off the influence of Newt and Nixon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Salon, August 10, 2013
“And Then There Were 40”: The Madness Of The GOP Is The Central Issue Of Our Time
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters yesterday that President Obama and congressional Democrats are “in denial.”
Yeah, denial’s just awful, isn’t it?
Capping a legislative work period more noted for what it failed to pass than for what it completed, the House voted for the 40th time on Friday to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care reform law before heading home for a five week recess.
The GOP-controlled House voted to approve a measure to prevent the IRS from enforcing “Obamacare” in a 232-185 vote.
The legislation faces virtually no chance of advancing in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats.
How many House Republicans voted for repeal? All of them who were on the Hill this morning.
If we include the Senate, the total number of votes held by congressional Republicans to repeal all or part of the federal health care law is 68.
We’re talking about a group of folks who are very slow learners.
At this point, what more can be said about such ridiculous congressional antics? Perhaps just this: with each one of these repeal votes, Republicans reinforce the impression that they’re not a serious governing party. On the contrary, they’re becoming rather pathetic.
Paul Krugman noted in passing last night, “[N]either you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.” This wasn’t in response to health care, but it might as well have been.
Whether GOP leaders are reluctant to do unglamorous work or not, Congress has an enormous amount of work it should be doing right now. This is especially true in the House, where lawmakers are supposed to be passing appropriations bills, working on the farm bill, negotiating on a budget, and if we’re really lucky, avoiding a debt-ceiling crisis in the fall.
Indeed, in the not-too-distant past, this was one of the more productive weeks of the year on Capitol Hill — before a four-week break, lawmakers traditionally scrambled to meet deadlines and get some work done so they’d have something to boast about during the August recess.
But that was before Republicans decided governing was for saps. Why get real work done when there are talking points to repeat, partisan stunts to execute, and “message votes” to push?
GOP lawmakers have already wasted months championing culture-war bills they know can’t pass and obsessing over discredited “scandals,” so there’s something oddly fitting about voting 40 times to take away Americans health care benefits, not because they expect their legislation to pass, but because vanity exercises like these make Republicans feel warm and fuzzy.
It’s as if Americans elected children to control half of the legislative branch of government.
Indeed, it’s been interesting of late to see President Obama give a series of speeches on the economy, and in nearly all of them, he takes time to mock congressional Republicans for these votes. Every time, the audience laughs — because in a way, this really is funny.
When lawmakers make fools of themselves, I suppose Americans should laugh at them.
It’s a shame Republicans aren’t in on the joke.
Update: Americans United for Change released a new video this afternoon, driving home exactly what the House GOP voted for (all 40 times).
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 2, 2013
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