“The Double Pox Caucus”: With Their Extortion Policy, The GOP Owns This Government Shutdown
There will be, among my media colleagues, an instinct to blame the current government shutdown on both sides. A pox on both their houses is popular because it’s easy – everyone’s to blame for gridlock, so we’re not blaming anyone! – and attracts fewer charges of media bias. The double pox caucus likes to strike a post-partisan pose because it gives them a sense of superior enlightenment; they get the joke of the two party system, they think, in a way that grubby true believers don’t.
Don’t buy it. Both sides aren’t to blame. The GOP – specifically the fringe right that is currently calling the party’s shots – craved this shutdown and owns it.
Here’s a good rule of thumb when adjudicating blame for a government shutdown: Whichever side is using the threat or reality of a shutdown to effect changes to policy or law is responsible for the shutdown. This works for the forthcoming debt ceiling fight as well. When one side is making unilateral demands as the price of doing what they concede should be done anyway, they own the resulting crisis.
In this case the GOP is trying variations on a policy-changing theme: They wanted to defund Obamacare; when that didn’t work they tried to chip away at the law by, among other things, postponing the individual mandate for a year. They are, in other words, trying to win through extortion policy changes they couldn’t convince voters to ratify at the ballot box.
To paraphrase President Obama from last week, the equivalent would be if he vowed to veto any continuing resolution (thus shutting down the government) if it didn’t include universal background checks for gun purchases or a public option for Obamacare.
The fact of each party having a position doesn’t mean that each has equal validity. To suggest otherwise incentivizes extremism: If the “correct” answer is an even split, then the most extreme position wins by dragging the center as far in its direction as possible. (That’s the core of the House GOP’s effort to move the dispute over funding the government to a conference committee: enshrining the frame of two equal sides at the negotiating table.)
Here’s the thing: Obamacare has been litigated endlessly. It has been at the center of American politics since before it was passed. It played a central role in the 2012 presidential race, with GOP nominee Mitt Romney vowing to repeal it. The Supreme Court weighed in, finding the law constitutional. Then the American people weighed in, voting by a comfortable margin for the pro-Obamacare candidate over the repeal-Obamacare candidate.
Polls tell us a number of things about the American people (or Ted Cruz’s “the American people“) and Obamacare. We know that more Americans dislike the law than like it; we also know that a minority of Americans (but 100 percent of the people in Ted Cruz’s head!) favors repeal or defunding the law while a plurality or majority – depending upon the poll – favors making the law work.
And polls also show that people aren’t wild about the notion of a government shutdown hinging on the debate over the Affordable Care Act. A Quinnipiac survey released just this morning, for example, reiterated all of these trends: While voters split on the law (45 percent in favor, 47 percent opposing), a majority (58-34) oppose defunding it, and that opposition grows more pronounced when contemplating not raising the debt ceiling in order to defund the ACA (64-27 against) or shutting down the government in order to stop the law (72-22 against).
(Poll after poll also shows that Republicans are in line for most of the blame for shuttering the federal government; points to voters for paying attention.)
These figures – along with the aforementioned one poll that counts, from last November – paint a muddled picture of the American electorate’s wishes regarding Obamacare. But they also make one fact crystal clear: Republicans cannot fairly claim to speak for the electorate in foisting this government shutdown upon us.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 1, 2013
“This Madness Will Never End”: So Long As There’s A Democrat In The White House, The Fever Will Never Break
I wish I could write something optimistic as we begin the government shutdown. I wish I could, but I can’t. In fact, this morning I can’t help but feel something close to despair. It isn’t that this shutdown won’t be resolved, because it will. It will be resolved in the only way it can: when John Boehner allows a vote on a “clean CR,” a continuing resolution that funds the government without attacking the Affordable Care Act. It could happen in a week or two, whenever the political cost of the shutdown becomes high enough for Boehner to finally find the courage to say no to the Tea Partiers in his caucus. That CR will pass with mostly Democratic votes, and maybe the result will be a revolt against Boehner that leads to him losing the speakership (or maybe not; as some have argued, Boehner’s job could be safe simply because no one else could possibly want it).
But the reason for my despair isn’t about this week or this month. It’s the fact that this period in our political history—the period of lurching from absurd crisis to absurd crisis, with no possibility of passing a budget let alone legislation to address any serious problems we face, with a cowardly Republican leadership held hostage by a group of insane political terrorists who think it’s a tragedy if a poor person gets health insurance and it’s a great day when you kick a kid off food stamps, a period where this collection of extremists and fools, these people who think the likes of Michele Bachmann and Steve King are noble and wise leaders—this awful, horrific period in our history, when these are the people who control the country’s fate, looks like it will never end.
OK, so “never” is an exaggeration. But does anyone see how it could end as long as there’s a Democrat in the White House, whether it’s Barack Obama or anyone else? Once the shutdown is over, we’re going to do it all over again with the debt ceiling in less than three weeks. And the CRs the House and Senate are passing back and forth now only fund the government for six weeks, meaning we could have a shutdown, followed by a debt ceiling crisis, followed by another shutdown. Whenever the next CR expires, we’ll do it again, and we’ll do it again the next time the debt ceiling has to be raised.
According to conservative reporter Byron York, this whole thing is being driven by 30 of the most radical GOP House members. And nothing will convince them that what they’re doing is crazy and wrong. Nothing. They’re zealots. They don’t care if the country suffers and they don’t care if their party suffers. They have an ideology that tells them that the only important things are fighting government and fighting Barack Obama, by any means necessary. If you can’t win at the ballot box, and you can’t win in the ordinary legislative process, and you can’t win at the Supreme Court, then it’ll have to be blackmail. And if that doesn’t work, then they’ll find some other method.
In June of last year, Obama expressed the belief that if he was re-elected, “the fever may break, because there’s a tradition in the Republican Party of more common sense than that.” Once booting him from office was no longer a possibility, they’d settle down and oppose him in the ordinary way opposition parties oppose presidents, not in this insane berserker rage they’ve been gripped by since January of 2009. I don’t know if he actually believed that, or if he was just trying to be optimistic. But it was never going to happen. That’s not only because of their white-hot hatred of him, but also because, generally speaking, the crazier a Republican member of Congress is, the less they have to worry about political consequences from their craziness. The most radical members come from the most conservative districts, where the only question determining who gets elected is which candidate in a Republican primary is the most extreme, hates Barack Obama the most, and can talk with the most contempt about liberals and government and all the “thems” his constituents despise so much.
And even if the shutdown turns out to be a disaster for the GOP as a whole, those Tea Party members are going to be 100 percent sure that the only problem was that Republicans didn’t fight hard enough. They’ll come out of it more convinced than ever that government is evil and Democrats are the enemies of all that is right and good, and the good Lord himself put them in Congress to fight liberals and obstruct Obama and undermine government and scratch and bite and kick and scream. And that’s what they’re going to continue to do as long as they are privileged to serve.
Their fever will never break. Never. The only thing that will give it a temporary respite is if a Republican becomes president, at which time they’ll decide that crises aren’t such a great tool after all. Their nihilistic rage will be put away, behind a glass door with the words “Break in case of Democratic president” written on it. And then it will start all over again.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 2, 2013
“Angry Men Against Democracy”: GOP Government Shutdown Isn’t About Obamacare, It’s About Obama
The House Republicans are like really bad boyfriends in a break-up. The moment is upon us, when the Capitol lantern will be dimmed and dark, with the U.S. government closing down for … who knows how long?
This is what they came here to do, the Class of 2010 House Republicans, which created a new majority overnight. They did not come here to govern or to be part of government. Stone cold crazy, they came to our town of Washington to take it down from within. They came from states like, say, Tennessee. Ever hear of Frog Jump? The tea party has such diversity! They are largely angry white men. They are not legislators or policymakers. They are not respecters of the usual traditions of Congress. They are not much but a band of marauders, an unhappy few.
It doesn’t take many unruly House Republicans to stamp out the spirit of a perfectly nice democracy. Roughly 40 will accomplish what the British did not when they burned down the Capitol in 1814, and what the terrorist hijackers failed to do on 9/11 a dozen years ago.
If I read the tea leaves right, they are going to make a demoralized country even more so. People will start to lose more faith in our national institutions and with the very idea of America: fairness and “playing by the rules,” as Bill Clinton used to say. Our highly skilled and dedicated federal workforce, which has had its pay nearly frozen for years, will feel more disrespected if they are furloughed. The world will be watching in utter disbelief.
And then what happens one minute after midnight Tuesday morning? The light goes out in the dome. The more sensible Senate will not be party to this crime. House Speaker John Boehner will flail about, helpless and humiliated because he can’t control this lawless faction.
Then the babble will start about Obamacare. That’s what they would like us to think this is all about. My fellow Americans, this is not about Obamacare; it’s about President Obama. It’s about taking down his presidency. Attacking Obamacare is just the means to that end. I don’t think Obama sized up their intent and plan to take him down, from the day they arrived in January 2011. Unfortunately, he did not recognize the depth of their hostility when the government debt ceiling hung in the balance in August 2011. He kept trying to be friends with Boehner and the other side.
We have another debt limit deadline hanging over us, which makes this showdown look like a prologue to an even more disastrous event.
Here’s the cruelest cut of all. Never has a landmark piece of legislation, passed by both houses in the usual manner, been subject to this kind of relentless attack well after its passage. Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader of the tea party band, tells anyone who will listen at 4 a.m. that the American people are on their side. That is erroneous, and besides which, it wouldn’t make the tea party plot right. Obamacare passed before many of them got here, back in 2010.
It wasn’t pretty, but Obamacare passed fair and square. President Obama was re-elected handily. So let’s keep the lantern lit. Don’t let 40 angry men undo the results of American democracy.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 30, 2013
“A Different America”: Where The G.O.P.’s Suicide Caucus Lives
The geography of Congress’s so-called suicide caucus. Click to expand.
On August 21st, Congressman Mark Meadows sent a letter to John Boehner. Meadows is a former restaurant owner and Sunday-school Bible teacher from North Carolina. He’s been in Congress for eight months. Boehner, who has served in Congress for twenty-two years, is the Speaker of the House and second in the line of succession if anything happened to the President.
Meadows was not pleased with how Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders in the House were approaching the September fight over spending. The annual appropriations to fund the government were scheduled to run out on October 1st, and much of it would stop operating unless Congress passed a new law. Meadows wanted Boehner to use the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, a course Boehner had publicly ruled out.
Back home in Meadows’s congressional district, the idea was quite popular. North Carolina’s Eleventh District had been gerrymandered after the 2010 census to become the most Republican district in his state. Meadows won his election last November by fifteen points. The Presidential contest there was an even bigger blowout. Romney won the district by twenty-three points, sixty-one per cent to thirty-eight per cent. While the big story of the 2012 election was about demographics and a growing non-white population that is increasingly Democratic, that was not the story in the Meadows race. His district is eighty-seven per cent white, five per cent Latino, and three per cent black.
Before Meadows sent off his letter to Boehner, he circulated it among his colleagues, and with the help of the conservative group FreedomWorks, as well as some heavy campaigning by Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Mike Lee, seventy-nine like-minded House Republicans from districts very similar to Meadows’s added their signatures.
“Since most of the citizens we represent believe that ObamaCare should never go into effect,” the letter said, “we urge you to affirmatively de-fund the implementation and enforcement of ObamaCare in any relevant appropriations bill brought to the House floor in the 113th Congress, including any continuing appropriations bill.”
They ended the letter with a stirring reference to Madison:
James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 58 that the “power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon … for obtaining a redress of every grievance…” We look forward to collaborating to defund one of the largest grievances in our time and to restore patient-centered healthcare in America.
Not everyone thought it was a terrific idea or one worthy of comparison to the brilliance of the Founders. Noting the strategic ineptness of threatening a government shutdown over a policy that neither the Democratically controlled Senate nor the President himself would ever support, Karl Rove railed against the idea in the Wall Street Journal. The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer dubbed the eighty Republicans the “suicide caucus.”
And yet, a few weeks later, Boehner adopted the course demanded by Meadows and his colleagues.
The ability of eighty members of the House of Representatives to push the Republican Party into a strategic course that is condemned by the party’s top strategists is a historical oddity. It’s especially strange when you consider some of the numbers behind the suicide caucus. As we approach a likely government shutdown this month and then a more perilous fight over raising the debt ceiling in October, it’s worth considering the demographics and geography of the eighty districts whose members have steered national policy over the past few weeks.
As the above map, detailing the geography of the suicide caucus, shows, half of these districts are concentrated in the South, and a quarter of them are in the Midwest, while there’s a smattering of thirteen in the rural West and four in rural Pennsylvania (outside the population centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh). Naturally, there are no members from New England, the megalopolis corridor from Washington to Boston, or along the Pacific coastline.
These eighty members represent just eighteen per cent of the House and just a third of the two hundred and thirty-three House Republicans. They were elected with fourteen and a half million of the hundred and eighteen million votes cast in House elections last November, or twelve per cent of the total. In all, they represent fifty-eight million constituents. That may sound like a lot, but it’s just eighteen per cent of the population.
Most of the members of the suicide caucus have districts very similar to Meadows’s. While the most salient demographic fact about America is that it is becoming more diverse, Republican districts actually became less diverse in 2012. According to figures compiled by The Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman, a leading expert on House demographics who provided me with most of the raw data I’ve used here, the average House Republican district became two percentage points more white in 2012.
The members of the suicide caucus live in a different America from the one that most political commentators describe when talking about how the country is transforming. The average suicide-caucus district is seventy-five per cent white, while the average House district is sixty-three per cent white. Latinos make up an average of nine per cent of suicide-district residents, while the over-all average is seventeen per cent. The districts also have slightly lower levels of education (twenty-five per cent of the population in suicide districts have college degrees, while that number is twenty-nine per cent for the average district).
The members themselves represent this lack of diversity. Seventy-six of the members who signed the Meadows letter are male. Seventy-nine of them are white.
As with Meadows, the other suicide-caucus members live in places where the national election results seem like an anomaly. Obama defeated Romney by four points nationally. But in the eighty suicide-caucus districts, Obama lost to Romney by an average of twenty-three points. The Republican members themselves did even better. In these eighty districts, the average margin of victory for the Republican candidate was thirty-four points.
In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.
In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).
In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.
Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.
By: Ryan Lizza, The New Yorker, September 26, 2013
“An Election Do-Over?”: Congress Thinks Elections Don’t Matter if They Don’t Like The Outcome
The problem for many years in Washington was that lawmakers were always looking to the next election, holding votes meant to burnish their own conservative or liberal credentials or set their opponents up for an attack ad based on that vote. That was an unproductive approach, but it seems downright quaint compared to now, when lawmakers are still fighting the last three elections.
Democrats note that their candidate won the 2008 election, and achieved an agenda – including the health care law – as a result of that win and the wins of Democrats in Congress. Republicans counter that voters overwhelmingly expressed their disgust with the law in 2010, electing scores of new Republicans to Congress and giving the GOP control of the House. Democrats say that voters had a definitive opportunity in 2012 to undo Obamacare, when Mitt Romney ran on a platform of doing just that. Not only was Romney defeated, but Democrats picked up seats in both the House and Senate.
Elections have consequences, as Obamacare foe John McCain reminded his colleagues recently. But too many lawmakers seem to think that elections are meaningless if they don’t like the result.
The standoff has resulted in a whole new definition of the word “compromise” on Capitol Hill. It was bad enough when the idea of compromise became equivalent to capitulation. That made it nearly impossible to get an agreement on anything, with lawmakers in both parties declaring to constituents that they will “fight” for them – meaning they wouldn’t accept the concerns or needs of any other district. But now, “compromise” has been expanded to re-open settled matters. This was true when Democrats sought (though with much less ferocity than the GOP has displayed with Obamacare) to vitiate the Bush tax cuts for upper-income people before the law’s expiration date. And Republicans are doing it now with Obamacare.
If lawmakers want to undo settled law and free and fair elections, why stop at legislation? Why don’t the Republicans say, OK, we’ll keep the government running, but only if President Obama and the entire cabinet resign. Then they can offer a “compromise” under which they’ll accept the early departures of merely Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.
And maybe Democrats could say, sure, we’ll delay Obamacare, but only if every single tea party-affiliated member of Congress resigns immediately, and pledges never to get involved in politics or public policy again. Then, they could “compromise” by accepting the resignations of only the most vociferous of the GOP’s right wing. If you’re going to undo an election, after all, why not go big?
Sports teams and armies have operated under the idea that you fight the battle with the people and the tools you have at that moment. Washington could do the same.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, September 27, 2013
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