“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
“We Don’t Make Deals With Bullies”: No Yielding On Obamacare, Debt Ceiling Or Government Shutdown
Republicans in the House are like a bunch of 3-year-olds playing with matches. Their hapless leaders don’t have the sense to scold them and send them to their rooms — which means President Obama has to be the disciplinarian in this dysfunctional family.
Mature adults in the GOP should have explained reality to these tantrum-throwing tykes long ago: It simply is not within their constitutional power to make Obamacare go away. They can scream at the top of their lungs, roll around on the floor, hold their breath until they turn blue, waste everybody’s time with 41 useless votes — whatever. All they can really do is hurt themselves or others.
Yet here we are, with Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) cowed into letting his members threaten to shut down the government unless they are allowed to stay up all night watching television and eating candy. Also, unless the Senate and Obama agree to nullify health-care reform before it fully takes effect.
I happen to believe that Obamacare is a great accomplishment, providing access to medical insurance to millions of Americans who lack it and bringing the nation much closer to universal health care. It’s an imperfect law, to be sure, but it could be made much better with the kind of constructive tinkering that responsible leaders performed on Social Security and Medicare.
Even if Obamacare were tremendously flawed, however, it would be wrong to let a bunch of extremist ideologues hold the country hostage in this manner. If Republicans want to repeal the reforms, they should win the Senate and the presidency. If not, they’re welcome to pout and sulk all they want — but not to use extortion to get their way.
At issue is not just the threat of a federal shutdown, which will happen Oct. 1 unless Congress passes a continuing resolution to fund government operations. The debt ceiling has to be raised before the Treasury hits its borrowing limit, which will happen around Oct. 18. If House Republicans don’t kill or neutralize Obamacare with the funding bill, they are ready to threaten the nation — and the global economy — with a potentially catastrophic default.
The proper response — really, the only response — is to say no. And mean it.
Obama is, by nature, a reasonable and flexible man, but this time he must not yield. Even if you leave aside what delaying or defunding Obamacare would mean for his legacy — erasing his most significant domestic accomplishment — it would be irresponsible for him to bow to the GOP zealots’ demands.
The practical impact of acquiescing would be huge. Individuals who have been uninsured are anticipating access to adequate care. State governments, insurance companies and health-care providers have spent vast amounts of time and money preparing for the law to take effect. To suddenly say “never mind” would be unbelievably reckless.
The political implication of compromising with blackmailers would be an unthinkable surrender of presidential authority. The next time he says “I will do this” or “I will not do that,” why should Congress or the American people take him seriously? How could that possibly enhance Obama’s image on the world stage?
Obama has said he will not accept a budget deal that cripples Obamacare and will never negotiate on the debt ceiling. Even if the Republicans carry through with their threats — and this may happen — the president has no option but to stand his ground.
You don’t deal with bullies by making a deal to keep the peace. That only rewards and encourages them. You have to push back.
The thing is, this showdown is a sure political loser for the GOP — and smart Republicans know it. Boehner doesn’t want this fight and, in fact, should be grateful if Obama hangs tough and shows the crazies the limits of their power. Most Republicans in the Senate don’t want this fight. It’s doubtful that even a majority of House Republicans really, truly want this fight, no matter what they say publicly.
But irresponsible demagogues — I mean you, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — have whipped the GOP base into a frenzy of unrealistic expectations. House members who balk at jumping off the cliff risk being labeled “moderate,” which is the very worst thing you can call a Republican — and the most likely thing to shorten his or her political career.
The way to end this madness is by firmly saying no. If Boehner won’t do it, Obama must.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 20, 2013
“The Crazy Party”: The GOP Has Made Its Transition From Being Just The Stupid Party
Early this year, Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana, made headlines by telling his fellow Republicans that they needed to stop being the “stupid party.” Unfortunately, Mr. Jindal failed to offer any constructive suggestions about how they might do that. And, in the months that followed, he himself proceeded to say and do a number of things that were, shall we say, not especially smart.
Nonetheless, Republicans did follow his advice. In recent months, the G.O.P. seems to have transitioned from being the stupid party to being the crazy party.
I know, I’m being shrill. But as it grows increasingly hard to see how, in the face of Republican hysteria over health reform, we can avoid a government shutdown — and maybe the even more frightening prospect of a debt default — the time for euphemism is past.
It helps, I think, to understand just how unprecedented today’s political climate really is.
Divided government in itself isn’t unusual and is, in fact, more common than not. Since World War II, there have been 35 Congresses, and in only 13 of those cases did the president’s party fully control the legislature.
Nonetheless, the United States government continued to function. Most of the time divided government led to compromise; sometimes to stalemate. Nobody even considered the possibility that a party might try to achieve its agenda, not through the constitutional process, but through blackmail — by threatening to bring the federal government, and maybe the whole economy, to its knees unless its demands were met.
True, there was the government shutdown of 1995. But this was widely recognized after the fact as both an outrage and a mistake. And that confrontation came just after a sweeping Republican victory in the midterm elections, allowing the G.O.P. to make the case that it had a popular mandate to challenge what it imagined to be a crippled, lame-duck president.
Today, by contrast, Republicans are coming off an election in which they failed to retake the presidency despite a weak economy, failed to retake the Senate even though far more Democratic than Republican seats were at risk, and held the House only through a combination of gerrymandering and the vagaries of districting. Democrats actually won the popular ballot for the House by 1.4 million votes. This is not a party that, by any conceivable standard of legitimacy, has the right to make extreme demands on the president.
Yet, at the moment, it seems highly likely that the Republican Party will refuse to fund the government, forcing a shutdown at the beginning of next month, unless President Obama dismantles the health reform that is the signature achievement of his presidency. Republican leaders realize that this is a bad idea, but, until recently, their notion of preaching moderation was to urge party radicals not to hold America hostage over the federal budget so they could wait a few weeks and hold it hostage over the debt ceiling instead. Now they’ve given up even on that delaying tactic. The latest news is that John Boehner, the speaker of the House, has abandoned his efforts to craft a face-saving climbdown on the budget, which means that we’re all set for shutdown, possibly followed by debt crisis.
How did we get here?
Some pundits insist, even now, that this is somehow Mr. Obama’s fault. Why can’t he sit down with Mr. Boehner the way Ronald Reagan used to sit down with Tip O’Neill? But O’Neill didn’t lead a party whose base demanded that he shut down the government unless Reagan revoked his tax cuts, and O’Neill didn’t face a caucus prepared to depose him as speaker at the first hint of compromise.
No, this story is all about the G.O.P. First came the southern strategy, in which the Republican elite cynically exploited racial backlash to promote economic goals, mainly low taxes for rich people and deregulation. Over time, this gradually morphed into what we might call the crazy strategy, in which the elite turned to exploiting the paranoia that has always been a factor in American politics — Hillary killed Vince Foster! Obama was born in Kenya! Death panels! — to promote the same goals.
But now we’re in a third stage, where the elite has lost control of the Frankenstein-like monster it created.
So now we get to witness the hilarious spectacle of Karl Rove in The Wall Street Journal, pleading with Republicans to recognize the reality that Obamacare can’t be defunded. Why hilarious? Because Mr. Rove and his colleagues have spent decades trying to ensure that the Republican base lives in an alternate reality defined by Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Can we say “hoist with their own petard”?
Of course, the coming confrontations are likely to damage America as a whole, not just the Republican brand. But, you know, this political moment of truth was going to happen sooner or later. We might as well have it now.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, September 19, 2013
“Not This Time”: Government Shutdown Report, How Republicans Play Chicken And Lose
Republicans are likely to incur serious political damage in their effort to hold hostage continued funding of the government in exchange for deep spending cuts. This routine has become an annual ritual, and in the past President Barack Obama has been the first one to cave. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which includes the automatic sequester, is one bitter fruit of the president’s past failure to hang tough in the face of Republican extremist demands.
But this time is different.
The Tea Party Republicans, who dominate the GOP House Caucus, are demanding that President Obama de-fund the Affordable Care Act in exchange for their willingness to fund ordinary government spending in the new fiscal year, which begins October 1. But they picked the wrong demand. In the past, Obama was willing to make deep cuts in federal spending in order to get a budget deal with Republicans. The Affordable Care Act, however, is a nonnegotiable for the president. It’s his personal crown jewel, the centerpiece of his legacy. For Tea Party Republicans, however, Obamacare is evil itself, and opposition to it is a loyalty test.
Moreover, the president has told Democrats in both the House and Senate caucuses that he has no intention of negotiating over the debt ceiling. If the Republicans want to play cute with America’s full faith and credit, they will bear the political responsibility for the consequences.
Happily, the test over the shutdown comes first. We don’t need a vote to extend the debt ceiling until mid-October. If the Republicans gamble and lose big on the shutdown, they may well back off the debt-ceiling threat.
Another nice break for Democrats: In the past, voters’ eyes have glazed over when it came to budget details, and much of the mainstream press has played budget standoffs as “partisan bickering,” as if it were the equal responsibility of both parties. Equal blame is a mantra promoted by such Wall Street groups as “Fix the Debt.”
This time, however, the press is reporting on the sheer extremism of the GOP. Polls suggest that in the case of a government shutdown, or worse, a debt default, Republicans would reap most of the blame. A CNN poll released last week found that 51 percent of people would blame Republicans for a shutdown, while 33 percent would blame President Obama. Twelve percent would blame both parties.
Ordinarily, Obama might offer other cuts in order to prevent a shutdown, but other cuts won’t do it this time; the Tea Party wants the scalp of ObamaCare. So a president who is ordinarily reluctant to hang tough may well let the Republicans shut down the government—and let them bear the responsibility. It worked for Bill Clinton in 1996 when Gingrich shut down the government and his Republicans took the fall.
Another nice break for the Democrats is that the Republicans are split several ways. The relative realists, including many GOP senators and the House Republican leadership, grasp just how much damage a shutdown or a debt default would do to their party. It would display to voters once and for all the sheer nuttiness of the Tea Party faction that now controls the House. Going into an election year, this sort of debacle could help the Democrats take back majority control in 2014.
But House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, nobody’s idea of political moderates, have failed utterly in their efforts to persuade the Tea Party Republicans of their folly—setting the stage for a donnybrook.
The GOP is also split between the congressional Tea Party and several conservative Republican governors who actually like Obamacare. Astoundingly, despite the right-wing animus toward anything connected to the Affordable Care Act, conservative governors in key states have accepted the provision in Obamacare to expand Medicaid mostly at the federal government’s expense.
These GOP turncoats include Rick Scott in Florida, Jan Brewer in Arizona, Ohio’s John Kasich, and Michigan’s Rick Snyder. Why the reversal? These are swing states, and the Medicaid expansion would reach well into the working middle class—people who are losing their health coverage. Medicaid is popular. Expanding Medicaid is not just sensible policy; it’s good politics.
So the Tea Party is on a collision course with both the congressional leadership and with Republican governors in several key states.
All of this opens up new possibilities for 2014. There are only about 25 contestable House seats thanks to gerrymandering. But if Democrats can pick up most of these, they can take back the House. It would take something big for that to happen, but shutting down the government and playing chicken with a debt default—that’s big.
It is said that most Tea Party Republicans don’t mind suicidal legislative politics because their own seats are safe. On the other hand, they don’t want to wake up in January 2015 as part of the House minority.
There’s only one glitch in this happy scenario. If Republicans do force a government shutdown, at some point they will have to back down and allow the government to reopen. And at that point, there would be pressure on President Obama to give them some cover by offering other cuts. Not Obamacare, of course—just minor stuff like Social Security, Medicare, education, food stamps, Head Start, and the rest.
But that’s a depressing column for another day, and maybe Obama will even enjoy the benefits of toughness and resist further cuts. For today, let’s enjoy the box the Republicans have put themselves in.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, September 18, 2013
“Let’s Impeach Congress”: Failure To Pay Debt Is ‘Unconstitutional’
In what has become an annoying and unnecessary annual ritual, Congressional Republicans and the White House have staked out their political ground as we approach this year’s Season of the Witch—the time when any remaining shred of reason in government is retired in favor of political posturing over the debt ceiling.
Appearing this morning on ABC’s “This Week”, Obama made clear that he has no interest whatsoever in cooperating with Speaker John Boehner’s demand for budget cuts in trade for House GOPers permitting the government to pay the debts it has already incurred.
Speaking in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, the President stated:
“Never in history have we used just making sure that the U.S. government is paying its bills as a lever to radically cut government at the kind of scale that they’re talking about,” he said. “It’s never happened before. There’ve been negotiations around the corners, because nobody had ever presumed that you’d actually threaten the United States to default.”
Speaker Boehner would beg to differ, noting earlier this week—
“For decades, the White House, the Congress have used the debt limit to find bipartisan solutions on the deficit and the debt,” Boehner said. “So President Obama is going to have to deal with this as well.”
While there may be a small element of truth in Boehner’s words regarding the use of the annual debt ceiling as a tool to manage deficit and debt in previous days, that doesn’t mean that many participants in either the Congress or the Administration, prior to 2011, have ever viewed such an effort as a legitimate means of negotiating the annual budget nor perceived the threat of default as something to be followed through upon.
Nor does it mean that prior occupants of the White House ever found the threat of default to be a particularly useful exercise.
Indeed, were we to go back to President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s perspective on such an action, we find that The Gipper didn’t much care for the approach—
“Unfortunately, Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility. This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veteran’s benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in the financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations. It means we have a well-earned reputation for reliability and credibility—two things that set us apart from much of the world.”
Despite these words offered up by Ronald Reagan—the golden calf worshipped by true-believing Republicans everywhere—the Congressional Republicans appear to, once again, hope that the American public will forget—or simply fail to grasp—that it was Congress who authorized the very expenditures that now require a raise in the debt ceiling if these bills are to be paid.
Obama also offered one more, rather tantalizing thought in his Stephanopoulos interview when he noted that Congress’ constant efforts to use the the debt ceiling as leverage “changes the constitutional structure of this government entirely.”
Could the President be telegraphing that he may now be willing to use Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling without Congress in the event of an unfortunate vote—something that Obama has previously been unwilling to do?
The fact that Congress, including House Republicans, authorized these expenditures is of no consequence to those who seek to reap what they perceive as the political benefits of agreeing to spend on items that the public wants and then shift the blame onto the White House every year when it comes time to pay for Congress’ actions.
And while Boehner takes liberties with history in an effort to make himself look tough—a rather comical effort given that exactly nobody believes that the Speaker is in control of much of anything these days—what is genuinely scary is the fact that it is Speaker Boehner who passes for “reasonable’ among today’s House Republicans.
Increasingly, the House of Representatives is under the control of the extremists who are pushing hard to both default on the debt and shut down the entire government if Obama refuses to cave to their desire to defund the President’s landmark legislation, Obamacare.
Still worse, these extremists continue to hold a grudge over the previous failures to shut down the government and default on our obligations at debt ceiling time and are just itching to make it happen this year.
While I would truly enjoy the opportunity to egg these people on in the firm belief that a government shut-down at the hands of Republican extremists could be just the thing to rid ourselves of this scourge once and for all, I admit that some restraint is required when considering who would be left to suffer the consequences.
What would a government shutdown mean to Americans?
As it happens, we’ve had some experience with this so let’s take a look at what happened when the House Republicans shut down the government in 1995-96:
- More than 400,000 veterans saw their disability benefits and pension claims delayed.
- Educational benefits were delayed for 170,000 veterans
- Instead of providing benefits to veterans, a number of VA hospitals were forced to set up food banks for their employees who were going without pay checks.
- Approximately $3 billion in U.S. exports couldn’t leave the country because the Commerce Department couldn’t issue export licenses.
- For the first time in the federal unemployment program’s 60-year history, six states ran out of federal funds to pay unemployment benefits.
- Processing and deportation of illegal immigrants stopped, and employers were unable to verify job applicants’ immigration status.
- 10,000 new Medicare applications and 212,000 Social Security requests were delayed.
- Tens of thousands of Americans could not purchase a home because the Federal Housing Administration was unable to insure single family home loans.
- EPA’s enforcement activities were stopped and toxic waste clean-up at more than 600 sites slowed or came to a halt.
- 95% of workplace safety activities were halted.
- The Department of Interior stopped inspecting oil and gas well on public lands.
- 760,000 American workers were either furloughed or worked without pay.
- 200,000 U.S. applications for passports went unprocessed.
It stretches the imagination to understand how anyone could view such an action as helpful at a time when the American economy is struggling to recover and when recent wars have left so many veterans in need of the benefits that would stop flowing as a result of a shut-down.
Thus, while the idea of “teaching Obama a lesson” or doing something drastic to get the national debt under control may appeal to many, my suggestion would be that you familiarize yourself with who will directly suffer as a result of your grand plans. If trashing the economy, denying veterans their benefits and slowing down social security payments to your parents works for you, knock yourself out.
If not, you might consider letting your representatives know that you are not in favor of such a ridiculous effort to resolve our problems.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 15, 2013
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