“Voting For Default”: Paul Ryan’s Embarrassing Debt Ceiling Vote
After Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) decided to put a clean debt ceiling bill up for a vote yesterday evening, he had a new challenge: finding enough Republican votes to go along with the Democrats to pass it.
Although Boehner doesn’t normally vote, he did this time. He then asked others in the Republican leadership to follow his lead.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) both did so, along with lead deputy whip Peter Roskam (R-Ill.).
He hoped some of his committee chairmen would step up as well. Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) all gave their support.
One name absent from that list: Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.).
Ryan’s vote against the debt ceiling bill was particularly disappointing.
In recent months, Ryan has transitioned from a stubborn ideologue to a pragmatic leader, most notably in his willingness to broker a budget deal that relaxed sequestration. Just yesterday, he criticized the vast majority in the Congress for looking to undo the changes to military pensions that were included in that budget agreement. (A bill undoing the cuts passed 326-90 in the House.) Despite facing numerous bipartisan opposition, Ryan has stuck by those cuts.
He also undoubtedly understands how catastrophic it would be for the United States to default. He understood that leadership was concerned about the bill passing and were looking for leaders in the House to vote for it.
In addition, raising the debt ceiling authorizes the spending that he personally negotiated in the Murray-Ryan budget. Ryan knows this isn’t new spending. It’s not a blank check. This just allows us to actually pay our bills.
For Ryan, this was likely all about politics. He may still have his eye on a 2016 presidential run (though I don’t think he does) and if not, he certainly will consider it in the future. If the deciding vote came down to him, I have no doubt that he would have voted in the affirmative. Once he realized he didn’t need to support the bill, he took the easy way out and opposed it.
This should be embarrassing for Ryan. For someone who prides himself on being serious, he voted for a possible U.S. default instead of authorizing paying for spending that he personally negotiated. Sometimes, leaders need to take tough votes for the sake of their caucus and the country. Both the Republican Party and the United States needed yesterday’s bill to pass. That’s why Boehner, McCarthy and the 26 other Republicans voted for it. They knew it wouldn’t play well with their constituents, but they did it anyway.
Ryan should have been a part of that group.
By: Danny Vinik, Business Insider, February 13, 2014
“And Here We Go Again”: Republicans Are Really, Really Bad At Hostage Negotiations
For some time, I’ve been arguing that we should not just extend the debt ceiling but get rid of it altogether. It’s a weird historical anomaly that serves no practical purpose other than allowing the opposition party, should it be sufficiently reckless, to threaten global economic catastrophe if it doesn’t get its way. I assumed that your average Washington Democrat would share this view, but now I’m beginning to think that if you’re someone like Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, the debt ceiling is actually quite helpful, and you’d be sorry to see it go.
Because here’s what keeps happening: The debt ceiling approaches. Republicans begin making threats to torpedo the country’s economy by not raising it, and thereby sending the United States government into default, if their demands aren’t met. We then have a couple of weeks of debate, disagreement, and hand-wringing. Republican infighting grows more intense, and their reputation as a bunch of radicals who are willing to burn down the country to serve their extreme ideology is reinforced. At the end of it, the Republicans cave, the ceiling is raised for some period, and we do it all again in a few months.
And here we go again. The debt ceiling is going to have to be raised in the next month or so. Since the deficit is now at its lowest point since Barack Obama took office, it’s hard for Republicans to say that slashing the budget is so urgent that it justifies threatening to send America off an economic cliff. So what will they demand as their price for assenting to a debt ceiling increase? The answer is…they can’t decide. Yesterday, the House leadership proposed that they demand either a repeal of the “risk corridor” provision in the Affordable Care Act, which protects against a “death spiral” in the individual insurance market (here’s a good explainer on that), or approval of the Keystone pipeline. As Jonathan Chait pointed out, “Republicans have decided that one of these policy demands is so vital that they can insist its fulfillment justifies the threat of global economic calamity. They’re just not sure yet which one.” But it turned out that they couldn’t even unite around one of those two things, and that proposal of the leadership’s is now dead.
So here’s where we are. The Republican position is that something or other, let’s call it the Policy Change To Be Named Later, is so urgent, so pressing, so essential to the future of this great nation that if they don’t get it, whatever it turns out to be, they will force the government into default. And as soon as they figure out what the PCTBNL is, they’ll let us know.
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ position is simple: the debt ceiling needs to be raised, without conditions. Period. And that’s just what’s going to happen. There’ll be some hemming and hawing between now and then, but Democrats are going to win this, and Republicans are going to lose, and look like fools. Given that, if you were Barack Obama, wouldn’t you be perfectly happy to go through this routine a few more times?
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 5, 2014
“Holding A Blank Ransom Note”: GOP Had A Plan On the Debt Ceiling, But Now Have Absolutely No Idea What To Do Next
Last spring, House Republican efforts to hold the debt ceiling hostage quickly became a fiasco – Democrats refused to play along and Congress passed a clean increase. Last October, House GOP efforts to hold the debt ceiling hostage were arguably even worse – the debacle coincided with a humiliating shutdown, and ended with another clean increase.
Despite this recent history, Republican lawmakers once again said they expected some kind of major policy concession or they would once again push the nation towards a default. Say hello to Debacle #3.
House Republican leaders are at a loss on how to move a debt limit increase.
A GOP leadership aide told CQ Roll Call that after an informal canvas of the House Republican Conference through member meetings and phone calls over the past week, leaders concluded that the top two sweeteners could not attract enough Republican support to pass a debt ceiling hike.
Going into this week, House Republicans had narrowed their scope: they would refuse to pay the nation’s bills unless Democrats gave them either (a) the Keystone XL pipeline and its 50 permanent jobs; or (b) the elimination of risk corridors in the Affordable Care Act, which would add $8 billion to the deficit and risk higher premiums on consumers.
In reality, it was highly unlikely the GOP would get either concession – Democrats don’t see the need to pay a ransom if the hostage takers are bluffing – but Republicans seemed certain they’d seek one concession or the other.
That is, until today, when House GOP leaders suddenly realized that rank-and-file House Republicans aren’t on board with either idea. And since these measures apparently don’t have 218 GOP votes, Republicans would need Democratic support to pull off their own hostage crisis, which isn’t going to happen.
So where does this leave the House of Representatives three weeks before Congress needs to act on the debt limit? Lost and directionless.
A leadership aide told Roll Call, “We are mulling other options and trying to figure out the best way forward on this.”
Or put another way, “We had a plan, but now have absolutely no idea what to do next.”
It’s not too tough to predict how this will play out.
That left Republican leaders with no clear alternative to addressing the debt limit, which the Treasury Department has said needs to be raised by the end of February.
Instead, it now appears that a combination of Republicans and Democrats will be needed to get a debt-limit boost through the House.
And that means a clean debt-ceiling increase, which was the inevitable outcome in the first place.
The lingering question isn’t why GOP leaders are struggling in this fight; it’s why GOP leaders agreed to launch this fight knowing in advance they’d lose.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 5, 2014
“Rule And Ruin Party Crashers”: The Tea Party’s Drive For Ideological Purity
In the late nineteen-sixties, Mitch McConnell came to Washington to work as an aide to Senator Marlow Cook, a Kentucky Republican. Cook backed clean-air standards and limits on strip mining. It was a time of political diversity among Republicans: in 1970, Senate Republicans endorsed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. McConnell was briefly a fellow-traveller of those who regarded government as a source of public protection. He once called the Nixon Administration “at worst, completely reactionary.”
In 1984, McConnell was elected to the Senate, on the coattails of Ronald Reagan’s landslide reëlection. By then, a movement of Southern and evangelical conservatives was rising within the Party. McConnell tacked right periodically, saluting the new Republican leaders. During the Administration of George W. Bush, he backed the President by voting, with Ted Kennedy, to enact No Child Left Behind and the expansion of the Medicare drug benefit. By 2009, after Wall Street melted down, McConnell had risen to Minority Leader, and he forged a deal with Democrats to bail out big banks.
Then the Tea Party rose up in fury, and McConnell moved right again, in an effort to reinvent himself as an anti-government insurgent. It wasn’t easy; he was sixty-nine, and his long jowls and round eyeglasses gave him the look of a Taft Administration clerk. Nonetheless, in 2011, he led the Senate Republicans through a ruthless, extortionate campaign to threaten default on the national debt. It succeeded. President Obama wobbled and accepted budget cuts. Afterward, McConnell called the national debt “a hostage worth ransoming.”
This autumn, he supported the Tea Party radicals’ second threat to default on the debt and a sixteen-day shutdown of the federal government. This time, though, Obama held firm, and, in the end, McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner were forced to choose between Tea Party principles and the viability of the world economy. McConnell negotiated his party’s late-hour capitulation, and, within days, Tea Party groups called for his ouster. The Senate Conservatives Fund, a PAC founded by Jim DeMint, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which has bankrolled Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, and other highly conservative candidates, announced that it would finance a Republican primary challenge against the Minority Leader next year, because he “has a liberal record and refuses to fight for conservative principles.”
Other veteran Republicans who joined McConnell on the debt-ceiling vote are facing similar challenges from Tea Party-backed candidates. Those targeted include Thad Cochran, of Mississippi, who was elected to the Senate in 1978; Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina; and Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee. In 2012, such primary challenges weakened the Party’s competitive position, and allowed the Democrats to win an eight-seat majority in the Senate. Even now, the insurgents seem less interested in victory than in purification. “We know which senators fought for liberty, and which ones caved to Obama,” Lee Bright, the South Carolina state senator who is challenging Graham, told Slate recently. “We’ve got a list.” The Tea Party’s approval ratings have plummeted since the shutdown ended. Business lobbies and their PACs, appalled by the shutdown’s estimated twenty-four-billion-dollar cost to the economy, are signalling that they may pull back from uncompromising candidates. But the fact that PACs like the Senate Conservatives Fund are willing to force incumbents into expensive, distracting primary fights makes it even less probable that the Republicans can retake control of the Senate.
Like a guerrilla army, the Tea Party is learning how to influence public opinion even when it loses a conventional battle. The budget caps that Obama conceded in 2011 have already enshrined in law a portion of the movement’s draconian fiscal agenda. And although Cruz and his allies in the House won no additional cuts this time, they managed to spread magical thinking among their followers about a possible future debt default. (The next debt-ceiling deadline arrives early next year.) Cruz and the others systematically promoted the idea—the fantasy—that, if the Treasury Department were prohibited from issuing any new debt to finance interest payments and government operations, the country would do just fine. The global economy, this story goes, far from collapsing into crisis, would prove resilient, and, while some nonessential federal departments might wither for lack of funds, that would only demonstrate how Americans could get by with a much smaller government.
This campaign has been dismissed by some Wall Street analysts as just a form of coercive bargaining. Washington is a grand opera of phony crises. Congress has raised the debt ceiling more than seventy times since 1960 without forcing an actual default. It’s tempting to believe that even a diva like Cruz, who, after all, holds a law degree from Harvard and evidently aspires to higher office, would never countenance a final default. Yet history is rife with political radicals who have shocked the world by doing just what they always said they would: Confederate secessionists, for example, who seem to inspire so many Tea Partiers today.
The Tea Party’s anti-intellectualism reflects a longer, deeper decline in the Republican Party’s ability to tolerate a diversity of ideas and public-policy strategies, and to adapt to American multiculturalism. Mitt Romney’s poor showing among Latino voters in 2012 helped insure Barack Obama’s reëlection. Republican leaders, chastened and without any other obvious way to increase their vote base before 2016, pledged earlier this year to revive a comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Yet party leaders, in part because they have been tied down since July by the debt confrontation, haven’t found a way to move legislation past the nativist caucus in the House.
As recently as 2007, when the Bush Administration almost passed a similar bill, it still seemed possible that a modernizing Republican Party might build a formidable political coalition of Latinos, evangelicals, disaffected Catholic Democrats, high-tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, social and educational reformers, and eclectic independents. Instead, as Geoffrey Kabaservice puts it in his history of the Republican decline, “Rule and Ruin,” movement conservatives have “succeeded in silencing, co-opting, repelling, or expelling nearly every competing strain of Republicanism from the party.” Political purges have no logical end point; each newly drawn inner circle of orthodoxy leaves a former respected acolyte suddenly on the outside. That a Tea Party-influenced purification drive now threatens such a loyal opportunist and boardroom favorite as Mitch McConnell seems a marker of the times.
McConnell’s would-be usurper is Matt Bevin, a businessman who owns a bell company; his campaign slogan is “Let Freedom Ring.” He told Glenn Beck recently, “We have got to wean people from this idea of free lunches.” (He might start with fellow Kentuckians; their state pays sixty-six cents in federal taxes for every dollar of federal spending it takes in.) Bevin pleaded, “What we need to tell the American people is that the party’s over.” Presumably, he didn’t mean the Grand Old Party, but the American people may be forgiven for thinking that he did.
By: Steve Coll, The New Yorker, November 4, 2013
“Reality Is Not, And Never Was The Point”: The Tea Party’s True Believers Thrive On Rejection
Yay.
Yippee.
Woo hoo, even.
It was a nick-of-time rescue, like when Polly Pureheart is whisked off the railroad tracks right before the train comes barreling through, or the correct wire is snipped and the bomb timer stops counting down with just seconds left.
Last week, hours before a historic default, Congress finally stopped playing chicken with the world’s largest economy and ended the government shutdown.
So . . . hurray, right?
Huzzah, right?
Crisis averted, lessons learned, common sense restored. Everything’s good, is it not?
Well, no. Not even close.
Pardon the pooping of the party, but it’s hard to cheer the aversion of a crisis that:
A) Was entirely manufactured.
B) Will in all likelihood recur very soon.
This is what it has come to in Tea Party America: government of the crisis, by the crisis, for the crisis, government that lurches from emergency to emergency, accomplishing little, resolving less and generally behaving with all the thoughtful reflection of a toddler holding her breath until she gets her way.
Let no one claim this is no big deal because we’ve had shutdowns before. Let no one chirp that this is how things are supposed to work — checks and balances and all. Let none of us act as if it’s anything but bizarre to see a militant faction in one chamber of the legislature bring government to a halt because it doesn’t like a law.
Most of all, let us finally stop pretending this is only about that law, the Affordable Care Act, and the delusional claim that it will usher in socialism, communism and slavery, resurrect Vladimir Lenin and send Nazis marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.
Obamacare?
No, this is about Obamascare, the terror of what some still regard as alien and their consequent refusal, even five years in, to accept the legitimacy of a president twice elected with nary a hanging chad in sight.
The only good news out of this 16-day debacle is that his refusal to kowtow to these bullyboy tactics suggests that the president does, indeed, have a spine, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding.
Repeat: That’s the only good news. Anyone expecting the even-better news that this closes the book on the Tea Party, given its abject failure to achieve its stated goal of defunding the Affordable Care Act, will be bitterly disappointed. These are true believers. True believers thrive on rejection.
Note that, even as other Republicans were sounding appropriately chastened, Tea Party activists were assailing the party for “surrender” and were disavowing regret. As the shutdown was going down in flames, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), a Tea Party stalwart, told CNN, “Unfortunately, once again, it appears the Washington establishment is refusing to listen to the American people.”
This, as polls show the American people’s esteem for the GOP and the Tea Party at record lows and 62 percent of respondents were telling Gallup they wanted their representatives to compromise so the government could reopen. Gallup also tells us Americans now identify government dysfunction as this country’s biggest problem.
The disconnect between what Cruz says the people are saying and what they are actually saying should surprise no one. The defining characteristic of the Tea People has always been their ability to convince themselves reality is whatever they need it to be.
Reality, after all, is not the point. Ideological purity is.
So we will likely return to this crossroads, or one very much like it. Any hope of avoiding that rests with the dwindling population of adults in the GOP and their ability to make their party realize what should have long ago been obvious.
They can have purity or they can have power. They cannot have both.
By: Leonard Pitts, J., Featured Post, The National Memo, October 21, 2013
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