“How About The ‘Congress Does It’s Job’ Plan”: In The Midst Of Crises, Chaos Grips Congress
I’d thought about creating some kind of flow chart to capture ongoing developments in Capitol Hill, but quickly gave up. As Jonathan Cohn noted, it would have simply been too messy.
By my count, no less than four separate conversations are taking place right now: The White House is talking to House Republicans and, separately, it to Senate Republicans. In the Senate, moderate Republicans are talking to the Democratic leadership. In the House, Republicans from the party’s extreme wing are talking to Republicans from the not-so-extreme wing, all under the watchful eye of the caucus leaders.
And that’s just the official dialogue. Staff and outside interest groups are talking amongst themselves. The subject of these talks include myriad variations on how to write a bill reopening the government and giving it new borrowing authority, for different durations of time and under different conditions — or no conditions at all.
That ought to clear things up, right?
It’s been nearly two weeks since congressional Republicans shut down the government, and we’re just days from a debt-ceiling calamity, suggesting policymakers should theoretically be working towards some kind of resolution. But while there was a flurry of activity yesterday, it was largely a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
House Republicans, for example, thought they’d presented the White House with a credible offer: Congress would temporarily raise the debt ceiling, the government would remain closed, Democrats would accept Medicare and/or Social Security cuts, and the severity of the sequestration cuts that neither party likes would be eased. President Obama declared this a joke, told House GOP leaders he could probably get a better offer from Senate Republicans, and so dejected House members promptly left Capitol Hill yesterday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), meanwhile, thought she too had come up with a solution: Congress would reopen the government for six months and raise the debt limit for a year. Democrats would have to accept sequestration levels and throw in a two-year delay of the medical-device tax in the Affordable Care Act, and in exchange, Republicans would concede nothing. Yesterday, Democrats rejected this as wholly unacceptable, too.
And as a practical matter, it doesn’t much matter that Dems didn’t like it, since House Republicans said they’d refuse to even vote on the Collins plan — a plan in which Republicans give up nothing except temporary hold on some hostages — even if the Senate approved it and even if House GOP leaders could tolerate it.
So what happens now?
With House members having given up, at least for now, talks are now underway between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). What, if anything, they can expect to accomplish is unclear.
And even if they reached some sort of resolution, it may not matter, since House Republicans still appear to be in a sociopathic mood, and may simply reject anything that emerges from the upper chamber, no matter the consequences.
The anxiety levels are exceedingly high.
For what it’s worth, I remain fond of the “Congress does its job” plan. It goes like this: the government needs to be funded, and since the parties already agree on funding levels, Congress should do its job and reopen the government — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
Similarly, the nation needs to pay its bills, and since the parties already agree that default would be catastrophic, Congress should do its job and extend the Treasury’s borrowing authority — neither side makes demands, neither side takes a hostage, neither side asks for concessions from the other, and neither side relies on extortion.
For reasons that only make sense to them, Republicans consider the “Congress does its job” plan to be wildly offensive and a proposal so outrageous, they’d rather hurt Americans on purpose than vote for it.
Tick tock.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 13, 2013
“Big-Money Manipulators”: Worse Than Citizens United, A Sinister Last Gasp Of Republican Gangerism
The dysfunction in Washington is incredibly dispiriting.
We are constantly being reminded that we are a nation torn seemingly beyond repair, divided into irreconcilable camps, endlessly clashing over diminishing common ground.
And the culpability of big money in our current condition cannot be underplayed.
Rich conservatives are out to bend government to their will or break it in the attempt to discredit this Democratic president and ensure that there won’t be another soon.
This week the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission. Shaun McCutcheon is an Alabama Republican who wants to give more to his preferred candidates than is currently allowed by law. The Republican National Committee has joined McCutcheon in the case. If the court agrees with them, the already significant influence of big money in our politics would have no limits. The legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin wrote an article about the case in July for The New Yorker entitled “Another Citizens United — but Worse.”
At the same time that Republicans want to increase the influence of the rich on our elections, they want to decrease the influence of the poor at the ballot box by passing a raft of new voter restrictions.
This is a sinister, last-gasp move of gangsterism: when you’re losing the game, tilt the table.
You must understand this larger plot to fully appreciate the Republicans’ current budget ploy. This is not so much about limiting government as it is about measuring power. Rich Republicans are reaching for the edges so that they can redefine the limits.
As The New York Times pointed out this weekend, Republicans — financed by the billionaire Koch brothers — began plotting this government shutdown over Obamacare soon after the president began his second term.
If they couldn’t win in a fair electoral fight, they’d win in an asymmetric legislative one.
Earlier this year, John Boehner hashed out a deal with Harry Reid — or at least had “several” conversations about a deal — in which the Democrats would accept the Republicans’ budget numbers ($70 billion below what the Democrats wanted) in return for the speaker’s voting on a continuing resolution with no strings attached.
The Republicans had won. But the speaker later reneged. He told George Stephanopoulos this weekend: “I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand.”
To be clear, his far-right members in their bright red districts — and their deep-pocketed backers — forced him to reconsider.
Boehner is fighting his own battle — for his job and his legacy. He wants to appear in control of a caucus that is uncontrollable. The man who said last week of the government shutdown, “this isn’t some damn game,” is playing games. In fact, Politico reported Tuesday that many Republicans believe a massive budget deal is the best way to solve the current crisis, but Boehner has resisted, saying he wants to “put points on the board.”
The president, for his part, has deployed a list of metaphors as long as his arm to describe the Republicans — from hostage takers to deadbeat homeowners — to get more of the public to understand his principle of not negotiating on keeping the government open or paying the government’s bills. He wants to break the crisis cycle while simultaneously defending the Affordable Care Act. He wants to rescue the government from the clutches of the nihilists.
But many Americans are too frustrated to ferret out the details. They see dysfunction in the system as a whole and they’re fed up with it.
According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, a third of Americans now cite dysfunctional government as the most important problem facing America today. That was the highest level ever recorded by Gallup, whose trend on the measure dates back to 1939, and dysfunction now ranks higher than the economy in general or unemployment and jobs in particular.
This is not a “both sides at fault” issue. It is a tremendously partisan one.
And according to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Republicans believe the president should agree to a deal that includes changes in his health care law, and 75 percent of Democrats believe that Republicans should agree to a deal with no health care changes. Independents are nearly evenly divided between the two.
Now the shutdown is beginning to bleed into the debate about whether to raise the debt limit, a debate that has brought out the Republican default deniers to further muddy the waters.
The government shutdown, as costly and futile as it is, would look like child’s play compared with a default.
According to a Tuesday report in Bloomberg/Businessweek, one global market research firm estimates that the government shutdown “cost $1.6 billion last week in lost economic output” and “the office closures are now draining an average of $160 million each workday from the $15.7 trillion economy.”
And if you think this is bad, consider that a default could trigger a full-blown recession. In a Wednesday report, CNN quoted the International Monetary Fund economist Olivier Blanchard as saying: “If there was a problem lifting the debt ceiling, it could well be what is now a recovery would turn into a recession or even worse.”
And yet, a growing number of Republicans are questioning the possibility of default. Unbelievable.
Some Republicans have never met an inconvenient fact that they weren’t determined to deny. Evolution: didn’t happen. Climate change: not so much. Obama’s faith: doubt it.
In some parts of the Republican universe, facts and fantasy merge, the truth doesn’t surface, it’s shaped, data must be made to conform to doxology, and accepted science borders on the heretical. This is how the money-rich are able to prey on the knowledge-poor.
This denial is sinking in among the Republican rank and file. A Pew Research Center report issued Monday found that most Republicans believe that we can go past the debt limit deadline without major problems.
This is bigger than Obamacare. This is about rich conservatives seeking to exert unlimited influence on our political system, and employing far-right Republicans who are animated, to varying degrees, by an innate hostility to this president, fear of diminishing influence and a disavowal of disagreeable truths.
This is about the fragility of our democracy: the possibility that a government by the people may swiftly give way to a government dominated by dark money and dark motives.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 9, 2013
“Deep Seated Racial Antagonism”: Tea Partiers React With Fury To A World They Can’t Control
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, many pundits and political observers were eager to expunge the nation’s brutal and long-running history of stark racial oppression. They spoke of a “post-racial” society freed from the divisions of tribe, healed of the deep wounds that ached and bled along the color line for centuries.
Even those who were less sanguine about the disappearance of racism — myself included — believed that the election of the nation’s first black president signaled a new era of greater racial harmony and understanding. Surely, a nation ready to be led by a black man was ready to let go many of its oldest and ugliest prejudices.
But that was a very naive notion. It turns out that Obama’s election has, instead, provoked a new civil war, a last battle cry of secession by a group of voters who want no part of a country led by a black man, no place in a world they don’t rule, no home in a society where they are simply one more minority group. Call those folks “Tea Partiers.”
The ultraconservatives who have taken over the Republican Party are motivated by many things — antipathy toward the federal government, conservative religious beliefs and a traditional Republican suspicion of taxes, among them. But the most powerful force animating their fight is a deep-seated racial antagonism.
Don’t take my word for it. Democracy Corps, a political research and polling group headed by Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, has published a report from a series of focus groups conducted with segments of the Republican Party — moderates, evangelicals and Tea Partiers.
The report confirms that Republicans, especially the Tea Partiers, “are very conscious of being white in a country that is increasingly minority. The race issue is very much alive.” It also notes that “Barack Obama and Obamacare is a racial flashpoint for many evangelical and Tea Party voters.”
Tea Partiers believe that the Democratic Party is intent on expanding the social safety net in order, basically, to buy votes. They see “Obamacare” as a sop to that alleged 47 percent of lazy Americans who don’t want to work, don’t pay any taxes and live off government handouts. And, of course, those lazy Americans are, in their view, voters of color.
One focus group participant actually described the mythical America he pined for this way:
“Everybody is above average. Everybody is happy. Everybody is white. Everybody is middle class, whether or not they really are. Everybody looks that way. … Very homogeneous.”
Democracy Corps isn’t the only research group that has ferreted out the racial antagonism at the heart of Tea Partiers’ radicalism. Writing in The New York Times, journalist Thomas Edsall shared portions of an email exchange with political scientist Christopher Parker, co-author of Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. Parker said that “reactionary conservatives” believe “social change is subversive to the America with which they’ve become familiar, i.e., white, mainly male, Protestant, native born, straight. ‘Real Americans,’ in other words.”
None of this should come as any great surprise. In 2010, a New York Times poll of Tea Partiers found that more than half said the policies of the Obama administration favor the poor, and 25 percent thought that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public. Their racial paranoia has long been clear.
If anything has been surprising, it’s been the potency of their hatred, the irrationality of their tactics, the venom in their backlash. But, as they see it, they are fighting for their way of life — their control, their power.
This is an existential battle, and they’re willing to burn down the country to save it from people of color. That’s why they’re willing to risk defaulting on the nation’s debt for the first time in history.
The only whiff of good news is that Tea Party supporters tend to be older than average. Their cohort is diminishing and will be replaced by a younger voting bloc whose members don’t hew to their antediluvian views.
But the Tea Partiers are going to be with us for a while, and it’s going to be a wild ride.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, October 12, 2013
“There Are No Asterisks”: Those Who Wrap Themselves In The Constitution, Must Also Abide By The Constitution
Shortly after the 2010 midterms, as the newly elected House Republican majority was poised to start governing (I use the word loosely), the GOP officials had an idea for a symbolic gesture: they’d read the entire Constitution out loud. In January of this year, as the new Congress got underway, they did it again.
There wasn’t any harm in this, of course, but there wasn’t any point, either. It seemed to be the Republicans’ way of reminding the political world that they are the ones who truly love the Constitution. Sure, there are parts conservatives don’t like (the establishment clause, promoting the general welfare), and the right is eager to amend the document in a wide variety of ways, but for Tea Partiers and their allies, the Constitution has no greater champions than far-right congressional Republicans.
And if that’s still the case, Kristin Roberts has some bad news for them.
Have Republicans forgotten that they too must abide by the Constitution?
The document is explicit in its instruction to America’s federally elected officials — make good on the country’s debts. “The validity of the public debt of the United States,” the 14th Amendment states, “shall not be questioned.”
This is not some arcane biblical reference that needs to be translated from scraps of parchment. In fact, its purpose and intent are fairly well documented.
There’s been quite a bit of talk about exotic tactics President Obama may have to consider if congressional Republicans choose to push the United States into default on purpose. Maybe the White House can pursue a “14th Amendment option.” Maybe he can mint a “platinum $1 trillion coin.” Maybe the Treasury can create “Super Premium Bonds.” Maybe the president can do something to protect Americans from those who would do us deliberate harm, even if those people happen to be elected members of Congress. After all, if the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned, doesn’t Obama have a constitutional obligation to protect us from Republicans’ sociopathic tendencies?
Maybe it’s time to turn the question around on those who like to wrap themselves in the Constitution they claim to revere.
As this relates to Obama, there’s some disagreement among credible experts about whether the president can act unilaterally to circumvent the debt-ceiling law. Obama himself addressed the point yesterday, arguing that it really is up to Congress to complete this simple task and it wouldn’t do any good for him to experiment with creative alternatives.
But that only helps reinforce the importance of the question for congressional Republicans who swear to support the Constitution before they’re permitted to hold office. The document says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.” It doesn’t say anything about justifying extortion schemes, or holding the public debt hostage, or protecting the integrity of U.S. finances in exchange for right-wing goodies to satisfy U.S. House candidates who won fewer votes than their rivals.
Likewise, Article IV, Section 1 of the Constitution — known as the Full Faith and Credit Clause — doesn’t include any asterisks about what happens when one party really hates health care reform.
When the 14th Amendment was ratified, U.S. Sen. Benjamin Wade, an Ohio Republican, argued, “Every man who has property in the public funds will feel safer when he sees that the national debt is withdrawn from the power of a Congress to repudiate it and placed under the guardianship of the Constitution than he would feel if it were left at loose ends and subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress.”
Today’s congressional Republicans are prepared — some are eager — to betray this commitment, ignore their constitutional responsibilities, and put Americans’ wellbeing at risk for no particular reason.
Those who claim to cherish the Constitution have some explaining to do.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 9, 2013
“A Slow-Moving Disaster”: Republicans Remain Ignorant Of Disastrous Sequester Effects
Both the New York Times and Politico have reports out today on the debt-ceiling-denial caucus, the Republican lawmakers who believe that defaulting on America’s obligations by failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely fashion would be no big thing. “I think it’s a lot of hype that gets spun in the media,” said Florida Republican Rep. Ted Yoho. Pronouncements of a debt ceiling disaster are part of “a false narrative that’s been perpetuated by this administration,” adds Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
But the Times also noted that some unnamed GOPers believe that breaching the debt ceiling won’t be a catastrophe because, they say, the government shutdown and the budget cuts under the so-called sequester were both supposed to be bad, but so far haven’t been:
But the voices of denial are loud and persistent, with some Republicans saying that the fallout from the continuing shutdown and the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration has been less severe than predicted.
Perhaps these unnamed representatives haven’t been paying attention, as they’ve been too busy trying to deny people health insurance, but the personal and economic effects of both the shutdown and, perhaps more importantly, the sequester, have been serious and extremely detrimental to the country.
For starters, the shutdown is costing the U.S. economy some $300 million per day in economic output. Thousands of children were thrown out of Head Start, mine safety inspections have been cut back and a national computer network that helps track food-borne illnesses was closed down during a salmonella outbreak that, so far, has sickened 278 people in 18 states.
But those effects pale in comparison to those caused by the sequester, the across-the-board automatic spending cuts that came into effect due to the Budget Control Act, which was the piece of legislation that arose out of the last debt ceiling debacle. Here are just some of the problems that have resulted from the abysmally low spending levels under the sequester:
- Federal employment is plummeting; 100,000 federal jobs will disappear over the next few quarters.
- Overall the economy will lose up to 1.6 million jobs through the end of fiscal year 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
- Government watchdogs have far less money to do their jobs.
- The public defender system is being gutted.
- The National Institutes of Health are being forced to cut hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of research grants. “God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for,” says NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.
- Programs aimed at helping low-income, first-generation students get to college are being slashed.
- Head Start spots for tens of thousands of children are being eliminated.
- Thousands of meals from Meals on Wheels, which provides food to low-income seniors, have been eliminated.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just because Republican lawmakers in D.C. haven’t noticed these things, doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. (And matters aren’t helped by a media with little patience for slow-moving disasters, which is how the sequester has played out.)
Remember, the sequester was never supposed to actually come into effect. But the sad fact of the current state of play when it comes to the shutdown is that the sequester seems here to stay. Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has railed against the deleterious effects of the sequester, is willing to reopen the government at sequester levels of spending; Democrats have already swallowed a bill that would re-open the government with most of the sequester intact.
In that sense, Republicans have already won when it comes to government spending, which is what a shutdown is traditionally about (though Republicans do have an on-again, off-again love affair with the sequester, which for a time they dubbed the “Obamaquester“).
But make no mistake: Funding the government at the level outlined in the sequester means crippling cuts to programs upon which people depend and foregoing crucial investments in the coming years. Continuing the sequester is by no means as bad as defaulting on the national debt, but it’s still a self-inflicted catastrophe. The debt ceiling deniers, then, are doubly ignorant: ignorant of the mess they’re trying to cause and ignorant of the mess that’s already here.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, October 9, 2013
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