“As Usual, The Public Be Damned”: House Republicans Should Come To Their Senses And Just Knock It Off
The health care obsessives in the Senate, led by Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, have spent days trying to portray Democrats as out of touch with the public. “The Senate Democrats are not listening to the millions of Americans who are being hurt by Obamacare,” Mr. Cruz said this morning in his last stand in this particular round of the budget battle.
Moments later, however, the vote took place and Mr. Cruz lost badly. It was clear that all Democrats and a majority of Senate Republicans had in fact listened quite closely to the public — which demanded that Congress not shut down the government, whatever the fate of President Obama’s health law.
On the crucial vote to cut off debate over a temporary spending bill to keep the government open, 79 senators, including 25 Republicans, opposed Mr. Cruz’s plea for a filibuster. (All of those Republicans also opposed the final bill, which removed the provision defunding the health law and sent the stopgap bill back to the House, but by then Democrats only needed a simple majority for passage.)
The Republican split in the Senate — 25 against shutdown tactics, 19 in favor — was a pretty clear signal to the House about the political limits of opposition to the health law. Mainstream Republicans will continue to oppose the law, exaggerating every minor glitch and failure, and running against it in next year’s election, but most are not willing to shut down the government to stop it.
They know what will happen if a shutdown occurs at midnight on Tuesday, or even worse, if a default occurs two or three weeks later: television news clips of phones going unanswered at Social Security offices, shuttered national parks, and veterans protesting reduced services. And a plunge in the market in event of a default. What was a political standoff would turn into a picture of dysfunction. Voters would get angry, and Republicans would inevitably (and accurately) get the blame.
The question now is whether a majority of House Republicans will feel the same way as their colleagues in the upper chamber. Answering only to rigidly gerrymandered districts, House members have shown themselves far less interested in the general welfare than senators, and may not react to the same pressures.
The bill now heads back to the House, and if Republicans attach another health care demand to it, that’s it, game over, the government shuts down on Tuesday. The Senate will have to strip it out again, and there won’t be enough time for reconciliation. Speaker John Boehner could agree to a one- or two-week extension, if he can get the votes for a kick-the-can bill, or he could punt, approve the Senate bill, and make his stand on the debt limit increase in the following few days.
But he’ll eventually have to punt on that, too, or risk triggering an economic catastrophe. The only realistic path is a sensible variant on what Mr. Cruz said this morning: Listen to the public and stop governing by crisis. Or as President Obama put it this afternoon: “Knock it off.”
By: David Firestone, The Opinion Pages, The New York Times, September 27, 2013
“In A State Of Classic Denial”: The GOP Leadership Has Become Completely Delusional
You have to wonder if the GOP leadership has begun to lose touch with political reality.
They are laying out a series of demands that Democrats must meet in order to avoid a shutdown of the government — or an economic disaster that would result if the government defaults on its debts and refuses to pay financial obligations. Everyone acknowledges that either of these events would have dire consequences for the entire country and its economy.
Why do they believe that Democrats have a greater self-interest in avoiding these dire consequences than they do, when they themselves will be blamed? That makes no political sense.
And there is little question they will be blamed. The polling has made it clear for some time that most Americans will blame the GOP if either of these catastrophes ensue — and the focus of that blame will shift to the Republicans more and more as the days pass.
From a purely political point of view, it’s as if your opponent in a war threatens that he will blow his own head off if you do not surrender. What?
Maybe they assume that Democrats care more about the economy of the United States, the jobs of their fellow Americans and the availability of public services than they do — but that is not a message you’d think they would want to send to the voters.
And they are forgetting something else. The political situation has fundamentally changed since the last debt-ceiling crisis in 2011.
In 2011, the Tea Party leadership of the GOP was coming off a big win in the 2010 mid-terms. Last year their positions were once again tested in the General Election, and they were rejected by the voters.
Second, in 2011 President Obama could ill afford a government default that could have destroyed the momentum of the fragile recovery a year before his re-election. Next year the voters will not be deciding whether to re-elect President Obama. They will be deciding who they elect to Congress.
Do the Republicans really want to be held responsible for another financial calamity when it is their turn to face the voters? In fact, many observers believe that such a development would create exactly the kind of wave that could wipe out their already fragile majority in the House and dash their best hope in the foreseeable future to take back the Senate.
This increasing lack of connection to political reality may result in part from classic denial. They are unwilling to accept that their extremist ideological views are massively unpopular with an increasingly progressive electorate.
Last election they simply refused to believe that all of those Hispanics, African Americans, women and young people would come to the polls. Even their pollsters refused to believe that the electorate was changing. They were actually stunned that they lost.
They continue to refuse to believe the fact that with every passing year, the electorate is less and less sympathetic to their extremist views. Polls show that Millenial voters are the most progressive generation in 50 years. Every year a new class of those Millenial voters replaces a group of older, less progressive voters in the electorate. What’s more, every year there are more and more Hispanics and Asian Americans who voted over 70 percent for Obama. And of course — as a recent poll in the Virginia governor’s race makes clear — they persist in driving away more and more women voters with their opposition to women’s reproductive rights, attacks on education, child nutrition and universal background checks on guns.
The Tea Party Republicans appear to have abandoned hope that they can achieve their goals through the established — democratic — political process. After all, virtually all of their demands are extremely unpopular with the broader electorate and they overwhelmingly lost the last election.
Most Americans do not support their demand to defund Obamacare — and the law’s popularity will only grow once it goes into effect — as its benefits become clear and the “horrors” predicted by its opponents fail to materialize.
Most Americans simply do not support policies that take food from the mouths of hungry children in order to give more tax breaks to millionaires, or gut the provisions of the Dodd-Frank law that rein in Wall Street banks, or privatize Medicare.
So they have resorted to the tactic of choice for small extremist minorities: hostage-taking. They are threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get their way.
And that is precisely why the president and Democrats in Congress are so clear that they will not cede to GOP demands. If Democrats were to allow hostage-taking to work, GOP extremists would try the same tactic again and again. There would be no end to the hostage-taking in order to force the majority of Americans to agree to the positions of a small minority that have been rejected in democratic elections.
And the GOP leadership is ignoring one final factor. When voters cast their ballots they not only ask who is on their side, they also ask who is competent to provide leadership.
Many Republicans in Congress have announced they are willing to risk shutdown or default to avoid the “horrors” of Obamacare, which they say is the worst law ever passed by Congress. Really?
Next time you get into a plane, ask yourself how you would feel about having a delusional pilot so out of touch with reality that he would recklessly risk the well-being of all on board to fly through a tornado because he wants to fly to the mythical land of Oz.
Voters are not generally wild about entrusting leadership to a bunch of reckless adolescents who see nothing wrong with playing chicken racing their cars toward each other to see who will swerve first.
Recklessness, lack of connection with reality, failure to recognize that actions have consequences — those are not the qualities that voters find appealing in candidates for higher office.
One way or another, the GOP will ultimately fold — that is virtually certain. The only question is whether someone in Republicanland who has yet not drunk the Tea Party Kool Aid will grab the yoke and pull the GOP out of this spiral dive — or whether they are forced to surrender as they emerge from a pile of rubble on the canyon floor.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post Blog, September 27, 2013
“When You Are On Fire”: Exactly How Much Republican Pyromania Are We Expected To Accept?
It must be difficult to be a Democratic Member of Congress right now. You are perpetually on call to put out a fire your Republican colleagues are determined to set, but they can’t make up their minds whether to burn down the house or the whole neighborhood.
Originally John Boehner wanted to give his charges the chance for an extended temper tantrum about Obamacare timed to conclude when the moment arrived to keep the federal government functioning, perhaps with a bit less money. Nope, that wasn’t sufficient. So the GOP headed directly towards a government shutdown, until Boehner and company looked about two inches beyond their own noses and saw that the public was (tragically) more tolerant towards a debt limit default threat than a shutdown. So the House GOP leaders moved in that direction. But they soon discovered getting the entire House GOP to vote for a debt limit increase would require a measure that incarnated every conservative policy fantasy in sight, and they are still struggling to get the votes. So now they may throw some sand in the gears of the continuing appropriations resolution and perhaps generate a mini-shutdown as a tonic to the troops, and hope that between the appropriations and debt limit measures they can slake the destructive furies of the Republican Party and its often-caustic right-wing chorus, and maybe even mark up a victory or two if Democrats conclude concessions are better than economy-wreaking chaos.
But at the moment, chaos reigns.
Even the jaded fans of pointless drama at Politico seem to think it’s out of control, per a Sherman/Bresnahan report:
Boehner and his team have now cycled through three fiscal strategies in about as many weeks, as rank-and-file Republicans jump from one approach to another in a so-far losing effort to emerge victorious from a budget showdown with President Barack Obama and the Democrats.
Now it’s on to “Plan C,” or whatever Republicans call this third iteration of government funding-debt ceiling strategy….
At this point, it’s difficult to conclusively determine where all the House GOP’s maneuvering and false starts will end.
I’m beginning to wonder if the whole idea is to convince Democrats that they need to consult abnormal psychology textbooks every time they deal with a fresh GOP demand.
Back when I worked for (pre-apostasy) Zell Miller, a very sensitive internal political memo laying out Zell’s secret re-election year agenda got accidentally taken off a fax machine at an out-of-state governors’ conference and handed to a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It was all so weird and unlikely that the big story wasn’t what was in the document, but that Zell’s minions had gone to such lengths to leak it. “This is great,” I recall a colleague saying with real enthusiasm. “They think we’re completely crazy.”
Being completely out of control does create some leverage, particularly if the firebug is willing to set fire to himself (“When you are on fire,” Richard Pryor famously observed after nearly incinerating himself in a freebase cocaine accident, “people get out of your way.”). So people start thinking about making concessions they wouldn’t otherwise consider, or contemplating scenarios they wouldn’t otherwise entertain. As Ezra Klein said with disgust this morning:
It’s a mark of the insane and reckless turn in our politics that shutting down the government so one of our to major political parties can get the brinksmanship out of its system is emerging as the sober, responsible thing to do. But here we are, greatest nation the world has ever known.
Today’s Republicans really do make America exceptional. But I don’t know exactly how much pyromania we are expected to accept.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 27, 2013
“Memo To Republicans, You Lost, Now Deal With It”: Third Graders Don’t Get Cupcakes For Threatening To Break Windows And Chairs
Imagine you’re a third-grade teacher, and the school announces that all the classrooms are going to be repainted, and the kids will get to choose the colors. You let your students each make a case for the color they’d like for their classroom, and it comes down to a choice between blue and green. The two sides give cute little speeches to the class about their favorite colors, and then you take a vote. There are 20 kids in the class; 12 choose blue and 8 choose green. Blue it is.
But then the kids who wanted green insist that the color has to be green. They go to the principal’s office and make their case that blue sucks and green rules. The principal tells them that the class chose blue, so the walls are going to be blue. Then the pro-green kids return and say that since there was a new kid who joined the class since the vote, we have to have the vote again. Another vote is held; it’s still blue. Then the pro-green kids announce that because anyone can see that blue is sucky, they’re going to write in green magic marker on any wall that gets painted blue. Then they announce that if the walls get painted blue, they’re going to break the windows in the classroom, smash the chairs, and fling the contents of everybody’s cubby on the floor.
When they’re told they can’t do that, they say, “OK, tell you what: we’ll refrain from breaking the windows and trashing the class, but only if you give us pro-green kids cupcakes every day, excuse us from homework for the rest of the year, and let us choose all the games we play at recess. It’s either that, or we start smashing.” Would you respond to these children, “Well, what if we just give you the cupcakes?” Of course not. You’d say, “Listen, you psychotic little turds. The goddamn walls are going to be blue. YOU LOST. Now suck it up.”
Okay, so if you were a third-grade teacher you wouldn’t actually say that. But you’d think it. And that’s where we are today. Republicans argued against the Affordable Care Act when it was moving through Congress. A vote was held, and they lost. Then they went to the Supreme Court and asked for the law to be overturned. They lost. Then they tried to defeat the president who passed the law and replace him with a guy who promised to repeal it. They lost. Now they’re saying that if they don’t get what they want, they’re going to trash the place.
And now we come to the part about the cupcakes and homework. The latest idea from Republicans is that in exchange for not trashing the American economy with a debt default, just defunding the Affordable Care Act isn’t enough. What they want as the price for standing down is the entire Republican wish list. Get a load of this:
According to a document obtained by CQ Roll Call, that “wish list” contains 20 “additional options” for the debt limit bill, on top of four principles in the “Core Package” — a one year debt limit increase for a one year delay of Obamacare, the agreement of tax reform instructions and the Keystone pipeline.
The 20 additional options, according to the document, are:
Economic Growth
1. Offshore Energy Production
2. Energy Production on Federal Lands
3. Pipeline Permitting Reform
4. Coal Ash
5. Prohibit EPA from Regulating Greenhouse Gases
6. REINS Act
7. Regulatory Process Reforms (APA)
8. Consent Decree Reform
9. Regulatory Flexibility Improvements
10. Block Net Neutrality Regulations
Non-Health Care Reforms:
1. Federal Employee Retirement Reform, which Republicans estimate will save $20 to $84 billion.
2. Eliminate Dodd-Frank Bailout Fund, which they estimate will save $23 billion.
3. Eliminate Mandatory Funding for CFPB, with estimated savings of $5 billion.
4. Require SSN to Receive Child Tax Credit, with estimated savings of $7 billion.
5. Eliminate Social Service Block Grant, with estimated savings of $17 billion.
Health Care Reforms:
1. Increase Medicare Means Testing, which Republicans estimate will save $56 billion.
2. Reduce Medicaid Provider Tax Gimmick, which Republicans estimate will save $11 billion.
3. Medical Liability Reform, with estimated savings of $49 billion.
4. Disproportionate Share Hospitals, with estimated savings of $4 billion.
5. Eliminate Public Health Slush Fund
I’m sure that if you asked them the logical question—Are you people insane?—they’d respond that this is an opening position for negotiations, and we can go from there. Sure, maybe we won’t get everything on the list, but maybe we could bargain it down to, say, delaying the ACA for a year, handcuffing the EPA, the Keystone XL pipeline, and cutting money for public health. In other words, we might be willing to not smash the windows if you give us the cupcakes.
There are some basic notions that undergird the operation of a democracy. When there’s an election, the candidate who gets more votes is the one who takes office. When a bill is passed through Congress and signed by the president, it’s now the law. And when you lose, you don’t get to demand that your agenda be enacted, for no reason other than that you’d prefer it that way. If you want a bunch of policy changes, you have to win an election, then pass that agenda through the legislative process. That’s how it works. Baseball players who strike out don’t get to just demand that they be given a triple or else they’re going to set fire to the stadium. And third graders don’t get cupcakes for threatening to break windows and chairs.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 27, 2013
“A Clarifying Moment”: No Negotiations On Debt Limit Means Exactly What It Says
The good thing about the fiscal madness that’s gripped the GOP is that it creates a good, clarifying moment for progressives. The president and congressional Democratic leaders have repeatedly announced a policy of refusing to negotiate over a debt limit extension, on grounds that (a) the economic stakes involved in messing around with this are just too high, dwarfing in importance anything either side could “win,” and (b) the debt limit accommodates existing debt from previous spending, and thus is not an appropriate vehicle for changing spending or taxes. (It would have been nice had the president taken this position back in 2011, but better late than never).
It is of great importance that Obama, Pelosi and Reed not flinch from this position, no matter what. This is a point on which all progressives, regardless of how they feel about specific fiscal issues, ought to be able to agree. Indeed, this is of particular importance to Democratic “centrists” who might be tempted to agree with this or that detail of the debt limit bill Boehner is putting together–say, approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which is insanely popular in certain parts of the midwest, or greater means-testing in Medicare. Once Democrats head down the road of discussing any of these concessions in exchange for allowing the economy to continue to function, the hostage-takers in the GOP will have won, perhaps for good.
Matt Yglesias argues that negotiating over the debt limit this time would represent a vast abandonment of responsibility by the president:
Republicans are essentially asking for an end to constitutional government in the United States and its replacement by a wholly novel system….
Things like this do happen. The British system of government used to feature a ruling monarch who was checked in limited ways by two houses of parliament. Over time, those houses of parliament leveraged their control over tax hikes into overall control of the government. On a somewhat slower time frame, the elected House of Commons nudged the House of Lords out of almost all of its de facto political power. And that’s the House’s proposal here. The president should become an elected figurehead (not dissimilar to the elected presidents of Germany, Israel, or Italy) whose role is simply to assent to the policy preferences of the legislative majority.
That’s the logic of bargaining over the debt ceiling, because this isn’t really a bargain at all. A bargain is when Obama wants something the GOP doesn’t want (universal preschool, say) and then the GOP says “look we’ll do it, but only if you do X, Y, and Z for us.” Increasing the debt ceiling isn’t like that. It isn’t a pet policy priority of Obama’s and it isn’t something House Republicans oppose. It’s something both sides agree is necessary to avert a legal and financial disaster.
Matt goes on to point out that today’s demands are attributable to Obama’s failure to take the same position in 2011. Then, at least, one could make the argument that both parties were very interested in taking steps to reduce long-term deficits and debt. Now it’s reasonably clear the Republican agenda is to permanently shrink government, to overturn the duly enacted Affordable Care Act and nullify the Supreme Court decision and the presidential election that kept it in place, and to prove once and for all that most intransigent brand of “constitutional conservatism” can work politically. To the extent that both parties claim to care about the economy, there is no one, not even debt default enthusiasts, who think wrangling over the debt limit is going to be good for the economy.
So the answer to this vicious “opening bid” from Boehner needs to be “no,” not “maybe” or “maybe something else.” If no negotiations occur, then there is a reasonably high probability that the GOP’s corporate allies will make Boehner walk the plank and cooperate with House Democrats to pass a “clean” debt limit increase. That’s actually the only sane way out of the dark place Boehner is leading the country towards right now.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 26, 2013
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