Would John Boehner And The Republicans Shut Down The Government Over Planned Parenthood?
The good news is, Democrats and Republicans have reportedly reached a general agreement on the size of the cuts for the rest of the fiscal year. As of this morning, the package is up to $34.5 billion, from $33 billion, and now reportedly includes some additional reductions in military spending.
The bad news, Republicans still want to use the budget to wage a culture war, and tomorrow night, will shut down the government to advance this agenda.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the top Democrat in the Senate, said Thursday morning that he is “not nearly as optimistic” about avoiding a shutdown as he was after a Wednesday night Oval Office meeting and said “it looks like it’s headed in that direction.”
Mr. Reid said that Republicans have “drawn a line in the sand” on issues of abortion funding and changes to the clean air act, and he said those issues could not be resolved in the hours left before a government shutdown.
“The numbers are basically there. But I am not as nearly as optimistic, and that’s an understatement, as I was eleven hours ago,” Mr. Reid said on the floor of the Senate. “The only thing holding up an agreement is ideology.”
In case this isn’t already clear, we’re dealing with obvious madness. Republicans want to cut off Planned Parenthood and gut the Clean Air Act, but instead of pursuing legislation to achieve their goals, they’re insisting that this be part of the budget. Democrats can’t go along with this nonsense, and John Boehner is too weak a Speaker to tell his caucus to act like grown-ups, so the entire process is unraveling.
This has led to talk about the GOP shutting down the government over abortion, but even that’s not quite right — Planned Parenthood is already prohibited from using public funds to terminate pregnancies, and has been for many years. What we’re talking about here is Republicans shutting down the government over access to contraception and family planning services.
This is the basis for the GOP hostage strategy.
President Obama will host his third budget talks in as many days in two hours, summoning Boehner and Reid to the Oval Office. Stay tuned.
By: Steve Benen, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, April 7, 2011
No More Fence Straddling: Even Moderates Should Condemn Paul Ryan’s Budget
Political moderates and on-the-fencers have had it easy up to now on budget issues. They could condemn “both sides” and insist on the need for “courage” in tackling the deficit.
Thanks to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget and the Republicans’ maximalist stance in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, the days of straddling are over.
Ryan’s truly outrageous proposal, built on heaping sacrifice onto the poor, slashing scholarship aid to college students and bestowing benefits on the rich, ought to force middle-of-the-roaders to take sides. No one who is even remotely moderate can possibly support what Ryan has in mind.
And please, let’s dispense with the idea that Ryan is courageous in offering his design. There is nothing courageous about asking for give-backs from the least advantaged and least powerful in our society. It takes no guts to demand a lot from groups that have little to give and tend to vote against your party anyway.
And there is nothing daring about a conservative Republican delivering yet more benefits to the wealthiest people in our society, the sort who privately finance the big ad campaigns to elect conservatives to Congress.
Ryan gives the game away by including the repeal of financial reform in his “budget” plan. What does this have to do with fiscal balance? Welcome to the Wall Street Protection Act of 2011.
Oh, yes, and this budget has nothing to do with deficit reduction. Ryan would hack away at expenditures for the poor. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates he gets about two-thirds of his $4.3 trillion in actual cuts from programs for low- income Americans. Note that this $4.3 trillion almost exactly matches the $4.2 trillion he proposes in tax cuts over a decade. Welcome to the Bah Humbug Act of 2011.
But you’d expect a progressive to feel this way. What’s striking is that Ryan is pushing moderates to stand up for a government that will have enough money to perform the functions now seen as basic in the 21st century. These notably include helping those who can’t afford health insurance to get decent medical care, a goal Ryan would have the government abandon, slowly but surely.
Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairs of the deficit commission and the heroes of the budget-cutting center, put out a statement saying some nice things about the idea of the Ryan budget. They called it “serious, honest, straightforward,” even though there is much about its accounting that is none of those.
But then they got to the real point, declaring themselves “concerned that it falls short of the balanced, comprehensive approach” needed for bipartisan accord because it “largely exempts defense spending from reductions and would not apply any of the savings from eliminating or reducing tax expenditures as part of tax reform to deficit reduction.”
Ryan, they argued, “relies on much larger reductions in domestic discretionary spending than does the commission proposal, while also calling for savings in some safety-net programs — cuts which would place a disproportionately adverse effect on certain disadvantaged populations.”
This is much like what I said, with an added layer of diplomacy. When even deficit hawks begin choking, however politely, on a proposal whose main motivation is ideological, you know there is an opening for a coalition between moderates and progressives on behalf of sane, decent government.
The Republican approach to shutdown talks should reinforce this possibility. Democrats have nearly given away the store to avoid a crackup, yet Republican leaders, under pressure from their right wing, have continued to ask for more and more and more. My word, even President Obama has finally gotten impatient.
However the shutdown saga ends, the negotiating styles of the two sides ought to tell moderates that they can no longer pretend that the two ends of our politics are equally “extreme.” No, conservatives are the ones who’ve been radicalized. The Ryan budget is definitive evidence of this.
It is conservatives who would transform our government from a very modestly compassionate instrument into a machine dedicated to expanding existing privileges while doing as little as possible for the marginalized and the aspiring — those who, with a little help from government, might find it a bit easier to reach for better lives.
Moderation involves a balance between government and the private sector, between risk and security, between our respect for incentives and our desire for greater fairness. The war against moderation has begun. Will moderates join the battle?
By: E. J. Dionne, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 6, 2011
No, Rep Paul Ryan’s Budget Proposal Is Not Brave
Prominent opinion writers have spent the last few days fawning over Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which would essentially abolish Medicare and Medicaid while lowering taxes on top earners, and many of them have deployed a litany of superlatives usually reserved for costumed superheroes. Commentators like David Brooks and Jacob Weisberg have described Ryan’s plan as “brave,” and “bold,” and the word “courageous” has been ubiquitous.
But the closer people look at Ryan’s plan, the clearer it becomes that the plan isn’t all that brave. Let’s take stock of all the recent revelations about it.
Ryan’s plan included a laughably implausible unemployment analysis from Heritage predicting it would bring unemployment down to 4 percent by 2015 and 2.8 percent by 2012 — an analysis Heritage then quitely retracted by attempting to disappear it from the internet. Ryan’s plan claims to save money while repealing the Affordable Care Act, even though the CBO has said repealing the ACA will increase the deficit. Ryan implied that his plan was supported by President Bill Clinton’s former OMB Director Alice Rivlin, even though it isn’t. It cuts taxes on top earners, when the easiest way to reduce the deficit is to let the Bush tax cuts expire.
Ryan’s misleading claims aren’t the only thing that isn’t particularly brave about his plan. After accusing Democrats of “raiding” Medicare with the Affordable Care Act, Ryan spares the elderly voters who supported Republicans in 2010 by making sure only he guts medical care for future seniors (he still calls it “saving Medicare,” however). And as the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted, 2.9 trillion in Ryan’s budget comes from cuts in programs focused on low-income Americans. It doesn’t touch defense spending.
In other words, it focuses on cuts to programs that benefit those most likely to vote Democratic, while preserving programs that serve those more likely to vote Republican.Rewarding your constituencies while punishing the other side’s is how partisan politics usually works, but there’s nothing particularly brave about it.
Ryan himself said during the rollout that his plan isn’t so much a budget as a “cause.” As Steve Benen wrote yesterday, the cause here is destroying the modern welfare state so that rich people have to pay less in taxes. The only reason so many people think Ryan’s plan is “brave” is because they agree with this cause.
When we call a person brave, what we usually mean is that his or her “bravery” is being employed towards an end we agree with. In this case, those who are hailing Ryan’s proposal as brave are doing so because they agree with its goal, which — no matter how many times people insist otherwise — is not deficit reduction. It’s destroying the social safety net. It just so happens that’s a cause a lot of wealthy people with a disproportionate influence on our political discourse happen to believe in. So they think it’s brave, even if the numbers are phony and even if it disproportionately punishes the poor. But there’s nothing at all brave about it.
By: Adam Serwer, The Washington Post, April 7, 2011
A SUCKER’S BET: Are Republicans Really Prepared To “Gamble On Entitlement Reform”?
The effort to pass a budget for the remainder of the fiscal year will be the principal challenge for policymakers over the next few days, but while that work continues, congressional Republicans will also start a massive fight over the next budget.
We’ll have more on this later — sneak preview: the GOP wants to gut entitlements — but as the process gets underway, it’s worth pausing to appreciate the politics here. The Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Hayes has a lengthy new report, arguing that Republicans are prepared to “gamble on entitlement reform,” and the GOP thinks it can win this time.
If there is one thing that political strategists, pollsters, and elected officials of both parties have agreed on for decades, it’s that entitlement reform is a sure political loser. Social Security is the “third rail” — touch it and you die. Suggest changes to Medicaid and you don’t care about the poor. Propose modest reforms to Medicare and you’re the target of a well-funded “Mediscare” campaign that ensures your defeat.
No longer.
“People are getting it that these things are unsustainable,” says Karl Rove. “For so many people, debt is no longer abstract. It’s more concrete. I don’t know if it’s seeing Greece on TV or what. It’s still tough, but it’s not the political loser it used to be.”
Other influential Republicans go further. They believe that getting serious about entitlement reform can be politically advantageous.
“I think it can be a real winner for Republicans if we handle it the right way,” says South Carolina senator Jim DeMint.
The piece goes on to quote all kinds of Republicans, all of whom genuinely seem to believe there’s a public appetite for their entitlement agenda. GOP officials have been too scared to tackle this in earnest before, the theory goes, but bolstered by public support, this time will be different. This time, they say, Americans want entitlement cuts, and Democratic criticisms will fall on deaf ears.
Time will tell, I suppose, but all of the available evidence suggests these folks have no idea what they’re talking about, and are poised to pursue one of the most dramatic examples of political overreach we’ve seen in a very long time.
Republicans can presumably read polls as easily as I can, but let’s focus for a moment on the latest CNN poll, released late last week. Asked, for example, about Medicaid funding, a combined 75% want funding levels to stay the same or go up. For Social Security, 87% of Americans want funding levels to stay the same or go up. For Medicare, 87% want funding levels to stay the same or go up — and most want funding to increase, not stay the same.
For some reason, Hayes and his allies look at numbers like these and think Republicans will benefit from pushing entitlement cuts. No, seriously, that’s what they think. GOP leaders are not only arguing this, they’re actually counting on it as part of a larger political strategy.
Karl Rove, ostensibly the GOP’s most gifted strategist, believes Americans may be “seeing Greece on TV,” and suddenly find themselves favoring Medicare cuts.
I don’t think he’s kidding.
Hayes noted in his piece, “So have things really changed? We’ll soon find out.”
On this point, we agree.
By: Steve Bensen, Washington Monthly, April 4, 2011
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