“A Functioning Government Is A Problem”: Shutdown Isn’t Symptom of Tea Party Ideology, It Is Tea Party Ideology
It’s easy to wonder how a group of people hired to do one job — simply to keep a country running — could be bungling it so terribly. That is, until you remember that a powerful faction of those people were never interested in doing that one job in the first place.
Today’s government shutdown, hitched to an unrealistic laundry list of demands, isn’t a symptom of Tea Party ideology — it is Tea Party ideology. The Tea Party and its allies in Congress have never been interested in using the government to solve problems. Instead, they believe that a functioning government is a problem in itself. And they are willing to risk untold damage to the country in order to get their way.
In previous partisan budget disputes, at least we’ve had the comfort of imagining that neither party wanted to completely destroy the government. Not so this time.
The Republican Party under Tea Party control is in such denial about reality that it is willing to deal a blow to the nation’s economy just because it can’t believe, and won’t admit, that it lost the last two presidential elections. They’re also hoping that their antics will play to their advantage in future elections, deliberately planning votes they hope will back vulnerable Senate Democrats into tight corners.
Just look at Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who somehow has managed to wrest control of the Republican Party after less than a year in the Senate. Cruz explained during his long imaginary filibuster last week that “if we listen to the American people, the vote would be 100 to 0 to defund Obamacare.” Apparently, holding a national election in which the candidate who created Obamacare handily defeated the candidate who wanted to repeal it doesn’t count as “listening to the American people.”
In fact, Cruz told us (and then shamelessly denied that he had told us) that those who criticize his defunding efforts are just like Neville Chamberlain, who wanted the British people to “accept the Nazis” and “appease them.”
Rep. John Culberson of Texas went even further, likening Republicans threatening to shut down the government to the 9/11 heroes on United Airlines Flight 93: “I said, you know like 9/11, ‘Let’s roll!'”
Rep. Michele Bachmann, meanwhile, likened the all-out fight to defund Obamacare to helping free Americans from drug addiction, saying, “President Obama can’t wait to get Americans addicted to the crack cocaine of dependency on more government health care.”
This is the alternate reality that is driving the government shutdown.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — far from a liberal group — has warned that a shutdown will hurt business. Wall Street is skittish. Even the majority of Americans who oppose Obamacare don’t want to see it fail. In all, Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to the plan to shut down the federal government to block the implementation of the ACA. A Quinnipiac poll this week found that 72 percent opposed the shutdown.
Now even Republican members of Congress are coming out to say that the shutdown is nuts and that it’s entirely the fault of a party that’s letting the Tea Party take the reins.
The Republican establishment and big business groups like the Chamber worked to get Tea Party senators and congressman into power and encouraged the rigid anti-government ideology that fueled the movement. They got what they paid for. Unfortunately, the rest of us are now paying too.
By: Michael Keegan, The Huffington Post Blog, October 1, 2013
“Rebels Without A Clue”: Republicans Are Delusional About Both Economics And Politics
This may be the way the world ends — not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.
O.K., a temporary government shutdown — which became almost inevitable after Sunday’s House vote to provide government funding only on unacceptable conditions — wouldn’t be the end of the world. But a U.S. government default, which will happen unless Congress raises the debt ceiling soon, might cause financial catastrophe. Unfortunately, many Republicans either don’t understand this or don’t care.
Let’s talk first about the economics.
After the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 many observers concluded that such events, while clearly bad, aren’t catastrophes: essential services continue, and the result is a major nuisance but no lasting harm. That’s still partly true, but it’s important to note that the Clinton-era shutdowns took place against the background of a booming economy. Today we have a weak economy, with falling government spending one main cause of that weakness. A shutdown would amount to a further economic hit, which could become a big deal if the shutdown went on for a long time.
Still, a government shutdown looks benign compared with the possibility that Congress might refuse to raise the debt ceiling.
First of all, hitting the ceiling would force a huge, immediate spending cut, almost surely pushing America back into recession. Beyond that, failure to raise the ceiling would mean missed payments on existing U.S. government debt. And that might have terrifying consequences.
Why? Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests. In particular, Treasury bills — short-term U.S. bonds — are what investors demand when they want absolutely solid collateral against loans. Treasury bills are so essential for this role that in times of severe stress they sometimes pay slightly negative interest rates — that is, they’re treated as being better than cash.
Now suppose it became clear that U.S. bonds weren’t safe, that America couldn’t be counted on to honor its debts after all. Suddenly, the whole system would be disrupted. Maybe, if we were lucky, financial institutions would quickly cobble together alternative arrangements. But it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis set off by the failure of Lehman Brothers five years ago.
No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don’t have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party’s delusional wing. For they are delusional, about both the economics and the politics.
On the economics: Republican radicals generally reject the scientific consensus on climate change; many of them reject the theory of evolution, too. So why expect them to believe expert warnings about the dangers of default? Sure enough, they don’t: the G.O.P. caucus contains a significant number of “default deniers,” who simply dismiss warnings about the dangers of failing to honor our debts.
Meanwhile, on the politics, reasonable people know that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t let himself be blackmailed in this way, and not just because health reform is his key policy legacy. After all, once he starts making concessions to people who threaten to blow up the world economy unless they get what they want, he might as well tear up the Constitution. But Republican radicals — and even some leaders — still insist that Mr. Obama will cave in to their demands.
So how does this end? The votes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling are there, and always have been: every Democrat in the House would vote for the necessary measures, and so would enough Republicans. The problem is that G.O.P. leaders, fearing the wrath of the radicals, haven’t been willing to allow such votes. What would change their minds?
Ironically, considering who got us into our economic mess, the most plausible answer is that Wall Street will come to the rescue — that the big money will tell Republican leaders that they have to put an end to the nonsense.
But what if even the plutocrats lack the power to rein in the radicals? In that case, Mr. Obama will either let default happen or find some way of defying the blackmailers, trading a financial crisis for a constitutional crisis.
This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Contributor, The New York Times, September 29, 2013
“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
“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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