“Nothing Short Of Everything”: The Republican Leaders Vs The GOP’s Neanderthals
House Republicans, perhaps tired after working for four days after a six-week absence, will wrap their work week today around noon, leaving just five more days in September in which the chamber will be in session. And as House members depart this afternoon, they’ll leave increasing odds of a government shutdown in their wake.
Part of the problem is simply a matter of logistics: the government will run out of money on Sept. 30, and House leaders haven’t left themselves much time to get their work done.
But just as important is the fact that Republican leaders have absolutely no idea how they intend to govern. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the GOP leadership team thought they’d worked out a viable solution, which House Republicans rejected less than a day after it was introduced. Party officials are looking for someone to blame.
It’s not hard to find frustration with Heritage Action and the Club for Growth among senior Republicans, who believe the groups’ demand that they include Obamacare defunding language on any spending bill keeping the government open will ultimately empower Democrats in a series of fall battles over spending. They believe it’s part of a pattern of pushing untenable demands that have no chance of becoming law.
“Heritage Action and Club for Growth are slowly becoming irrelevant Neanderthals,” one senior GOP aide said.
Neanderthals, of course, is a subjective term — draw your own conclusions — but characterizing the right-wing activist groups as “irrelevant” is plainly incorrect. The House Republican leadership spent weeks carefully crafting a plan to avoid a government shutdown; Boehner & Co. unveiled their scheme on Tuesday; and by Wednesday morning, Heritage Action and Club for Growth had convinced Boehner’s caucus to reject Boehner’s plan out of hand.
I can appreciate why the Speaker’s office is frustrated, but which side of this equation sounds “irrelevant”?
Regardless, Republican leaders are left with an unsettling set of circumstances, which makes the odds of a government shutdown far more likely than they were 24 hours ago. Indeed, GOP lawmakers oppose their leaders’ plan, and the leaders don’t have a backup plan.
Consider just how brutal this is.
A clearly frustrated Boehner seemed to realize that he leads a conference where no plan is quite good enough. There are frequently about 30 Republicans who oppose leadership’s carefully crafted plans — just enough to mess things up. A reporter asked him whether he has a new idea to resolve the government funding fight. He laughed and said, “No.”
“Do you have an idea?” he asked the reporters. “They’ll just shoot it down anyway.”
That sounds terribly sad, though it also happens to be true. The party is out of control, and its most powerful leader has no power.
A significant, outcome-changing contingent within the House GOP caucus is driven by such irrational hatred of the Affordable Care Act that it won’t accept anything short of everything. Party leaders realize this approach would trigger a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans. But if Boehner crafted a far-right spending measure to make extremists happy, this would quickly be rejected by the Senate and White House, again leading to a shutdown that the public would blame on Republicans.
The best way out is for the Speaker to give up on the radical wing of his party and strike a deal with House Democrats by scrapping the destructive sequestration policy. The shutdown would be averted; the economy would get a boost (remember when Congress occasionally thought about the economy?); and the Speaker would win plaudits for bipartisan cooperation and governing.
This, of course, won’t happen.
What’s likely to be the way out is Boehner will promise the extremists that if they support his idea of a temporary spending measure, he’ll hold the debt ceiling hostage over “defunding Obamacare.” The right-wing will probably see this as good enough and the nation will spend the next five or six weeks dealing with yet another Republican-imposed crisis.
Buckle your seat belt.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 12, 2013
“Marinating In The Swamp”: Tea Party Republican’s Government Shutdown Crisis Proceeding On Schedule
What with all the attention being paid to Syria, most people have forgotten that we’re just three weeks away from a government shutdown unless Congress passes a continuing resolution (CR), which is the (relatively) quick-and-easy way of keeping the government operating at current funding levels without writing a whole new budget. As you may remember, Tea Party Republicans in the House would like to use the threat of a government shutdown to force a defunding of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, while the Republican leadership, conservatives to a person, realizes that this is spectacularly stupid. If they hold up the CR with a defunding demand, Barack Obama will say no, the government will shut down, Republicans will get every ounce of the blame, and it’ll be a complete disaster for the GOP. Eventually they’ll give in and pass a CR, but only after having caused a crisis and eroding their brand even further, and by the way not actually defunding Obamacare.
So House Majority Leader Eric Cantor came up with something resembling a solution. The way it would work is that the House would pass two versions of the CR, one that defunds Obamacare and one that doesn’t. They would then send them to the Senate, which would presumably pass only the one that doesn’t defund Obamacare, which Obama would then sign. As Politico describes it, “The arrangement allows all sides to express themselves, but it surrenders the shutdown leverage that some conservatives hunger for.” And not surprisingly, Tea Partiers both inside and outside Congress don’t like it. Take, for instance, high-profile bloviator Erick Erickson of Red State and CNN. Here’s how his reaction starts:
Eric Cantor is always looking for new and imaginative ways to screw conservatives.
Let me stop you right there. Really? Does Erickson really believe that Eric Cantor, he of the 96 percent lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union and equally near-perfect ratings from every other conservative organization, the guy who dreams of challenging John Boehner from the right—he’s “always looking for new and imaginative ways to screw conservatives”?
The rest of Erickson’s analysis of the situation isn’t particularly wrong in its facts, but this is what happens when you’ve spent a long time marinating in the fever swamp. A disagreement over tactics is immediately interpreted as an ideological betrayal. If asked, Cantor would say that he wants to repeal Obamacare as much as anybody, but he knows that shutting down the government next month is not only not going to accomplish that, it will impede everything else conservatives want to do. And he’d be telling the truth. But some people just can’t hear it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, September 10, 2013
“No, Poverty Is Not The Fault Of The Poor”: Remember Folks, The Banks Crashed The Economy
We’re starting to prep for “poverty day” around these parts–it’s next Tues, 9/17–the Census Bureau will release the poverty and household income results for last year. There’s lots of rich data and both CBPP and yours truly will have much to say about the results.
But in prepping for a presentation on this stuff for tomorrow, I made the graph below, just showing the sharp increase in the official poverty rate over the great recession. I’ve noted in many posts the limits of the official measure, most importantly re the dates shown in the figure, how it leaves out many of the safety net benefits that expanded to offset the downturn.
But to explain what struck me in gazing upon this simple figure below, we’re actually better off looking at the incomplete official rate. How can it make any sense to blame the poor themselves, as per Charles Murray, Paul Ryan, along with pretty much the rest of the House R’s caucus, for this increase in poverty in the midst of the worst downturn since the Great Depression?
How is it that those of us trying to argue on behalf of providing the poor with the opportunities they need are so often back on our heels, defending the increase in the SNAP (i.e., food stamp) rolls against those who claim the safety net is a hammock? Did the poor come up with the financial “innovations” that inflated the housing bubble? You know, the one that imploded and took the economy down with it…how about the dot.com bubble? Was that also the dastardly work of the bottom 20%?
Perhaps I’m a little sensitive after this debate earlier today on CNBC. Or maybe it’s the juxtaposition of the finance sector’s recent profitability and the flack the $15/hr fast-food strikers are getting from the economic elites.
But really, it’s time to get on offense here, my friends. Listen, elites: you want less people on food stamps? Fine…then stop screwing up the economy. Then we’ll talk. Until then—until we’re back around full employment, until you stop blowing bubbles, I really don’t want to hear from you about hammocks and the bad decisions of the poor. You want to talk job creation, infrastructure investment, skills training, mobility, opportunity—I’m all ears. Otherwise, quiet down and get to work.
OK…rant over.
By: Jared Bernstein, Salon September 10, 2013
“Coming To A Head Very Soon”: Syria Isn’t The Only Crisis On Congress’ To-Do List
It seems like a long time ago, but as recently as mid-August there was a spirited fight within the Republican Party about the looming budget crisis. Far-right lawmakers wanted to use the threat of a government shutdown to pressure Democrats into defunding the federal health care system — an idea destined for failure — while party leaders balked.
U.S. policy in Syria quickly became the dominant issue on the political landscape, but in the back of our minds, there was an awkward realization: the budget fight had been pushed from the front page, but it hadn’t gone away. Indeed, folks stopped talking about this, but nothing had changed — GOP extremists still demanded a shutdown; the GOP mainstream still hated the idea.
This is coming to a head very soon, and the House Republican leadership has an idea on how to get themselves out of this mess. As Sahil Kapur reports, GOP leaders will make their pitch to the caucus today.
First, the House would pass a continuing resolution to continue funding the government at sequester levels, coupled with an amendment to defund Obamacare. When the package is sent to the Senate, it would be required to vote on the defunding measure first. If the Senate votes it down, and then passes the CR with Obamacare funding, it goes straight to President Barack Obama’s desk.
No confrontation. No attempt to force Democrats to back down. No need to go back to the House for a vote on a clean continuing resolution. But conservatives get a vote.
Just to clarify, there would be only one vote in the House — members would vote for the spending measure, with the anti-Obamacare measure tacked on as a sort of appendage. The Senate, meanwhile, would hold two votes — one to reject the House package, the other to approve the House package without the healthcare add-on.
In effect, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and the rest of the leadership want to put on a little political theater in the hopes of making their far-right colleagues feel better about themselves. Everyone would know in advance that the Senate would reject the effort to defund the Affordable Care Act, but the plan allows for Republicans to cast this vote with the knowledge that they wouldn’t actually have to shut down the government.
It’s a win-win, right? Conservatives get to say they voted to “defund Obamacare”; Democrats would get to keep the government’s lights on; and GOP leaders would get to placate the radicals among them without any real adverse consequences.
At least, that’s the idea. The trouble comes when we take a closer look.
First, there’s a very real possibility that right-wing lawmakers won’t appreciate feeling patronized by their own leaders, and simply won’t accept the plan as a credible solution. Indeed, this isn’t just idle speculation: “Conservative Republicans who caught wind of the plan on Monday told The Hill it was unacceptable.”
These folks don’t want a symbolic, feel-good gesture; these folks actually want to force a budget crisis in the hopes of denying millions of Americans access to affordable health care. Republican leaders are afraid of the fallout of a government shutdown, but rank-and-file Republicans don’t give a darn.
And if House Republicans balk at their own leadership’s ploy, it means Boehner & Co. will find themselves dependent on House Democratic votes to avoid a shutdown. Do you think Dems might want a little something out of this deal to save the Speaker’s butt? Count on it.
Which then leads us to the second problem: under this approach, spending levels are still at sequestration levels. Why is that important? Because the sequester is a painfully stupid and destructive policy that’s hurting the country for no reason.
In August, Boehner said “none of us like” the sequestration policy. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the sequester “is not the best way to go about spending reductions.” House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said the sequester is “unrealistic,” “ill-conceived,” and a policy that “must be brought to an end.”
And yet, the Speaker’s plan is to effectively tell the right, “You’re not getting the shutdown you wanted, but at least you’re getting the destructive sequestration cuts we pretend not to like.”
There’s a real chance that rank-and-file Republicans oppose the idea because they want to shut down the government, while rank-and-file Democrats balk because they hate the sequester.
All of this will have to be dealt with fairly soon, since the government runs out of money on Sept. 30. Once that’s done, we then get to move on to congressional Republicans threatening to crash the global economy on purpose with another debt-ceiling hostage crisis.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 10, 2013
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