“More Of The Same”: Keeping Alive A Flawed And Self-Destructive Strategy, The GOP Fights On Against Obamacare At Its Own Peril
In the wake of the public uproar over the government shutdown, Democratic hopes for recapturing control of the House of Representatives next year have risen sharply. The party needs to pick up 17 seats, and the main question is whether the current furor against the Republicans will remain until the midterm elections of November 2014.
The House Republicans and their tea party allies, unbowed by their failure to defund President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, have signaled that they have just begun to fight. They have seized on his administration’s inexplicable botching of the law’s rollout to breathe new life into their efforts to kill “Obamacare.”
In so doing, however, they may be keeping alive the flawed and self-destructive strategy that took the country to the brink of financial default. Public opinion polls cited a record plunge in Republican popularity during the government shutdown, attesting to how poorly the tea party scheme to strangle Obamacare in its crib played on Main Street.
House Speaker John Boehner, still nursing the political wounds suffered for trying to appease the get-Obama caucus in the House, told the still-faithful on Wednesday, “We’ve got the whole threat of Obamacare continuing to hang over our economy like a wet blanket.”
Boehner may or may not be proved correct in that view. However, his observation suggests he and his caucus have no intention of getting off the track that led them over a cliff in the executive-branch shutdown, a fiasco for which the GOP gets primary blame.
Much will depend on whether the Obama administration can recover from the amateur hour of the law’s initial implementation and begin to deliver health insurance to the millions of Americans without it. The president seems to have taken his head out of the clouds over the technological screw-up by calling in more experts to straighten out the mess.
Contrary to its foes’ insistence that the law is Public Enemy No. 1, the uninsured public showed unexpectedly heavy interest in enrolling, or at least to exploring whether insurance offered under Obamacare would be good for them and their families. The jury is still out, much as it was on Social Security and Medicare when these programs were first enacted amid even louder laments of “socialism” and “socialized medicine.”
In any event, if the administration manages to overcome the law’s growing pains, the Democrats will have at least a chance to gain new political support among beneficiaries. Many of them are of income levels and ethnicities customarily inclined to vote for the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his breakthrough New Deal.
Meanwhile, exertions to keep the flame burning against Obamacare among the House Republicans and their self-appointed leader from the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, could be a blessing in disguise to Democrats pointing to next year’s congressional elections.
Their fund-raising arms are experiencing an usual upswing compared to the Republican cash solicitors. The Democrats will be targeting key House GOP incumbents up for re-election in admittedly strong conservative districts who have benefited from gerrymandering. At the same time, moderate Republicans in Congress are starting to band together to purge the tea party influence in their ranks.
The heavy hit on the Republican brand has been emphatically underscored by the post-shutdown polls. The question is whether voters fed up with the party’s increasingly sharp turn to ultraconservatism, one not seen since the days of Barry Goldwater, will remain turned off at voting time a year from now.
By then, Obamacare may or may not be a principal catalyst for decision-making at the ballot box, pro or con, on midterm election day. The same polls also indicate that Americans still worry much more about the state of the economy and, particularly, high unemployment than about the state of federally subsidized health insurance.
But for now, the House Republicans’ reply to all the criticism of their stand against Obamacare is a promise of more of the same, along with hope that the law will indeed collapse, helping them recover from the severe political damage they have inflicted upon themselves.
By: Jules Witcover, The Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2013
“You Need This Mr. Speaker”: How To Make John Boehner Cave On Immigration
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) generally adheres to the unwritten Republican rule that bars him from allowing votes on bills opposed by a majority of Republicans, even if they would win a majority of the full House.
But he’s caved four times this year, allowing big bills to pass with mainly Democratic support. They include repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans; providing Hurricane Sandy relief; expanding the Violence Against Women act to better cover immigrants, Native Americans, and LGBT survivors of abuse; and this week’s bill raising the debt limit and reopening the federal government.
Many presume the Republican House is a black hole sucking President Obama’s second-term agenda into oblivion. But the list of Boehner’s past retreats offers a glimmer of hope, especially to advocates of immigration reform. Though it has languished in the House, an immigration overhaul passed with bipartisan support in the Senate, and was given a fresh push by Obama in the aftermath of the debt limit deal.
The big mystery that immigration advocates need to figure out: What makes Boehner cave? Is there a common thread? Is there a sequence of buttons you can push that forces Boehner to relent?
Two of this year’s caves happened when Boehner was backed up against hard deadlines: The Jan. 1 fiscal cliff and the Oct. 17 debt limit. Failure to concede meant immediate disaster. Reject the bipartisan compromise on rolling back the Bush tax cuts, get blamed for jacking up taxes on every taxpayer. Reject the Senate’s three-month suspension of the debt limit, get blamed for sparking a global depression. Boehner held out until the absolute last minute both times, but he was not willing to risk blowing the deadline.
A third involved the response to an emergency: Hurricane Sandy. Conservative groups were determined to block disaster relief because — as with other federal disaster responses — the $51 billion legislative aid package did not include offsetting spending cuts. Lacking Republican votes, Boehner briefly withdrew the bill from consideration, unleashing fury from New York and New Jersey Republicans, including Gov. Chris Christie. While there wasn’t a hard deadline to meet, disaster relief was a time-sensitive matter, and the pressure from Christie and his allies was unrelenting. Two weeks after pulling the bill, Boehner put it on the floor, allowing it to pass over the objections of 179 Republicans.
The fourth cave occurred in order to further reform and expand a government program: The Violence Against Women Act. The prior version of the law had been expired for over a year, as conservatives in the House resisted the Senate bill in the run-up to the 2012 election. But after Mitt Romney suffered an 18-point gender gap in his loss to Obama, and after the new Senate passed its version again with a strong bipartisan vote, Boehner was unwilling to resist any longer. Two weeks later, the House passed the Senate bill with 138 Republicans opposed.
Unfortunately for immigration advocates, there is no prospect of widespread pain if reform isn’t passed. There is no immediate emergency, nor threat of economic collapse.
But there is a deadline of sorts: The 2014 midterm elections.
If we’ve learned anything about Boehner this month, it’s that he’s a party man to the bone. He dragged out the shutdown and debt limit drama for weeks, without gaining a single concession, simply so his most unruly and revolutionary-minded members would believe he fought the good fight and stay in the Republican family. What he won is party unity, at least for the time being.
What Boehner lost for his Republicans is national respectability. Republican Party approval hit a record low in both the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll and Gallup poll.
Here’s where immigration advocates have a window of opportunity to appeal to Boehner’s party pragmatism. Their pitch: The best way to put this disaster behind them is for Republicans to score a big political victory. You need this.
A year after the Republican brand was so bloodied that the Republican National Committee had to commission a formal “autopsy,” party approval is the worst it has ever been. You’ve wasted a year. Now is the time to do something that some voters will actually like.
There’s reason to hope he could be swayed. In each of the four cases in which he allowed Democrats to carry the day, he put the short-term political needs of the Republican Party over the ideological demands of right-wing activists.
Boehner will have to do another round of kabuki. He can’t simply swallow the Senate bill in a day. There will have to be a House version that falls short of activists’ expectations, followed by tense House-Senate negotiations. Probably like in the most formulaic of movies, and like the fiscal cliff and debt limit deals, there will have to be an “all-is-lost moment” right before we get to the glorious ending. Boehner will need to given the room to do all this again.
But he won’t do it without a push. A real good push.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, October 18, 2013
“Looking Back On The Carnage”: How Republicans Won Nothing And Lost Everything In The Government Shutdown
Two and a half weeks into the government shutdown, and with a disastrous debt default mere hours away, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Wednesday finally reached for his one escape lever.
The House on Wednesday is expected to vote on a bipartisan Senate-brokered bill to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling. “We fought the good fight, we just didn’t win,” Boehner said in announcing he would bring the bill for a vote, which should pass with support from Democrats and moderate Republicans.
Though Republicans originally demanded a steep ransom, the inexorable path to Wednesday’s deal wrought havoc on the party brand while delivering them absolutely none of the gleaming prizes they wanted. And plenty in the party told them this is exactly how it would end.
First, the terms of the deal are quite favorable to Democrats. The one concession Republicans won in the deal? The implementation of an income verification system in ObamaCare for people seeking federal subsidies.
Except it’s hardly a concession. The health care law originally had similar verification requirements, though the Obama administration in July delayed them to 2015. In short, the GOP will get a minor tweak to the law that was in there in the first place.
At the same time, the deal will force the House and Senate to convene a budget committee to hammer out a new spending agreement. Democrats have been repeatedly asking for just such a committee since at least April.
The GOP’s failure to win any concessions is all the more painful when you consider that a different strategy — to be blunt, a sane strategy — could have put real pressure on Democrats.
Before the shutdown, Republicans had a chance to vote for a clean continuing resolution to fund the government through November 15 at the reduced levels mandated by the 2011 debt-limit deal. Instead, the House balked, repeatedly sending the Senate untenable bills attacking ObamaCare.
Had Republicans approved the original “clean” offer, they would have had a second crack at addressing spending within two months, and an untarnished image as they tried to wield the debt ceiling as leverage. By putting all their chips in an utterly futile plan to defund ObamaCare, they squandered both.
While Republicans gained virtually nothing, they will be bleeding from this battle for a long time to come.
Republicans entered 2013 clamoring for a “rebrand” after losing the 2012 election. The shutdown has set that effort back so far that they might as well have rewound the clock to the eve of Mitt Romney’s defeat.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey midway through the shutdown found that only one-quarter of Americans had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, an all-time low. Other polls showed Democrats opening up wide leads in generic balloting, and suggested they could retake the House in 2014.
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) told the Washington Post that the GOP’s huge slide in polls had allowed the party to recruit a handful of stronger candidates who otherwise would have stayed out.
“In a number of districts we had top-tier, all-star potential candidates who several months ago didn’t see a path to victory,” he said. “They reopened the doors.”
Though Democrats’ big polling advantage will likely fade to some degree come 2014, the party is, for now, in good standing heading into the midterm elections, particularly in the Senate, where candidates have to appeal to a wider ideological swathe of voters.
The shutdown fallout could also have an impact next month in Virginia. With the shutdown dragging on, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe pried open a wide lead over Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. McAuliffe aired an ad directly linking his opponent to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the shutdown’s architect. And even Cuccinnelli conceded the shutdown was negatively impacting his campaign.
Meanwhile, Cruz has also exposed a deep rift in the congressional GOP between the establishment and the Tea Party. Though conservative members say they won’t oust Boehner from his leadership post for caving on the debt ceiling, the House caucus has been left more fractured than ever, with outside conservative groups blasting GOP members unwilling to tank the economy as the “surrender caucus.”
That’s not even taking into account the huge gulf opening up between House Republicans and Senate Republicans.
Such divisions could spawn fractious primary fights next year. Business groups, concerned with their waning influence with the GOP, have already said they may help finance primary campaigns against Tea Party lawmakers.
Even Republicans, looking back on the carnage that was the shutdown, have begun to admit it was a costly mistake.
“We took some bread crumbs and left an entire meal on the table,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. “This has been a very bad two weeks for the Republican Party.”
By: Jon Terbush, The Week, October 16, 2013
“Standing Wrong”: Old Conservatives Can’t Learn New Tricks
If President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats wanted to maximize the political advantage they’re getting from the shutdown/default crisis, they’d agree to at least one part of the short-term deals Republicans have offered, raising the debt ceiling for only six weeks at a time. Then we’d have one default crisis after another, and the standing of the GOP would keep on its downward trajectory until—let’s just pick a date at random here—November 2014. But Republicans won’t do that; they’re now insisting (and good for them) that the deal has to extend at least a year into the future so we don’t have to keep going through this. If they get that deal, though, the issue will fade and voters could start to forget how reckless Republicans have been.
They could forget, but I’m guessing Republicans won’t let them. It isn’t as though the ultimate conclusion of this crisis is going to result in a chastened GOP, ready to be reasonable and assure the public it can govern responsibly. The Republicans are falling fast, but their problems could be just beginning.
That’s because the people driving this crisis are still going to be the loudest voices in the party even after it ends. They won’t get what they want, and when that happens they’ll make sure everyone knows that they were right all along. It’s critical to understand that for them, tactics and ideology are inseparable. You don’t compromise with Democrats because that means you’ve taken a position that is impure, contaminated with the stench of liberalism. Even a drop is too much, just as you wouldn’t put just a little rancid meat in your stew. And regardless of the substance of any issue, you don’t compromise because compromise is by definition betrayal, and compromise is failure. Taking the maximal position on everything, they sincerely believe, doesn’t just produce the best policy, it produces political victory.
Imagine it’s a few months from now, and a Republican representative running for re-election gets asked by a reporter whether he thinks the shutdown/default crisis of 2013 was a good idea and whether his party ought to use the same tactic again to try to achieve its policy goals. If he says no, there are people just waiting to charge him with being a traitor to the cause of conservatism, with the inevitable primary challenge from the right to follow. If he says yes, he’s just made his general-election opponent’s first television ad.
The Republican Party is in a bad place right now, as a series of polls released last week showed. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed the party with a 24 percent favorability rating, an all-time low in that poll. Gallup has it at 28 percent, a record low in that poll as well. A poll from Democratic firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner has the party at 26 percent. Among independent voters, the numbers are even worse.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. But in an echo of the “unskewed polls” nonsense from the 2012 election, Senator Ted Cruz has been telling conservatives to ignore it. He assures them that his own private polls show that Republicans are winning and will triumph if they keep “standing strong.” This is just what conservatives want to hear, which is why many of them are likely to believe it. So if and when a deal is struck, almost regardless of what it contains, they’ll still be convinced that complete victory could have been theirs if only their leaders had held out a little longer. You might have thought that unlike previous Tea Party leaders like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, the Princeton- and Harvard-educated Cruz is no dummy. Yet tactically, he turns out to be just as foolhardy as the rest of them. He told Republicans to jump off a cliff, and they did.
To them, the tactical formula will always be the same. Was shutting down the government a disaster? It would have gone better if we had only been firmer in our demands and held out longer! Did a Democrat win the White House? We would have won if we had nominated a “true” conservative! Did your Senate candidate lose the general election? We’ll win next time if only we nominate someone more conservative!
They can’t learn from their mistakes if they don’t understand them. It isn’t hard to imagine that these activists and voters, who are so incredibly hard to satisfy, could produce a never-ending churn within the party. Believe it or not, the current Republican caucus is even more conservative than the one that swept into Washington in 2010. With a sufficient number of conservative states and congressional districts in no danger of falling to Democrats, the next election inevitably will see a new group of primary winners who are hailed as heroes, then eventually branded as traitors, to be replaced by a new cadre of even more doctrinaire right-wingers. Just look at what happened to Marco Rubio, who swept into the Senate as a Tea Party star but was cast out once he tried to achieve immigration reform. The personnel will keep changing even as the basic dynamic—a GOP establishment cowering in fear of newly minted members of Congress delighting in blowing up the system—remains the same.
A party can evolve in only one of two ways: It changes its people, or its people change. The first doesn’t seem likely. It’s hard to imagine a wave of Republican moderates winning over Tea Party candidates in primary elections. The second doesn’t seem likely either, since the people driving the Republican Party are the truest of true believers.
Anything can happen, of course. The Democratic Party turned to the right with the nomination of Bill Clinton in 1992 and won two presidential elections. On the other hand, Democrats also won control of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008 while being firmly opposed to an unpopular Republican president; no trimming of ideological sails was necessary. But those Democrats were capable of rationally assessing their political prospects. It’s possible to be ideologically extreme and still be careful about the fights you pick. Today’s conservative Republicans are both ideologically and tactically extremist; indeed, they see them as one and the same.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 15, 2013
“Letting The Debt Ceiling Cave In On Seniors”: Republican Actions Could Well Spell Disaster For Them In The Mid-Term Elections
Democrats used to be able to count on the senior citizen vote. After all, it was FDR who created Social Security and Lyndon Johnson who created Medicare. But, hello, that was about 75 years ago and 50 years ago, respectively! Times do change.
As I like to scream at my Democratic friends, the post-65 generation were Ronald Reagan voters and had zip to do with FDR and LBJ.
As most now know, the only age group to support John McCain was the 65+ crowd and Romney beat Obama handily among seniors in 2012. Romney got 56 percent of the senior vote and McCain go 53 percent to Obama’s 45 percent in 2008.
The 45-64 group was very close in 2008 and Romney narrowly won it in 2012. And this was when Obama was the first Democrat since Carter in 1976 to receive more than 50 percent of the vote.
So what is my point?
Republicans have taken serious hits for their efforts to shut down the government and their possible refusal to raise the debt limit. In my blog post last week, I quoted Ronald Reagan on the debt limit. He got the message; he never drank the Kool Aid on that one.
But here is a very serious problem for the Republicans. If they really go through with their draconian plan, sure it hurts everyone, hurts the economy big time. But who does it especially freak out? You got it, senior citizens.
Why? The retired and those who live on fixed incomes and who have to draw on their retirement accounts get hammered. The last time the Republicans even threatened to hold the debt limit hostage in 2011, the stock market went down 17 percent.
Let me repeat that: After the debacle of 2008 and the economic meltdown, the stock market took a 17 percent hit for one reason and one reason only – Republicans doing what Reagan had warned against. Plus, the U.S. credit was downgraded, which was unprecedented.
Seniors can’t afford to have that happen again and they know it – their 401(k)’s can not become 201(k)’s. The crash in 2008 and the double digit hit in 2011, if repeated, will affect those who are retired and those planning on retirement, and that is about 50 percent of the voters. If Republicans lose substantial numbers of those who are over 50 years old, it won’t just impact their chances of winning the presidency, with the changing demographics of race and ethnicity, but it could well spell disaster for them in the mid-term elections as well. Republicans could lose the House and not make the gains they want in the Senate.
Republicans may think they are going strong with their base of tea party radicals bashing the Affordable Care Act, but nothing impacts voters as much as watching their monthly savings and retirement statements tank.
Seniors and upcoming retirees watch their stocks and bonds and IRAs and 401(k)’s like a hawk and if Republicans get the blame for big losses, trust me, they will feel it big time at the polls next November and for many Novembers to come.
Shutting down the government and defaulting on our obligations are not just bad policy, but they are really bad politics for the Republicans. They simply cannot afford to watch their advantage with the 50+ age group evaporate.
The real question is will the Republicans come to their senses? It is not a sure bet.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
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