“There’s Only One Answer”: John Boehner To President Obama, Can I Please Take You Hostage?
House Republicans have spent weeks fending off right-wing demands that they shut down the government unless President Obama agrees to destroy his own health-care reform. They’re currently trying to wriggle out of this demand by promising instead to use the debt ceiling to force Obama to destroy his health-care reform, which is an even more dangerous threat. So how do House Republicans plan to wriggle out of that promise? By getting President Obama to help them. John Boehner is pleading with Obama to combine negotiations over the debt ceiling and the budget. There’s really only one answer Obama can give here: Boehner can go fuck himself.
Boehner is desperately trying to combine two separate issues: negotiating over budget policy and negotiating over whether Congress should trigger a default on the national debt. Why negotiate the two together? Boehner argues:
“I reminded them that for decades, the White House, the Congress, have used the debt limit to find bipartisan solutions on the deficit and the debt. The types of changes were signed into law by Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton and President Obama himself two years ago. So President Obama is going to have to deal with this, as well. It’s really no different. You can’t talk about increasing the debt limit unless you’re willing to make changes and reforms that begin to solve the spending problem that Washington has.”
So we have two arguments here. The first one is that there have been times in the past when Congress has lifted the debt ceiling and also passed changes to fiscal policy. That is true. It can be convenient to wrap up the automatic step of lifting the debt ceiling into bills that change levels of taxes and spending, because a separate vote is unnecessary in the first place.
But Boehner isn’t proposing to attach a perfunctory debt-ceiling hike to “bipartisan solutions,” as has happened in the past. He is proposing that the opposition party extract unacceptable conditions as the price of lifting the debt ceiling. That is an unprecedented demand. Under the Bush presidency, Democrats objected that tax cuts had created un unsustainable fiscal position for the government, but it never even occurred to them to threaten to trigger a debt default to force Bush to repeal his tax cuts. Before 2011, the debt ceiling was an occasion for posturing by the out-party and was sometimes raised in conjunction with mutually agreeable policy changes, but the opposition never used the threat of default as a hostage.
Boehner’s correct that the hostage-taking negotiation he wants to hold again did occur once before in 2011. But that was a white-knuckle experience that very nearly led to default, has put in place an extremely stupid policy, and amounted to a gigantic blunder by Obama that he is rightly determined not to repeat. Enshrining the precedent that the opposition party can use the debt ceiling to extract otherwise unacceptable conditions would create a permanent cycle of crisis, where every fiscal negotiation carries a systemic risk. Democrats would be much better off letting Republicans default on the debt right now than submitting to a new normal whereby they get jacked up for concessions over and over until eventually there’s a default anyway. That is why Obama can’t go along with Boehner’s innocuous-sounding request to combine debt-ceiling negotiations with fiscal-policy negotiations.
Boehner’s last sentence gives the game away. He begins by asserting that “you can’t” lift the debt ceiling without making a separate budget deal. But of course you can. Congress does it all the time. Whether or not you decide to change budget policy is unrelated to whether or not you should trigger an unnecessary debt default.
Boehner ends the sentence by demanding that Obama “solve the spending problem.” That talking point is the Republican way of summarizing the party’s stance on fiscal issues, which holds that the deficit is a huge existential crisis but must be reduced entirely through spending cuts, without reducing any tax deductions.
The two parties don’t agree on that. Obama thinks the long-term deficit should be reduced through a mix of reduced tax deductions and lower spending. Boehner clearly is personally willing to compromise in some way on this but just as clearly cannot get House Republicans to agree to compromise. Not only is Boehner unable to make a long-term budget deal that his members can accept, but he also can’t even figure out how to keep the government open, as The Wall Street Journal reports in a paywalled news story:
In a bipartisan meeting Thursday among House and Senate leaders, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) asked Mr. Boehner what other concession could be made to satisfy conservatives, other than defunding the health-care law. The speaker said there was none, according to Republican and Democratic aides briefed on the meeting.
“Boehner said nothing will appease them but defunding Obamacare,” one aide said.
The debt ceiling is Boehner’s way around this. He wants to combine the debt ceiling with negotiations over the federal budget as a way of luring Obama into a position where Boehner can negotiate budget policy without making policy concessions.
But why on Earth would Obama agree to do that? The fact that Boehner is phrasing this as a request reveals the complete absurdity of the situation. Mr. President, would you mind dropping off your bus so I can strap a bomb to it and then make demands? Uh, no, let’s not do that.
By: Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, September 14, 2013
“The Beginning Of An Exceptional Friendship”: The American People’s Reply To Comrade Vladimir Putin
Dear President Putin,
Thank you so much for your letter to the American people! I am an American person, and when I learned on Thursday from the official Russian news agency, the New York Times, that you wanted “to speak directly to the American people,” I thought: How sweet!
I know I speak for many American people when I congratulate you on your English. It was flawless, with none of those dropped articles that plague so many of your countrymen. Please don’t be offended, but I have to ask: Did Edward Snowden help you with your letter?
It’s not just your English that impressed me. Your geopolitical points were smart — da bomb, as we American people like to say. (This is not the kind that would be used in Syria.) You were so thoughtful to bring up those memories of our days long ago as allies, and your references to “mutual trust” and “shared success” make me think that maybe we could be friends again. Your favorable mentions of Israel and the Pope remind me that we have so much in common.
Although some of us think it’s a good idea to have the U.S. military strike Syria, most of the American people agree with you that it would be a bad idea. (President Obama, you may have heard, is on both sides of the issue.) Your arguments against attack were creative, which is why it’s such a shame that, at the very end, you kind of stepped in it. When you told us that Americans are not “exceptional” — well, that hurts all of us American people.
I was surprised by this lapse because I think you really “get” Americans. When we saw photos of you shirtless in Siberia, you brought to mind one of our most celebrated American lawmakers, Anthony Weiner. When we watched you navigate around Russian laws to stay in power, you brought to mind another quintessentially American figure, Rod Blagojevich. The Harley-Davidson, the black clothing, the mistress half your age — you are practically American yourself.
This makes your crack about “American exceptionalism” all the more perplexing. “It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional,” you wrote. “We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.” (Thank you for the considerate mention of God, by the way; American people respond well to that.) But I’m guessing what went wrong here is your translators let you down when they defined exceptional for you as luchshyy (better) rather than razlichnyy (different).
Americans do not believe they are better than other peoples. If you doubt this, you need only look at Congress. If we really thought we were superior, is there any chance we would choose them to represent us? There are exceptions — we think we are better than Canadians, for example, but please don’t tell them, because they’re awfully nice — but generally we accept that all countries have their strengths. We know, for example, that Russians are better than us at producing delicacies such as caviar and dioxin. (Kidding!)
When we say we are exceptional, what we really are saying is we are different. With few exceptions, we are all strangers to our land; our families came from all corners of the world and brought all of its colors, religions and languages. We believe this mixing, together with our free society, has produced generations of creative energy and ingenuity, from the Declaration of Independence to Facebook, from Thomas Jefferson to Miley Cyrus. There is no other country quite like that.
Americans aren’t better than others, but our American experience is unique — exceptional — and it has created the world’s most powerful economy and military, which, more often than not, has been used for good in the world. When you question American exceptionalism, you will find little support from any of us, liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, doves or hawks.
I hope you won’t take this criticism badly, because I offer it in friendship. I was in Slovenia that day in 2001 when President George W. Bush looked into your soul and liked what he saw. And had your ancestors not chased my ancestors out of Eastern Europe, I would not be here today, participating in the American experiment.
Anyway, it was such a pleasure to get your letter. Please write again soon. I think this is the beginning of an exceptional friendship.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 12, 2013
“Genuine Democracy, What A Concept”: President Obama Gives Democracy A Chance In Syrian Crisis
Regarding the Obama administration and Syria, preliminary thoughts about a rapidly evolving situation:
It’s not necessary to think that President Obama has performed brilliantly throughout this debacle to suspect that next time around it’s going to be much harder for an action-hero president to stampede the country into war. As a corollary, hawkish politicians will find it more difficult to intimidate skeptics by questioning their patriotism.
On the eve of George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq 10 years ago, this column observed that “regime change” wasn’t a conservative policy, but “utopian folly and a prescription for endless war.” It suggested that over the longer term, Bush’s neoconservative advisors “may have misjudged the American people as well. Mostly, Americans wish to be left alone; they have no heart for endless wars of empire.”
Maybe I was right about that.
Ten years ago, fools were pouring Bordeaux wine into gutters and ordering “freedom fries” because the French urged the Bush administration to let U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq do their work. Ten years ago, American agents were kidnapping suspected terrorists and delivering them into Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s dungeons to be tortured. Ten years ago, “diplomacy” was a dirty word, a synonym for cowardice.
Ten years ago, President Bush, having promised to put his case against Saddam Hussein to a vote in the UN Security Council, reneged on that vow, ordered weapons inspectors busily finding no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to clear out, and commenced his “shock and awe” bombing campaign. The “embedded” American news media treated the subsequent invasion like the world’s largest Boy Scout Jamboree.
These days, diplomacy gets more respect. Most Americans hope for the success of a French-sponsored Security Council resolution transferring custody of Syria’s arsenal of chemical weapons to international monitors. The numbers in a recent New York Times poll reflect a massive change in public opinion. Six out of ten Americans oppose bombing Syria. Sixty-two percent say the United States should avoid taking the lead role in solving foreign conflicts.
Ten years ago, a strong plurality favored U.S. activism. Asked last week if America should use force to turn dictatorships into democracies, people said no by a remarkable 72 to 15 percent. “A war-weary public that can turn an eye from children being gassed—or express doubt that it happened—is another poisoned fruit of the Bush years,” comments New York Times columnist Tim Egan.
Actually, the great majority, 82 percent in a recent CNN poll, believe that the Assad regime launched nerve gas weapons against its own people. But they’ve also witnessed reports of stupefying barbarities by his enemies, and bitter experience has left people wary of believing that American bombs can make things better. They fear that cruise missiles would only be the catalyst for an interminable, slow-motion grind like the Afghan war, which nearly everybody supported at the start.
This reluctance is also why—assuming the Russian, French, and Syrian agreement holds up—that political damage to President Obama for his hesitant, crawfishing approach to the Syrian crisis is apt to prove more limited than Beltway drama critics think. Obama’s ambivalence is widely shared.
As Michael Tomasky points out, Republican hypocrisy has been shocking even by GOP standards. During the 2012 campaign, Mitt Romney took a hawkish line, proposing to arm Syrian rebels and to conduct covert operations against the Assad regime. As recently as April, putative 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio chided Obama’s passivity.
“It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal,” he insisted. Regime change!
Last week Rubio voted no in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
If President Obama’s for it, GOP opportunists are against it. The end.
That said, the irony of Russian president Vladimir Putin appearing to rescue Obama from a political trap built by George W. Bush and baited by his own bluffing rhetoric about “red lines” would be almost disabling but for the horrors of nerve gas.
A deadly anachronism, gas weapons don’t work when it rains or the wind blows. They’re essentially useless in modern combat. Their appeal to a tyrant like Bashar al Assad is as an indiscriminate means of genocide, exterminating defenseless civilians like insects. Not to mention farm animals, pets, birds—basically anything with a nervous system.
Historical memories of the horrors of gas barrages during WWI are particularly strong among the Russians and French. On this subject, there really is an international community.
This too: however indecisive President Obama appeared to Beltway cognoscenti, he treated the American people like adults and honored the Constitution.
“I put [the question] before Congress,” Obama explained “because I could not honestly claim that the threat posed by Assad’s use of chemical weapons on innocent civilians and women and children posed an imminent, direct threat to the United States.”
Genuine democracy—what a concept.
By: Gene Lyons, the National Memo, September 11, 2013
“Our New Isolationism”: Sometimes, You Have To Put Some Spine In Your Diplomacy
The United States has just spent thousands of American lives in a distant land for a victory that now seems hollow, if indeed it can be called a victory at all. Our own country, moreover, is emerging from a recession, dispirited and self-absorbed, worried about the fragility of the recovery and the state of our democracy. Idealism is in short supply. So, as another far-off war worsens, Americans are loath to take sides, even against a merciless dictator, even to the extent of sending weapons. The voices opposed to getting involved range from the pacifist left to the populist right. The president, fearful that foreign conflict will undermine his domestic agenda, vacillates.
This is the United States in 1940. Sound a little familiar?
I’ve been reading two engrossing new histories of that time — “Those Angry Days” by Lynne Olson and “1940” by Susan Dunn — both focused on the ferocious and now largely forgotten resistance Franklin D. Roosevelt had to navigate in order to stand with our allies against Hitler.
Of course, 2013 is not 1940. The Middle East is not Europe. President Obama is not F.D.R. But America is again in a deep isolationist mood. As a wary Congress returns from its summer recess to debate Syria, as President Obama prepares to address the nation, it is instructive to throw the two periods up on the screen and examine them for lessons. How does a president sell foreign engagement to a public that wants none of it?
The cliché of the season is that Americans are war-weary from our long slogs in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is true, but not the whole story. To be sure, nothing has done more to discredit an activist foreign policy than the blind missionary arrogance of the Bush administration. But the isolationist temper is not just about the legacy of Iraq. Economic troubles and political dysfunction have contributed to a loss of confidence. Add to the mix a surge of xenophobia, with its calls for higher fences and big-brotherly attention to the danger within. (These anxieties also helped give rise to the expanding surveillance state, just as nativism in that earlier period gave license to J. Edgar Hoover’s obsessive eavesdropping.)
Isolationism is strong in the Tea Party, where mistrust of executive power is profound and where being able to see Russia from your front yard counts as mastery of international affairs. But sophisticated readers of The New York Times are not immune, or so it seems from the comments that arrive when I write in defense of a more assertive foreign policy. (In recent columns I’ve advocated calibrated intervention to shift the balance in Syria’s civil war and using foreign aid to encourage democracy in Egypt.) Not our problems, many readers tell me.
Isolationism is not just an aversion to war, which is an altogether healthy instinct. It is a broader reluctance to engage, to assert responsibility, to commit. Isolationism tends to be pessimistic (we will get it wrong, we will make it worse) and amoral (it is none of our business unless it threatens us directly) and inward-looking (foreign aid is a waste of money better spent at home).
“We are not the world’s policeman, nor its judge and jury,” proclaimed Representative Alan Grayson, a progressive Florida Democrat, reciting favorite isolationist excuses for doing nothing. “Our own needs in America are great, and they come first.”
At the margins, at least, isolationists suspect that our foreign policy is being manipulated by outside forces. In 1940, as Olson’s book documents, anti-interventionists deplored the cunning British “plutocrats” and “imperialists,” who had lured us into the blood bath of World War I and now wanted to goad us into another one. In 2013, it is supposedly the Israelis duping us into fighting their battles.
Many pro-Israel and Jewish groups last week endorsed an attack on Syria, but only after agonizing about a likely backlash. And, sure enough, the first comment posted on The Washington Post version of this story was, “So how many Americans will die for Israel this time around?” This is tame stuff compared with 1940, when isolationism was shot through with shockingly overt anti-Semitism, not least in the rhetoric of the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Both Lynne Olson and Susan Dunn, in interviews, were wary of pushing the analogy too far. The Middle East, they point out, is far murkier, far less familiar.
“In 1940 everything was black and white — there was no gray,” Dunn told me. “On one side, Adolf Hitler and ruthless, barbaric warfare; on the other side, democracy, humanism, morality and world civilization itself.” Yes, at least so it seems in hindsight, but the choice was not so clear in 1940. Both books offer copious examples of serious, thoughtful people who had real doubts about whether Hitler was a threat worth fighting: cabinet members and generals, newspaper publishers and business leaders. At Yale, Dunn reports, an antiwar student movement that included such future luminaries as Gerald Ford, Potter Stewart and Sargent Shriver drafted a petition demanding “that Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat.”
Olson told me she was startled to hear Secretary of State John Kerry inveighing against “armchair isolationism” last week in his testimony on Syria. “I think to be skeptical now does not mean you’re an isolationist,” said Olson, who is herself skeptical about taking sides in Syria. “It’s become a dirty word.”
Fair enough. But can we dial down the fears and defeatist slogans of knee-jerk isolationism and conduct a serious discussion of our interests and our alternatives in Syria and the tumultuous region around it?
The event that ultimately swept the earlier isolationists off the board was, of course, Pearl Harbor. But even before the Japanese attack the public reluctance was gradually giving way, allowing the delivery of destroyers to the British, the Lend-Lease program, a precautionary weapons buildup and the beginning of military conscription.
One factor that moved public opinion toward intervention was the brazenness of Hitler’s menace; Americans who had never given a thought to the Sudetenland were stunned to see Nazis parading into Paris.
Another was a robust debate across the country that ultimately transcended partisanship and prejudice.
Most historians and popular memory credit Roosevelt’s leadership for the country’s change of heart, but Olson points out that for much of that period Roosevelt was — to borrow a contemporary phrase — leading from behind. He campaigned in 1936 on a pledge to “shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars” and to seek to “isolate ourselves completely from war.” It was a vow he renewed repeatedly as Hitler conquered country after country: there would be no American boots on the ground.
Olson argues that while Roosevelt resolved early to send aid to Britain, it is not at all clear that he would have taken America into the war if it had not been forced upon him by Pearl Harbor. But by December 1941, she writes, “the American people had been thoroughly educated about the pros and cons of their country’s entry into the conflict and were far less opposed to the idea of going to war than conventional wisdom has it.”
“Obviously we got into it because of Pearl Harbor, but that debate made a crucial difference,” Olson told me. “And I think that is what’s called for now.”
Congress in recent years has not won much respect as an arena of policy debate, but it was heartening last week to hear leaders of both parties moving a little beyond petty obstructionism and bitter partisanship and inviting a serious discussion.
I hope that Congress can elicit from the president this week a clear and candid statement of America’s vital interests in Syria, and a strategy that looks beyond the moment. I hope the president can persuade Congress that the U.S. still has an important role to play in the world, and that sometimes you have to put some spine in your diplomacy. And I hope Americans will listen with an open mind.
By: Bill Keller, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, September 8, 2013
“Polarized Politics”: Syria Puts Our System On Trial
It was only a matter of time before our polarized politics threatened to destroy a president’s authority and call into question our country’s ability to act in the world. Will Congress let that happen?
To raise this question is not to denigrate those, left and right, who deeply believe that the United States should temper its international military role. Nor is it to claim that President Obama’s proposed strikes on Syria in response to Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons constitute some sort of “slam dunk” policy that should win automatic assent. But a bitter past hangs over this debate and could overwhelm a discussion of what’s actually at stake.
The wretched experience of Iraq is leading many Democrats to see Obama’s intervention in Syria as little different from what came before. Never mind that the evidence of Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people is far clearer than the evidence was about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or that Obama has been so reluctant to take military action up to now. He faces a peculiar problem: While hawks criticize Obama for not being willing to act boldly enough against Assad, doves criticize him for being too willing to risk a wider war. Members of Obama’s party have to understand the risks of forcing him to walk away from a red line that he drew for good reason.
At the same time, Democrats will never forget how their patriotism and fortitude were questioned when they challenged President George W. Bush on Iraq and other post-9/11 policies. Yes, Bush did sign a fundraising letter before the 2006 midterm election that spoke of Democrats “who will wave the white flag of surrender in the global war on terror and deny the tools needed to achieve victory.” At a campaign event that year, he said of Democrats: “It sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is to wait until we’re attacked again.”
I bring this up only to remind Republicans opposing Obama on Syria — and I’m not talking about the consistent anti-interventionist libertarians — that some in their party are making arguments now that they condemned Democrats for making not very long ago. Can we ever break this cycle of recrimination?
Obama bears responsibility here, too. Precisely because he had been so unwilling to intervene in Syria, he has handed opponents of his policy some of the very arguments they are using against him. Until Obama decided that the chemical attacks required a strong response, he was wary of getting involved, because the United States has reason to fear victory by either side in Syria. His old view may have been reasonable, but it can easily be invoked to undercut his current one.
The question now is whether Congress really wants to incapacitate the president for three long years. My hunch is that it doesn’t. This is why Republicans such as John Boehner, Eric Cantor and John McCain and Democrats such as Nancy Pelosi, Chris Van Hollen and Gerry Connolly all find themselves battling to give Obama the authority to act. The inconsistency of some Republicans shouldn’t blind us to the fact that others in the GOP are taking courageous risks to avoid paralyzing the president.
They will not prevail, however, unless Obama makes an unabashedly moral case on Tuesday explaining why things are different than they were a few months ago while laying out a practical strategy beyond the strikes. He must do something very difficult: show that his approach could succeed, over time, in replacing Assad with a new government without enmeshing the United States in a land conflict involving troops on the ground.
The administration’s view is that only a negotiated settlement will produce anything like a decent and stable outcome in Syria — and that only forceful U.S. action now will put the United States in a position to get the parties to the table. It’s not tidy or an easy sell, but it’s a plausible path consistent with what the United States can and can’t do.
If Obama wins this fight, as he must, he should then set about restoring some consensus about the United States’ world role. He has to show how a priority on “nation-building at home” can be squared with our international responsibilities. The seriousness of this crisis should also push Republicans away from reflexive anti-Obamaism, Rush Limbaugh-style talk-show madness, extreme anti-government rhetoric and threats to shut Washington down.
If we want to avoid becoming a second-class nation, we have to stop behaving like one.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 8, 2013
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