“The Devil’s Christmas Tree”: It’s Still A Long Ride On The Crazy Train
Expect to hear a great deal of cheerleading for a government shutdown from unusual quarters today. That’s because House Speaker John Boehner is now beginning to implement his earlier and much-puzzling-to-rational-people strategy of shifting Republican hostage-taking from efforts to keep the federal government operating to a debt limit bill due at the very latest by October 17.
Why is he doing this? You have to assume that Boehner is mesmerized by polling showing a debt default is more popular than a government shutdown–polling that is, of course, based on broad public incomprehension of the implications of a debt default.
Because (a) the president’s position after the dispiriting debt limit impasse of 2011 is that he will not negotiate over the debt limit, and because (b) congressional Democrats support that position, often with implicit or explicit “Hell No!” amendment, Boehner needs a debt limit bill that can pass the House with Republican votes only. And so his bill, as it is developing, is a right-wing Devil’s Christmas Tree, or to use a more secular metaphor, an evil child’s wish list for Santa. The generally very calm and very articulate Ezra Klein is almost at a loss for words in describing it:
The House GOP’s debt limit bill — obtained by the National Review — isn’t a serious governing document. It’s not even a plausible opening bid. It’s a cry for help.
In return for a one-year suspension of the debt ceiling, House Republicans are demanding a yearlong delay of Obamacare, Rep. Paul Ryan’s tax reform plan, the Keystone XL pipeline, more offshore oil drilling, more drilling on federally protected lands, rewriting of ash coal regulations, a suspension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions, more power over the regulatory process in general, reform of the federal employee retirement program, an overhaul of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, more power over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s budget, repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, more means-testing in Medicare, repeal of the Public Health trust fund, and more.
[T]his is really the [Republican] conference teaching Boehner a lesson. He had so little support to raise the debt ceiling at all — and so little trust from his members that he had a strategy to maximize their leverage — that this is the bill he had to present. At this point, Boehner either can’t stop them, or he’s too exhausted to try.
I suppose the other interpretation is that Boehner intends to eventually patch together something less psychotropic that can be passed with mostly Democratic votes (he has, after all, publicly and repeatedly said he won’t let the country default on its debts), and/or that business community pressure will be brought in like a deus ex machina to pull Republicans back from the brink. In that case, I suppose, there’s no reason to say no to any House Republican demand (though the leadership did, it is being reported, turn down including a late-term abortion ban similar to the one the House passed earlier this year).
It’s also possible, theoretically, that Boehner and company wanted to shock Democrats and the MSM with the consequences of his party’s impending defeat on appropriations in order to force some sort of compromise on measures designed to avoid a shutdown. But at this point, Republicans will find it increasingly difficult to accept any deal that doesn’t disable Obamacare, now that Boehner has embraced the idea that a one-year implementation delay is a “reasonable” alternative to “defunding” it. And that’s a non-starter for Democrats, even if they do prove willing to directly or indirectly violate constant pledges not to consider a debt limit bill with conditions.
So that gets back to why a lot of folk will soon be begging John Boehner to put aside his little do-it-yourself atomic bomb assembly kit and go back to threatening the conventional warfare of a government shutdown. TNR’s Noam Scheiber is already there:
[O]ne of two things is probably going to happen if we avoid a shutdown: Either John Boehner is going to turn around and appease irate conservatives by insisting on delaying Obamacare in exchange for raising the debt limit, thereby sending the government into default (since Obama isn’t negotiating). Or he’s going to back down and allow the debt ceiling to be raised with a minority of House Republicans and a majority of House Democrats, thereby further infuriating conservatives and almost certainly costing himself his job. (Recall that conservatives got more than halfway to the number of defections they needed to oust Boehner back in January, after he’d merely allowed a vote on a small tax increase when a much bigger one was kicking in automatically.) That is, either Boehner gets it or the global economy gets it, both of which Boehner would like to avoid even more than he’d like to avoid a shutdown.
If Boehner resigns himself to a shutdown, on the other hand, suddenly the future looks manageable. After a few days of punishing political abuse, Boehner will be able to appear before his caucus, shrug his shoulders in his distinctive Boehnerian way, and bleat that he executed the strategy conservatives demanded, but that the country is overwhelmingly opposed to it, as are most Senate Republicans and almost every semi-legitimate right-wing pundit and media outlet
That’s just great. I suppose begging John Boehner to be somewhat less destructive is a preferable alternative to caving to his demands. But it still involves a long ride on the crazy train in order to reach the engineer with a request to please turn around.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, September 26, 2013
“Purposely Stripped Of Context”: When Obamacare Polls Are Accurate Without Being True
As Republicans form a circular firing squad, nervous Democrats continue to believe that this is a depressing time when the future of Obamacare is on the line.
There is some reason for worry: the Koch brothers are spending millions trying to get young people to “opt out” of seeking health insurance at the state level, which could wreck the risk pool essential for the program’s success.
But young people, who as a group support President Obama, aren’t likely to buy Koch lies. And Hollywood progressives are about to unveil a strange-bedfellows alliance with insurance companies that will spend tens of millions of dollars telling Americans the truth — that they are better off with Obamacare being fully implemented.
Meanwhile, the chances of the Affordable Care Act being defunded in Washington are between zero and none, as many Republicans are now acknowledging. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) doesn’t have the votes for his strategy of threatening a government shutdown over Obamacare, and everyone but Cruz knows it. Karl Rove wrote an impassioned plea to Republicans not to use this “ill-conceived tactic.” Some analysts believe a government shutdown, which would almost certainly be blamed on the GOP, could even give Democrats an outside shot at winning back the House in 2014.
So why the jitters on the left? At least part of the explanation lies in polls on Obamacare that have been misunderstood or stripped of context. Over and over, Americans have been told that the public doesn’t support the president’s signature achievement. This is true in only the most literal sense of the word. It turns out that the idea behind the new law — universal coverage — is backed by a strong majority.
To get a sense of how the media are misreporting the story, consider a September 15 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. As David Weigel has noted in Slate, this is one of the most reliable polls around. It found public widespread ignorance about the law, which will be implemented beginning October 1, and a high level of skepticism about Obamacare’s ability to improve people’s lives The poll reported that 30 percent of respondents thought it would have a negative impact on their families and only 12 percent were convinced it would be positive. More than half felt — accurately — that it would have no impact on their families.
But those weren’t the results that made headlines. It was the overall figure — 43 percent support Obamacare and 54 percent oppose it — that received wide coverage, just as similar poll numbers have in the past.
This is a classic example of something being accurate without being true.
As New York Times columnist Charles Blow has noted, a new CNN/ORC Poll shows that while 35 percent of the public (the conservative base) oppose Obamacare because it’s too liberal, 16 percent oppose it because it isn’t liberal enough.
In other words, 59 percent of the American public either supports Obamacare or wants it to go further.
This casts an entirely new light on the health care debate and further isolates the obstructionists. They are now exposed as radicals who believe in extortion rather than elections — a fringe group of what John McCain in another context called “wacko birds.”
More evidence to bolster that point comes from a CNBC poll that shows the public opposed to cutting off funding for Obamacare by 44 to 38 percent. If it meant a government shutdown, nearly 60 percent oppose defunding. Surely if a majority opposed the idea of Obamacare, a similar majority would oppose the funding of it.
Liberals are justifiably upset about the way public opinion has been misreported on this issue, and most of the blame rests with reporters who don’t probe the internals of polls deeply enough.
But progressives have a role to play in changing the way the polling looks.
Longtime supporters of a single-payer system (I am among them) need to stop telling pollsters that they don’t like Obamacare, even if its provisions seem inadequate to them. Otherwise they will continue to be lumped in with Tea Party types and depicted as standing against a landmark achievement that liberals have been seeking since universal coverage first appeared in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party (Bull Moose) Platform of 1912.
By: Jonathan Alter, The National Memo, September 23, 2013
“Diary Of A Legislative Terrorist”: Ted Cruz Goes Nuclear Against His Own Party To Save His Own Skin
After months of attempting to tie the continued funding of the government to his demand that the Affordable Care Act be demolished, Texas Senator Ted Cruz is now coming face to face with what happens to demagogues who write political checks they can never hope to cash—and it isn’t pretty.
With a strategy that is now crumbling beneath his feet, it is all too clear that Ted Cruz made one heck of a miscalculation—one that promises to put an end to a budding political career that many believed would lead all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, how did it happen?
It began with Mr. Cruz placing a populist bet that he could use the August town hall season to change the math on Capitol Hill while enlisting millions to his ultimate cause—his candidacy to become President of the United States in 2016.
As the Texas Senator likely saw it, he could swoop in on the gatherings of like-minded, adoring members of his base and, by using the media to spread his message, convince watching independents that the Affordable Care act was so detrimental to the nation’s future that there was no legislative action—no matter how radical or extreme—that should be avoided in the quest to rid the country of the scourge of healthcare reform.
If Cruz’s efforts somehow succeeded beyond what most would have viewed as a rational expectation and the Senator was able to force enough Republican votes—and maybe even a few Democratic votes—to his way of thinking, Cruz would be portrayed as a great and heroic warrior.
This would be true even if there were, ultimately, insufficient votes for Cruz to win the battle.
And if his fellow Republicans in the Senate chose not to go along with his tactics, the Senator would, at the least, depart the town hall circuit with pockets full of publicity and legions of adoring minions who would henceforth view him as a great leader willing to fall on his own sword while appearing to bravely ignore his own political future if that is what it took to save his country from the evils of Obamacare.
It wasn’t a completely insane gambit.
The problem, however, was that Cruz’s entire strategy was dependent upon his expectation that the majority of Americans who continue to dislike the Affordable Care Act (and they do) would be willing to support a government shutdown brought about by Cruz’s effort to tie the destruction of Obamacare to the continuing operations of government.
That is where it all began to fall apart.
It turns out that, while the majority of Americans may continue to view Obamacare with a jaundiced eye, they are not at all prepared to accept Cruz’s radical, ‘take no prisoners’ approach as a solution.
With right-leaning publications like “Hot Air” screaming headlines like “Republican poll: Public opposed to a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare, including Republicans”, it began to dawn on the Texas Senator that he had made a serious miscalculation and that being credited with causing a shutdown was not going to be the political bonus he had anticipated.
Cruz reacted as might be expected—he began looking for a way to squirm out of his predicament. Immediately, he turned to boldly stating that any government shutdown would not be his fault—but rather the fault of the President.
Why? Because while he had initially perceived getting the credit for a shutdown to be a good thing, the data revealed he had badly judged the intent of the public. Therefore, he had to find a way to continue his plan while pushing the blame of shutdown to the other side—a tall order leaving Cruz to employ a deeply flawed logic that could only appeal to the lowest of low-information voters when attempting to sell us on the idea that this would all be Obama’s fault.
But having discovered the great flaw in his grand design, Cruz really had nowhere else to go.
If you, somehow, remain unclear as to the absurdity of Cruz’s attempt to argue that a shutdown would fall on the shoulders of the White House, consider that this logic would be akin to someone pointing a gun to the head of your puppy before turning to you and demanding that, if you want to save your hapless pooch, you must hand over to him your child’s entire college fund which you have been contributing to for some twenty years.
When you, understandably, refuse to make the trade—despite the fact that you could give the perpetrator the entire fund and deny your child her dreams for the future in order to save the pup—the perpetrator follows through on his terrible deed and then blames you for the death of the poor little puppy. Why? Because he gave you the chance to save the dog’s life and it was within your power to do so, no matter how repugnant. Never mind that the perpetrator had no right to put your dog’s life into the balance in the first place.
Thus, by Cruz’s logic, because the President will not destroy his own law, duly passed by Congress, signed into law by that President and adjudicated legal by the United States Supreme Court, and all because a first term Senator and a few of his friends demand he do so, the fault for the resulting threatened punishment is on the President —not on Cruz himself.
There were additional flaws in Ted Cruz’s grand plan.
Faced with a public that does not favor closing up government in order to extract the end of the President’s signature legislation, the likelihood of persuading Cruz’s fellow Republicans in the Senate to go along with his strategy drops to near zero. While it was always a pipedream to imagine that there would ever have been enough votes in the Senate to make Cruz’s dreams of Obamacare defunding come true—even if a majority of voters supported the notion—without a public hunger for extreme measures, any hope Cruz might have harbored for Senate support were—and are–doomed.
And if, by some miracle, Cruz could use public sentiment to turn enough Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to his way of thinking, hell would freeze over before the President of the United States would go along with any continuing resolution that includes the destruction of his own, signature legislation.
As Congressman Tom Cole (R-OK) put it, “It’s awfully hard to repeal Obamacare when a guy named Obama is President.”
While Senator Cruz certainly would have relished an ultimate victory that included defunding Obamacare, he surely knew this was an unlikely result to his campaign. But his true objective, despite his falsely courageous protestations otherwise, was never to actually pull off the death of Obamacare—rather, his objective was to portray himself as a committed leader who was willing and able to single-handedly shut down the government in a greater cause. Cruz was placing this bet in the belief that were he to earn the credit for a government shutdown over the Obamacare issue, he would become a true hero in the hearts and minds not only of the Republican base—but the millions of independent Americans who both object to Obamacare and would not be personally affected by a shuttering of the government.
Who knew the public would show such disdain for Cruz’s tactics?
Realizing that Cruz had put his penchant for demagoguery ahead of the fortunes of his own party, key Republican leaders, both inside and outside of government, began to speak up and to do so loudly.
Karl Rove published an op-ed taking Cruz—and other Republicans who would favor a shutdown—to task for being willing to inflict the serious political damage such an action would cause the Republican Party. As for the elected ‘insiders’, we’ve learned that Fox Fox News Sunday talk show host Chris Wallace was flooded with reams of opposition research aimed at Cruz as Wallace prepared for yesterday’s show—all of which was provided by Republicans!
Ted Cruz’s response to his massive failure?
Speaking during his appearance on the Fox Sunday show, Cruz said—
“Any vote for cloture, any vote to allow Harry Reid to add funding to Obamacare with just a 51-vote threshold, a vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare. And I think Senate Republicans are going to stand side-by-side with Speaker [John] Boehner and House Republicans, listening to the people and stopping this train wreck that is Obamacare.”
What that means is that Ted Cruz now plans on taking his party down with him by using a procedural tactic in the Senate that would brand any Republican voting for cloture—thereby agreeing to send the House bill to a vote of the Senate where it will surely be defeated—as a ‘supporter’ of Obamacare.
And if the Senate Republicans were to buckle to Cruz and refuse to vote in favor of cloture, the House Bill will remain stalled in the Senate and the government will shut down with the Republicans clearly taking all the blame.
Either way, Cruz has now created a lose-lose scenario for his Republican colleagues in the Senate that either brings an unwanted government shutdown or invites a never-ending flurry of primary challenges to his GOP cohorts…and all to save whatever credibility Ted Cruz might still be hanging onto with a narrow slice of the GOP base.
All of this brings us to one, inescapable conclusion…Ted Cruz is desperate.
How bad is it?
As one House GOP aide put it, “Nancy Pelosi is more well-liked around here.”
Ouch.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, September 23, 2013
“Principles Of Hostage Taking 101”: The Debt Ceiling Is A Hostage John Boehner Absolutely Can’t Afford To Shoot
Speaker of the House John Boehner’s never-ending quest to placate the tea party resulted in the GOP approving a bill on Friday that would fund the government through mid-December, while “defunding” Obamacare. (Never mind that, as U.S. News’ Carrie Wofford has pointed out, “defunding” Obamacare in this manner doesn’t actually work.) If, as expected, the Senate strips the defund provision and kicks the bill back to the House, Boehner will have to find yet another way of keeping his radicals at bay.
The next hostage, then, is likely the debt ceiling. Technically, the U.S. has already reached its statutory borrowing limit, but the Treasury Department has been using extraordinary measures to delay the reckoning, a tactic that will no longer work come mid-October. And already, the GOP has drawn up a wish-list of policy concessions it hopes to extract in return for raising the debt ceiling, running the gamut from changes to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law and means-testing of Medicare to approval of the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. If defunding Obamacare doesn’t happen now, expect that to be added to the list.
But President Obama, it seems, has learned his lesson from previous debt ceiling standoffs, and this time is refusing to play ball. He even called Boehner on Friday night to reiterate that he does not plan to negotiate over whether the U.S. government will actually pay its bills (which remember, is all raising the debt ceiling ensures).
Why is Obama right to offer the GOP nothing when it comes to raising the debt ceiling? Well, the debt ceiling is a hostage which the GOP is simply not willing to shoot. As former GOP Sen. Judd Gregg, N.H., explained in an op-ed in The Hill today:
You cannot in politics take a hostage you cannot shoot. That is what the debt ceiling is. At some point, the debt ceiling will have to be increased not because it is a good idea but because it is the only idea.
Defaulting on the nation’s obligations, which is the alternative to not increasing the debt ceiling, is not an option either substantively or politically.
A default would lead to some level of chaos in the debt markets, which would lead to a significant contraction in economic activity, which would lead to job losses, which would lead to higher spending by the federal government and lower tax revenues, which would lead to more debt.
Two years ago, when the very same debate over raising the debt ceiling was occurring, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis. – who would go on to be his party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2012 – confirmed that taking the debt ceiling hostage is impossible. “You can’t not raise the debt ceiling. Default is the unworkable solution,” he said. He then attempted to justify the GOP’s move anyway, but the word salad that resulted shows just how untenable their plan really is.
The economic damage that would result from actually allowing the country to default on its financial obligations – be they payments to foreign debtors, Social Security recipients or government vendors – would be catastrophic, not to mention the mess that would occur in markets around the world when the absolute certainty that is U.S. payment of its debt disappears overnight. According to the Government Accountability Office, the last debt ceiling debacle, which didn’t result in a default, cost taxpayers $1.3 billion in fiscal year 2011 alone. That would seem like chump change compared to the costs of an actual default.
Now, it may be that the GOP leadership lets the tea party get its way by shutting down the government over Obamacare, rather than risking a debt default. But Republicans who remember the Clinton-era shutdowns are not ready for a sequel. So Boehner is left in the unenviable position of making his wild faction a promise on which he can’t possibly deliver. It remains to be seen how he’ll get out of it, but Obama is certainly under no obligation to help.
By: Pat Garofola, U. S. News and World Report, September 23, 2013
“We Don’t Make Deals With Bullies”: No Yielding On Obamacare, Debt Ceiling Or Government Shutdown
Republicans in the House are like a bunch of 3-year-olds playing with matches. Their hapless leaders don’t have the sense to scold them and send them to their rooms — which means President Obama has to be the disciplinarian in this dysfunctional family.
Mature adults in the GOP should have explained reality to these tantrum-throwing tykes long ago: It simply is not within their constitutional power to make Obamacare go away. They can scream at the top of their lungs, roll around on the floor, hold their breath until they turn blue, waste everybody’s time with 41 useless votes — whatever. All they can really do is hurt themselves or others.
Yet here we are, with Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) cowed into letting his members threaten to shut down the government unless they are allowed to stay up all night watching television and eating candy. Also, unless the Senate and Obama agree to nullify health-care reform before it fully takes effect.
I happen to believe that Obamacare is a great accomplishment, providing access to medical insurance to millions of Americans who lack it and bringing the nation much closer to universal health care. It’s an imperfect law, to be sure, but it could be made much better with the kind of constructive tinkering that responsible leaders performed on Social Security and Medicare.
Even if Obamacare were tremendously flawed, however, it would be wrong to let a bunch of extremist ideologues hold the country hostage in this manner. If Republicans want to repeal the reforms, they should win the Senate and the presidency. If not, they’re welcome to pout and sulk all they want — but not to use extortion to get their way.
At issue is not just the threat of a federal shutdown, which will happen Oct. 1 unless Congress passes a continuing resolution to fund government operations. The debt ceiling has to be raised before the Treasury hits its borrowing limit, which will happen around Oct. 18. If House Republicans don’t kill or neutralize Obamacare with the funding bill, they are ready to threaten the nation — and the global economy — with a potentially catastrophic default.
The proper response — really, the only response — is to say no. And mean it.
Obama is, by nature, a reasonable and flexible man, but this time he must not yield. Even if you leave aside what delaying or defunding Obamacare would mean for his legacy — erasing his most significant domestic accomplishment — it would be irresponsible for him to bow to the GOP zealots’ demands.
The practical impact of acquiescing would be huge. Individuals who have been uninsured are anticipating access to adequate care. State governments, insurance companies and health-care providers have spent vast amounts of time and money preparing for the law to take effect. To suddenly say “never mind” would be unbelievably reckless.
The political implication of compromising with blackmailers would be an unthinkable surrender of presidential authority. The next time he says “I will do this” or “I will not do that,” why should Congress or the American people take him seriously? How could that possibly enhance Obama’s image on the world stage?
Obama has said he will not accept a budget deal that cripples Obamacare and will never negotiate on the debt ceiling. Even if the Republicans carry through with their threats — and this may happen — the president has no option but to stand his ground.
You don’t deal with bullies by making a deal to keep the peace. That only rewards and encourages them. You have to push back.
The thing is, this showdown is a sure political loser for the GOP — and smart Republicans know it. Boehner doesn’t want this fight and, in fact, should be grateful if Obama hangs tough and shows the crazies the limits of their power. Most Republicans in the Senate don’t want this fight. It’s doubtful that even a majority of House Republicans really, truly want this fight, no matter what they say publicly.
But irresponsible demagogues — I mean you, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — have whipped the GOP base into a frenzy of unrealistic expectations. House members who balk at jumping off the cliff risk being labeled “moderate,” which is the very worst thing you can call a Republican — and the most likely thing to shorten his or her political career.
The way to end this madness is by firmly saying no. If Boehner won’t do it, Obama must.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 20, 2013
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