“Gingrich’s Revisionist History Of Himself”: Bizarre Anyone Would Take Newt’s Advice About How To Engineer A Government Shutdown
Newt Gingrich has often relied on short memories of his political career (as I can attest from the shocked reaction I got in 2011 when writing about his well-known history as a Rockefeller Republican), but he’s clearly going too far in pretending the government shutdown he engineered in 1995 was some sort of triumph. Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru slaps him down pretty emphatically today:
Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him….
Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.
Almost nobody back then believed it. Democrats thought that they had won the battle over the shutdowns, and that the agreement to end them was a Republican surrender. Clinton made a point, in his next State of the Union address, to criticize Republicans for their strategy. It was an applause line. Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.
Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.
It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit….
Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now.
I’d say Ramesh is really pulling his punches here. The rationalization that the GOP “lost only a few seats” reflects some serious amnesia. This was the only time in U.S. history that the party holding the White House for two consecutive terms gained House seats in the second midterm election. It was perceived as a disaster at the time–after all, Gingrich stepped down as Speaker almost immediately–and was largely blamed on Gingrich’s handling of the budget negotiations that led to the shutdown. Ponnuru mentions Clinton’s rising approval ratings after the confrontation with Newt, but here’s what Gallup’s Frank Newport had to say about the saga’s effect on Gingrich’s popularity:
The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995. (Publicity at the time, including a famous front page caricature in the New York Daily News, included the allegation that Gingrich had closed down the government because he was given a bad seat at the back of Air Force One when returning from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.) By January of 1996, 57% of Americans said that their image of Gingrich was unfavorable, compared with 37% who had a favorable image of him. This nearly two-to-one negative-to-positive image ratio persisted throughout most of 1996 and 1997.
It’s just bizarre that anyone would take Newt Gingrich’s advice about how to engineer a fiscal confrontation involving a government shutdown threat, and an example of the man’s invincible chutzpah that he’s offering it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 12, 2013
“Lord Help Us!”: The Return Of One Of The GOP’s Dumbest Ideas
Lord help us, is the balanced budget amendment—one of the dumbest policy ideas the right ever cooked up (and that’s saying something)—actually back? Only time will tell, but today on the New York Times op-ed page, two prominent conservative economists, Glenn Hubbard and Tim Kane, try to revive it with an argument so unconvincing that I worry it’s going to be embraced by every Republican in sight. If you think the sequester was a terrific idea and worked out great for everyone, have they got a deal for you.
Hubbard and Kane start by insisting that deficit panic must not be allowed to wane. “We are stuck in a bad and worsening place: sure, deficits strike fear in the hearts of economists and intellectuals, but they don’t matter at the ballot box.” Haven’t we actually cut the deficit by more than half from its 2009 peak? And isn’t creating jobs and increasing wages more important? And aren’t most “economists and intellectuals” not actually driven to terror by the deficit at the moment? Of course not, silly. We must put aside parochial concerns like jobs and focus our fear on deficits, lest they one day…well, one day they’ll do something really bad, but don’t worry about what it is.
You never hear conservatives articulate exactly why running a deficit, any deficit, is so problematic. They rely on the fact that it seems self-evident, and in fairness, some Democrats, Barack Obama in particular, contribute to widespread misunderstanding of the subject by repeatedly comparing the government’s finances to a family’s finances. But the government’s budget isn’t at all like a family’s budget. For instance, when it’s faced with a crisis like the Great Recession, borrowing more and spending more is exactly what it has to do. In the last 50 years, we’ve had a balanced budget eight times, four of which were at the end of the Clinton years. There’s no reason why the deficit has to come down to zero. If that’s what you’re forced to do, then you end up making problems worse at the worst moments. That’s what happened to states over the last few years; because nearly every state has a requirement to balance their budget every year, when tax revenues plummeted, they were forced to slash government services and lay off hundreds of thousands of workers. This made the recession more painful for everybody (and the federal government sent billions of dollars to the states in an attempt to mitigate the damage).
If you had a balanced budget amendment in place, when a recession hits and tax revenues fall, the federal government would have to immediately cut back its spending, precisely the opposite of what it ought to be doing. Yet for years, a balanced budget amendment was Republican dogma, nearly on par with tax cuts for the wealthy and big defense budgets. Which brings us to Hubbard and Kane’s new balanced budget amendment proposal. Here’s part 1:
First, because reconciling expenditures and revenues would be impossible in real time, the constraint should be on expenditures only. A good rule would be this: Congress shall spend no more in the current year than it collected, on average, over the previous seven years. No more overspending in fat years and no draconian cuts to expenditures during future recessions.
This rolling average idea makes things a bit more sane, but do you see what they did there? I’ve highlighted it in bold. “The constraint should be on expenditures only,” meaning that their balanced budget amendment would require spending cuts, but not tax increases. Why? Because these are Republicans, that’s why. Here’s part 2:
Second, any amendment should be simple, focused only on fiscal balance. The best mix of tax and expenditure changes is for each generation of voters to decide.
Is that supposed to mean that the amendment itself shouldn’t actually write into the Constitution budgetary limits for every single federal agency for every year in the future? Well since that would be insane, I’m not sure why it has to be an explicit part of their three-part proposal. Perhaps they should also specify that a balanced budget amendment shouldn’t deal with abortion and drug legalization, or that the amendment need not specify the headline font on the Department of Energy’s press releases. And on to part 3:
Third, there should be an exception to the spending constraint for national emergencies.
And what would be a national emergency? Would the Great Recession count? How about the Iraq War, which the Bush administration (where Glenn Hubbard served) financed through deficit spending? This is basically a way of saying, don’t worry, we’ll require balanced budgets, unless requiring balanced budgets looks like a terrible idea, at which point we won’t. And then we get to the end, where Hubbard and Kane finally reveal the threat posed by deficits, a threat so profound it must be met with the constitutional equivalent of permanent sequestration:
America’s high and rising national debt threatens our economic health through higher future taxes, crowding out important government services, or both. The best antidote is a focus on economic growth and a balanced approach to deficit control
Ah, there we are. We must force draconian budget cuts now, because if we don’t, at some point in the future we might have to…force budget cuts. And of course raise taxes, which we can’t ever, ever do. So by imposing those cuts, we can “focus on economic growth,” not by actually promoting economic growth, but by…um…confidence!
This isn’t some dopey politician offering his opinion on a topic he plainly doesn’t understand, this is two highly-placed and supposedly informed conservative economists. Hubbard is dean of the business school at Columbia and was George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser. Kane is chief economist at the Hudson Institute. These are the Republican party’s big economic thinkers. And this is what they have to offer.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 12, 2013
“Crazy Is as Crazy Does”: Congress Is Off To Suck Up To Its Lunatic Tea Party Constituents
Four years ago, Democratic representatives went home for the August recess and found themselves under assault from angry Tea Partiers, who took over town meetings with shouting and fist-shaking over the Affordable Care Act in particular, and more generally, the theft of their country by the foreign Muslim usurper Barack Obama. This August, however, it’s Republicans who are under attack by some of those same people.
At one town meeting after another, hard-right Republican House members are being confronted by constituents accusing them of not being quite doctrinaire and reckless enough (see here, or here, or here). Once again the immediate topic is Obamacare, but now the question isn’t whether the law should pass, but whether Republicans should shut down the government in a futile attempt to defund it. The members catching the most heat are those who argue that shutting down the government is useless, because Barack Obama is never going to sign a budget that defunds his greatest domestic accomplishment, so the only thing a shutdown would do is create more political headaches for the GOP.
This outbreak of relative pragmatism on the part of some Republican members of Congress is of course seen by Tea Partiers as little more than weak-kneed appeasement. It suggests that there’s a shift underway among the Republican base, from simply favoring the threatening of a government shutdown as a way to extract concessions, to supporting a shutdown of the government even with the knowledge that doing so will produce no concessions from Democrats.
As many a Republican politician will tell you (ask Marco Rubio, for one), convincing the Tea Party that you’re sufficiently conservative and that you hate Barack Obama enough isn’t just a full-time job, it’s a game that almost everyone will eventually lose. At some point you’ll take some position or express some opinion that is interpreted as less than maximal anti-Obamaism, and all it takes is one slip to be declared a traitor forevermore. So as crazy as Republican politicians sometimes seem, don’t forget that they’re under constant pressure from a base that is even crazier.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, August 8, 2013
“Time For Conservatives To Face Reality”: Deal With It, ObamaCare Will Not Be Repealed Or Defunded
On March 21, 2010, my former boss and mentor, David Frum, wrote a story that ran on FrumForum.com under the headline “Waterloo.” It harshly criticized conservatives for their uncompromising opposition to the bill officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, but which most of us know simply as ObamaCare. David agreed that in a perfect world, ObamaCare would never see the light of day. However, surveying the legislative landscape, David observed that the GOP never had enough votes to defeat the health-care bill.
While conservatives could not prevent the bill from becoming law entirely, David argued that they could have engaged with Democrats and possibly watered down many of the bill’s most unconservative provisions. Instead, though, the GOP refused to participate at all because the worse the bill the unchecked Democratic Congress passed, the better Republicans would do in the 2010 midterm elections.
“Waterloo” went live on the website at around 5 p.m. on the 21st. Within 24 hours, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks took David to lunch and fired him, essentially for daring to disagree.
More than three years and two elections have passed since David was shouted down for pointing out the flaws in the GOP’s “strategy” for handling ObamaCare. History appears to have provided David right. While the GOP did seize control of the House in November 2010, the party has failed to secure the Senate and, more importantly, Barack Obama won re-election. Realistically, what that means is that repeal is not an option, since even if the GOP did somehow manage to secure a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in 2014 (which even the most optimistic prognosticators will tell you is not going to happen), the GOP still could not affect repeal (since the president would veto). And yet, despite this harsh reality, serious members of the GOP are still promising voters that they will repeal the law. Indeed, Mike Lee and Ted Cruz are threatening to shut down the government if the president does not defund the law.
Not surprisingly, plenty of smart liberals have taken note of the GOP’s obstinacy on this issue. But more interesting is the fact that some of the brightest voices within the conservative movement are beginning to speak out against the futility of the strategy that my old boss was fired for raising back in 2010. The question ought never have been whether we can prevent ObamaCare, but rather how bad ObamaCare was going to be when the bill finally was delivered to the president for signing.
Late last week, Charles Krauthammer finally put his foot down in the face of Cruz and Lee’s continued efforts to shape GOP policy proposals as if they lived in a perfect conservative world that simply does not exist. Krauthammer did not mince words, describing the Cruz/Lee ultimatum as “nuts.” While he acknowledged that he would support defunding ObamaCare if he thought it would work, he also said it’s obvious that it won’t work, and that he does not fancy “suicide.” Indeed, while Lee and Cruz will undoubtedly claim those who don’t support their cause are less than full conservatives, Krauthammer correctly observed that one’s position on their proposal has little to do with principle and everything to do with “sanity.”
Interestingly, the point that Krauthammer makes is virtually identical to the one David made three years ago. The proposition underlying both articles is that electoral realities must govern ideological decision-making. In a perfect world, Republicans simply could have prevented ObamaCare’s passage by voting against it. Similarly, now, in a perfect world, Republicans would have the votes to repeal or defund ObamaCare.
But alas, this is not a perfect world and that being the case, true conservatives adjust their tactics and their expectations. Over the past three years, the GOP base has become so enamored with the idea of ideological purity that they have been willing to throw the realities of real world politics overboard to chase it. But real defenders of conservatism must learn to embrace the painful compromises of day-to-day governance. Otherwise, we will become a party that stands by and debates itself while living under completely unchecked legislation shaped wholly by our ideological opponents.
By: Jeb Golinkin, The Week, August 6, 2013
“Hoping To Cash In”: The GOP Versus Hillary Clinton’s Celebrity
I’m not sure whether to file this under “pointless” or just “dumb,” but the Republican National Committee is threatening to boycott NBC and CNN if they go forward with, respectively, a mini-series and a documentary about former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. I guess you could file it under “oblivious”?
Here’s why: The last time I checked, Republicans were supposed to be fierce defenders of the free market. And to the extent that these companies are trying to catch the Hillary ’16 presidential wave, it’s more likely that they’re hoping to cash in on it rather than promote it.
Earlier today, the Republican National Committee issued a release saying that if NBC and CNN go ahead with their plans, Chairman Reince Priebus “will seek a binding vote of the RNC to prevent the committee from partnering with these networks in 2016 primary debates or sanctioning debates they sponsor.”
It goes without saying that media companies shouldn’t let political parties dictate their programming choices. But honestly, this is silly. Yes, Hillary Clinton is widely expected to run for president in three years. So are a lot of people, but she’s also the biggest celebrity in the potential presidential field, and by a long shot (sorry, Donald Trump, I’m only referring to serious potential candidates).
Does it make good business sense for these companies to try to capitalize on that celebrity? Yes. So much so that you’d think there would be a Hillary Clinton move in the works … which, it turns out, there is. NBC announcing a miniseries about Kirsten Gillibrand or Peter King would raise eyebrows. About Hillary Clinton? Come on.
Occam’s Razor (the maxim that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) applies here: The simpler explanation – that two media conglomerates think there’s a market for Hillary-related programming – is more plausible than the idea that they are engaged in a vast, collusive media conspiracy to promote the candidacy of someone who has universal name recognition and is already widely seen as the most likely person to become the next president.
Were I conspiratorially minded, I might suggest that the GOP really doesn’t want CNN and NBC to broadcast its presidential debates in 2016. There’s fairly wide agreement that the party did itself no favors with the traveling circus that was the 2012 primary debates. So limiting both the number and the reach of its 2016 tilts in one fell swoop? Well that would be a win-win. Could that be what this is all about? Alas, probably not.
So what are Republicans up to? Part of this is probably working the ref: They likely hope that whoever writes the scripts for these shows will bend over backward to make them – to borrow a phrase – fair and balanced, putting extra emphasis on her shortcomings in order to stay the braying on the right. (And if any conservatives want to argue that content is beside the point because any exposure is good exposure, please explain to me what exactly is the problem with Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan.) And probably the RNC is itself trying to capitalize on Hillary Clinton’s celebrity by issuing a press release about her.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, August 5, 2013
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