“Obamacare Is Killing The GOP”: Republicans’ Opiate Obsession With The Law Will Be The Party’s Undoing
It’s not an exaggeration to say Republicans have bet their future on the disaster they expect from Obamacare. “The implementation of the law over the next year is going to reveal a lot of kinks, a lot of red tape, a lot of taxes, a lot of price increases,” RNC spokesman Brad Dayspring told The New York Times last month. “It’s going to be an issue that’s front and center [in 2014].” GOP intellectuals see Obamacare as the centerpiece of the party’s strategy even well beyond then. “Republicans are likely to seize on every sad [implementation] story as justification for dramatic changes—and in 2016, mount campaigns designed to replace the system in whole or in part with plenty of material to use in their cause,” the conservative wonk Ben Domenech wrote approvingly in March.
And, of course, the party’s base is completely, unremittingly, obsessed with the issue. The mere anticipation of an implementation quagmire is “reinvigorating the movement,” Jenny Beth Martin, a national Tea Party official, told The Hill in early May. “We’re doing street rallies and protests over the next month to three months, initially. We’re working to recruit candidates that can talk about this.”
I happen to be agnostic about whether health care implementation will help the GOP in 2014. On the one hand, anything that energizes conservatives in a low-turnout election should benefit Republicans, much as it did on 2010. On the other hand, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent points out, much of the public antipathy toward Obamacare is already baked into the polls. The people who disapprove haven’t liked it from the get-go; similarly for the people who approve. It’s possible that a series of implementation snafus will move those numbers at the margins—a new poll suggests public opinion has soured a bit lately, perhaps as a result of all the “train wreck” chatter. On the other hand, it’s also possible that implementation will go relatively smoothly and people will embrace the program, netting Democrats a few more votes.
What I do know is that the GOP’s health care preoccupation is absolutely destroying its long-term prospects. However well the issue may work in the midterms, when an uptick in conservative turnout can flip a few dozen House seats, 2012 proved that it’s at best a wash in a presidential election, when Democrats can swamp that turnout with their demographic edge, and when the GOP’s challenge is to win moderates and independents as a result. Conservatives argue that the only reason health care didn’t work in 2012 is that Romney was a flawed messenger, given his patrimonial link to Obamacare. But with the Supreme Court largely blessing the law last June, the issue was mostly settled in the public mind, making it at best a non-factor among swing voters.
Even if implementation goes terribly, it isn’t likely to rekindle widespread angst. Most people will be untouched by implementation—even a disastrous implementation—for the simple reason that they won’t be relying on Obamacare. As Bloomberg’s Josh Barro has explained, 78 percent of us get coverage through Medicare, Medicaid, or our employers, a figure isn’t likely to change very much, or at least very quickly. Meanwhile, my colleague Jonathan Cohn points out that life for many people who do end up on Obamacare will improve, however flawed the program is, because it translates into insurance they didn’t have before.
Having said all that, the real problem with conservatives’ Obamacare strategy isn’t that it won’t work. It’s that the Obamacare obsession is actively sabotaging the GOP. Earlier this week The Washington Post ran an article about the ongoing dysfunction among House Republicans. Easily the most telling anecdote had to do with a largely symbolic measure called the Helping Sick Americans Now Act, concocted by Majority Leader Eric Cantor to help Republicans look like they care about the problems of ordinary people. (The bill feinted at easing the lot of the uninsured.) That, apparently, is where Cantor erred. As the Post explains:
A few dozen Republicans opposed the modest Helping Sick Americans legislation because they said it came from nowhere. Instead, Cantor pulled the bill and held another vote to repeal Obamacare — their 37th attempt to repeal part or all of the landmark health-care law — to appease conservatives.
To put the problem in Marxian terms, Obamacare has become the opiate of the GOP. By its own admission, the party must broaden its appeal to Latinos, gays, and young voters. It needs an economic agenda that encompasses more than tax cuts for the rich and brutal spending cuts. It has to persuade voters it’s more than just a nihilistic force bent on triggering global financial apocalypse if it doesn’t get its way in Washington. And yet, when party leaders so much as broach these liabilities, conservatives revolt and the leadership caves, appeasing them with an issue whose political utility peaked two-and-a-half years ago. (Suffice it to say, after the last few years, the words “reinvigorating the Tea Party movement” won’t exactly help Cantor and Boehner sleep at night.)
If you want to appreciate how truly incorrigible conservatives are on the subject, I recommend watching them grapple with the early news about Obamacare implementation, which has suggested the program could work better than anticipated. It’s a bit like watching a speculator learn he’s bet his life savings on a failing company—which is to say, chock full of denial and elaborate self-delusion.
For example, in late May, when the head of California’s insurance exchange announced that insurers were submitting cheaper bids than the state expected (and cheaper than many critics predicted), the conservative columnist Avik Roy tried to disprove the claims by visiting an online clearinghouse for private insurance plans. Roy solicited bids for a healthy 25-year-old male and a healthy 40-year old male, then pointed out that they came in far below what coverage would cost through the Obamacare exchange. All fine and good, except that Roy’s hypothetical bids were neither here nor there. The point of Obamacare is to provide affordable insurance to people who may be sick or older.
Alas, the fact that Roy basically affirmed the rationale for a program he set out to discredit—healthy, affluent young people are the one group that will do worse under Obamacare; everyone else will do better; no one has ever disputed this—didn’t stop every conservative outlet on the Internet from trumpeting his analysis. “Obamacare drives up insurance premiums by up to 146 percent in California,” screamed The Daily Caller. Even after a succession of wonks highlighted the glaring flaws, the editorialists at The Wall Street Journal leaned on Roy to declare an “ObamaCare Bait and Switch.”
The desperation here is palpable, but also understandable. If, instead of trying to fix your party’s deepest pathologies you wagered its entire future on a high-risk strategy that was starting to turn bad, you’d be a little desperate, too. Perhaps it’s a subset of Obama Derangement Syndrome that afflicts conservatives when they talk about health care—call it Obamacare Derangement Syndrome. Maybe one day, once the dust has settled, it’ll be covered under Obamacare, too.
By: Norm Scheiber, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 7, 2013
“Snowden And The Right”: The Republican Thermogenic Desire To See Barack Obama Have A Bad Day At The Office, Whatever It Takes
Here’s something I’ll certainly be keeping one eye fixed on as the Edward Snowden story advances: the degree to which the American right takes him up as a cause célèbre. They’re up a tree either way. If they do, then they’re obviously guilty of the rankest hypocrisy imaginable, because we all know that if Snowden had come forward during George W. Bush’s presidency, the right-wing media would by now have sniffed out every unsavory fact about his life (and a hefty mountain of fiction) in an effort to tar him. If they don’t, then they’ve lost an opportunity to sully Barack Obama. Since they like smearing Obama a lot more than they care about hypocrisy, my guess is that they will lionize him, as some already are. But in the long run, doing that will only expose how deep the rifts are between the national-security right and the libertarian right, and this issue will only extend and intensify those disagreements.
First out of the gate Sunday was Glenn Beck, who tweeted in the late afternoon, not too long after The Guardian posted the interview with Snowden: “I think I have just read about the man for which I have waited. Earmarks of a real hero.” Shortly thereafter, another: “Courage finally. Real. Steady. Thoughtful. Transparent. Willing to accept the consequences. Inspire w/Malice toward none.” And two hours after that: “The NSA patriot leaker is just yet another chance for America to regain her moral compass and set things right. No red or blue JUST TRUTH.”
Beck, I will concede, has a degree of credibility on the red/blue issue. He criticizes Republicans sometimes. Even so, it amounts to a speck of dust when set against his near-daily sermons (for years now) about liberal and Democratic fascism. So I wonder about the degree to which Beck would have hopped up to throw rose petals at young Snowden’s feet if he’d come forward in this way under the Bush administration.
About Beck, we can wonder. About the others, I think there is no reason to wonder at all. If Snowden’s parents had got about the business of conceiving him five or six years before they did, and the progeny had taken up this line of work in 2007 or 2008, it’s obvious that The Daily Caller and Breitbart.com, two right-wing outfits that Sunday evening were triumphantly bannering Snowden’s comments and the National Security Agency’s announced investigation into the matter, would have been savaging the guy. By close of business today, the rumors about his sexuality would be rampant.
They just want any cudgel they can find to beat Obama over the head, so Snowden suits their purposes for now. But let’s see where they go on this one over the long haul. On Sunday morning, Sen. Rand Paul called for a Supreme Court–level challenge to the NSA, in the form of a class-action suit, to end this data-mining. How’s that going to sit with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Reince Priebus, and the moneymen behind the Republican Party? Not very well.
Yes, the subject of the national-security state gives liberals and Democrats fits. We’re not “supposed” to do or support this sort of thing, because we believe in and hew to certain civil-libertarian principles. Conservatives, on the other hand, burdened with no such principles, can let it rip. No one expects ethical behavior of them in these arenas in the first place. It thus amuses me to watch conservatives attack liberals on the grounds of “hypocrisy” (if, say, they defend the Obama administration on this story) when everyone knows that (most) conservatives think civil liberties are some conspiracy against America.
But the bigger an issue conservatives try to make of this now, the more controversial the question of citizen-monitoring will become, and when that happens, the blowback is going to be much fiercer on the right than on the left, especially as we head toward 2016. On the left, Democrats will speak of the need for “balance” but not force a major debate on the issue, particularly if the nomination is essentially Hillary Clinton’s for the asking.
But on the right, the issue threatens to be much more disruptive. What used to be the Ron Paul–crank-libertarian faction, easily outnumbered by the neocons, is growing, and his son—a senator rather than just a congressman, young rather than curmudgeonly old, able to appeal to groups his father could not—is a much stronger standard-bearer for the anti-war-machine, pro-civil-libertarian message. Paul, it seems, is definitely running for president, and given the field, he’ll probably be in the first tier of contenders. He’ll have the ability to force a debate about these issues in a way his father never could.
The war caucus still dominates inside the GOP. But what really dominates the Republican Party mindset, what conquers everything, is the thermogenic desire to see Barack Obama have a bad day at the office, whatever it takes. So to the extent that Snowden proves useful to them in the coming days and weeks, they will use him. And liberals should say: let them.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 10, 2013
“Blocked By The GOP”: One Way To Help Close The Gender Wage Gap Is To Raise The Minimum Wage
This week, ThinkProgress’s excellent Bryce Covert wrote about a new report by the National Women’s Law Project about the relationship between the minimum wage and the gender pay gap. As the NWLP demonstrates, raising the minimum wage would help close the gender pay gap, because women are disproportionately concentrated in low-wage sectors such as food service, retail, housekeeping, and home health aides,
Raising the minimum wage is an important step in bringing economic justice to women workers. Consider the following:
— Contrary to what you might assume based on the recent mass freak-out by male Fox News anchors, we ladies are hardly the dominant sex in the workplace. In fact, we’re losing ground economically, and the gender wage gap is getting worse rather than better. Increasing the minimum wage would significantly remedy the situation.
— The NWLP points out that women of color, who suffer from racial discrimination as well as gender discrimination, make up a disproportionate number of minimum wage workers. So they, too, stand to strongly benefit from a minimum wage increase, in ways that would partially offset the effects of discrimination.
— Earlier research has shown that the declining real value of the minimum wage has substantially accelerated the trend in growing wage inequality in the U.S. generally, particularly among women. Increasing the minimum wage would help slow this trend.
— Finally, one of the chief benefits of the the minimum wage is as economic stimulus. In fact, it was originally instituted during the Great Depression not so much as a worker protection policy but as macroeconomic policy, to encourage economic growth. Low-wage workers tend to spend close to every penny they make, rather than save. The money they inject back into the economy then has a multiplier effect which revives the economy as a whole — meaning that the minimum wage benefits not just minimum wage workers, but everyone else.
So far, President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, which he made in the State of the Union address earlier this year, doesn’t seem to have gotten out of committee. It’s one of the endless list of things in this country that is excellent policy and excellent politics, but is being blocked by the G.O.P. Lather, rinse, repeat. Will this story ever end?
By: Kathleen Geier, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 8, 2013
“The Sorry Spectacle Continues”: Polarized Washington Ignores Long-Term Issues At Its Peril
Scandalfest continues. Official Washington is still flitting from one minor controversy to another, with the news media breathlessly reporting the latest leaked email or unsubstantiated accusation. Clearly, the chattering classes have declared the jobs crisis ended and the economic recovery complete.
While the Obama administration hasn’t popped open champagne bottles to celebrate, the air of silliness that hangs over the Beltway is a reminder that the worst is over. After all, the stock market is soaring. Consumer confidence is climbing.
The latest national unemployment number is down to 7.5 percent, the lowest level since December 2007, when the economy started its steep descent. Indeed, the sustained economic uptick may have a direct tie-in to Washington’s current obsession with less consequential matters: The economy is strong enough to have persuaded Republicans to stop blasting President Barack Obama over joblessness, so they’ve had to find other issues with which to batter him.
Here’s an update from outside the Beltway Bubble: The jobs crisis is not over. Average Americans are still struggling through an ugly economic transformation — a structural change decades in the making that jumped into overdrive with the Great Recession. Millions of Americans of working age remain unemployed, while others patch together two or three part-time jobs to keep food on the table. Still others have found full-time jobs but at far less pay than they used to earn.
A recent Quinnipiac poll provides a clear look into the minds of voters, who have little interest in the imbroglios of the moment. Rightly, 44 percent believe the revelations about the Internal Revenue Service, which singled out conservative organizations for unfair screening, as most important among the current controversies. Only 24 percent cited the deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, despite the GOP’s obsession with it. Far fewer, just 14 percent, listed the Justice Department’s scrutiny of reporters.
But here’s the news you may have missed: An overwhelming 73 percent said that boosting the economy and creating jobs is more important than any of the other three issues. If politicians were as poll-obsessed as they are rumored to be, they’d at least pretend to be devoting most of their time to helping middle-class Americans get back into stable jobs with good pay.
The jobs crisis has been decades in the making, an economic restructuring fueled by globalization and technology. Think about it: Those Bangladeshi textile workers killed in an April building collapse were doing work once done in the United States. No matter how many affluent Americans protest the conditions and boycott the designers who contributed to the disaster, those jobs are not coming back to these shores. Manufacturers will continue to pursue cheap labor.
As a result, the jobs that once guaranteed good wages and stable futures to generations of Americans without college degrees have all but disappeared. That transformation, which started in the 1970s, has contributed to the wage gap, the ever-widening rift between the haves and have-nots. The average American worker has been losing economic ground for decades.
Politicians ignore that growing gap at their peril. The notion of an America where everybody has an equal shot has always been more myth than reality, but there was once a time when it was not so difficult for young adults to imagine a more prosperous future than their parents had. That is no longer a likely scenario.
That’s a very difficult problem to solve, which helps explain why politicians don’t like to discuss it. It calls for a multigenerational response, the sort of bipartisan approach that is usually reserved for battles against foreign enemies.
But Washington is stuck in a period of deepening polarization, incapable, it seems, of even agreeing on the causes of our economic woes. Democrats, at least, have a language for discussing widening income inequality. Republicans haven’t yet come to terms with its existence. So the sorry spectacle continues.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, June 6, 2013
“Worried About The Right Wing”: Marco Rubio Threatens To Betray His Allies On Immigration Reform
As we discussed in April, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) spent a few months playing an awkward game on comprehensive immigration reform. On the one hand, Rubio has been a high-profile member of the “Gang of Eight,” helping negotiate the details of the legislation. On the other hand, the Florida Republican signaled his willingness to oppose the legislation he’s ostensibly helping write. Rubio would say he likes his own bill, but wouldn’t commit to it.
Many of those involved in the process grew weary of Rubio straddling the fence. It was common to hear Capitol Hill insiders joke that the senator thought he could be “a little bit pregnant” on the policy.
But all that changed in mid-April, when Rubio got off the fence and began championing the legislation he helped craft. And all of that changed again late yesterday when Rubio said he’s prepared to reject his own legislation.
Speaking with radio host Hugh Hewitt Tuesday, Rubio said the Senate should “strengthen the border security parts of this bill so that they’re stronger, so that they don’t give overwhelming discretion to the Department of Homeland Security.” He said he was working with other senators on amendments to do just that.
Then Hewitt asked: “If those amendments don’t pass, will you yourself support the bill that emerged from Judiciary, Senator Rubio?”
Rubio answered, “Well, I think if those amendments don’t pass, then I think we’ve got a bill that isn’t going to become law, and I think we’re wasting our time. So the answer is no.”
Even for Rubio, this is bizarre. The Florida Republican had concerns about provisions related to border security, which he worked out through the “Gang of Eight” negotiations — his colleagues made the changes he wanted to see, which in turn led Rubio to endorse the bipartisan legislation.
But now the senator is moving the goalposts, saying the changes that have already been made aren’t good enough, and unless he’s able to move his bill even further to the right, Rubio is prepared to reject his own legislation.
Well, maybe Democrats can once again give Rubio what he wants, keeping the larger effort intact?
I’m afraid not — Rubio is asking far too much.
Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn intends to introduce a sweeping amendment to the immigration bill when it goes on the floor next week, seeking to replace an entire section devoted to border security and tweak the national security and criminal justice titles.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), one of the members of the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight, has been working with Cornyn on the amendment “for weeks,” a Rubio aide said.
The Texas Republican wants stricter border patrol provisional “triggers” before registered immigrants are allowed to apply for green card status. His amendment would require 100 percent operational control of the Southern borders and that 90 percent of illegal border crossers be apprehended. It would also require 100 percent border surveillance, or situational awareness, of each one-mile segment of the Southern border and installment of a national E-Verify system before registered immigrants can pursue green cards.
No serious person involved in the negotiations believes this is a responsible approach. Indeed, no one even thinks these standards are realistic — it’s exactly why the Gang of Eight considered and rejected these measures during their negotiations. Rubio said they weren’t necessary to earn his support for the legislation, and now he’s saying they are.
He is, in other words, apparently prepared to betray his allies.
And why would Rubio do this? Because the Republican Party’s radicalized base opposes comprehensive reform, and Rubio’s support for the bill will undermine his future career ambitions, including a likely run for national office in 2016. [Update: Adam Serwer notes this is ultimately pointless, since the right will still resent the fact that he helped write a bill they hate, and the left will resent the fact that he walked away from a deal reached in good faith.]
There is an important caveat to all of this: Rubio has waffled before. I don’t recall him going as far as he did with Hugh Hewitt, but the Florida Republican occasionally waffles, only to be brought back into the fold. Reform proponents can hope that McCain and Graham will give him a call this morning, Rubio will walk back his comments from yesterday, and the process will move forward. Rubio isn’t a policy guy, so it’s possible he got rattled yesterday and said what he didn’t entirely mean.
But if we take his words at face value, Rubio has put the future of immigration reform at great risk, basically because he’s worried right-wing activists won’t like him anymore.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 5, 2013
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