“They’re Only Suggestions”: Ted Cruz Doesn’t Want Credit For Destruction In His Wake
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) met privately with a group of House Republicans on Wednesday to urge them to ignore their own leadership and oppose their party’s border bill. Less than a day later, House GOP leaders were forced to pull their preferred legislation – too many of House Speaker John Boehner’s members were listening to Cruz, not him.
When no one seemed sure what the House majority would do next, Democratic lawmakers were heard joking with reporters that they should ask Cruz, since he seems to be in control of the lower chamber.
Robert Costa had a fascinating report overnight on the behind-the-scenes efforts, including details from the Wednesday night meeting in Cruz’s office, though the far-right Texan apparently doesn’t want to be held responsible for his handiwork.
In an interview, Cruz said that he did not dictate what the members should do, but only reaffirmed his position against Boehner’s plan.
“The suggestion by some that House members are unable to stand up and fight for their own conservative principles is offensive and belittling to House conservatives,” Cruz said. “They know what they believe and it would be absurd for anyone to try to tell them what to think.”
And yet, by all appearances, Cruz guided their hand, telling House Republicans that “Boehner was distracted and … they should stick to their principles.” The senator “also reminded them to be skeptical of promises from House leaders, particularly of ‘show votes’ – legislative action designed to placate conservatives that carry little, if any, weight.”
For a guy who doesn’t try to tell Republicans what to think, Cruz seems eager to offer, shall we say, suggestions.
I don’t think the political world fully appreciates just how regularly the Texas Republican intervenes in the affairs of the House chamber.
The list we’ve been updating keeps getting longer. Last September, for example, Boehner presented a plan to avoid a government shutdown. Cruz met directly with House Republicans, urged them to ignore their own leader’s plan, and GOP House members followed his advice. A month later, Cruz held another meeting with House Republicans, this time in a private room at a Capitol Hill restaurant.
This year, in April, the Texas senator again gathered House Republicans, this time for a private meeting in his office. In June, less than an hour after House Republicans elected a new leadership team, Cruz invited House Republicans to join him for “an evening of discussion and fellowship.”
Last week, Cruz and House Republicans met to plot strategy on the border bill. This week, they huddled once more.
The Texas Republican doesn’t seem to get along with other senators, but he spends an inordinate amount of time huddling with House Republicans who actually seem to listen to his advice.
As for the senator’s motivations, Danny Vinik had a good piece arguing that Cruz’s principal goal seems to be doing the right thing for Ted Cruz.
He was the architect of the “defund Obamacare” movement last year that ended in a politically toxic government shutdown and eventual Republican capitulation. In February, Cruz forced some of his Republican colleagues to take a politically-damaging vote to raise the debt ceiling. In all of these situations, Cruz has been focused on his own political future, staking out a position as far to the right as he can. He didn’t care that his antics damaged the party. They were good for Ted Cruz – and that’s what mattered.
That’s what happened again on Thursday with the House GOP’s bill to address the border crisis. And it’s going to continue happening in the future….
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 1, 2014
“An Upending Of Reason In The House”: Republican Efforts To Placate Conservatives Aren’t Working
After conservatives on Thursday brought down House Speaker John Boehner’s bill to address the border crisis, the new House Republican leadership team issued a joint statement declaring that President Obama should fix the problem himself.
“There are numerous steps the president can and should be taking right now, without the need for congressional action,” the leadership quartet proclaimed, “to secure our borders and ensure these children are returned swiftly and safely to their countries.”
Who’s in the what now?
Just the day before, House Republicans had voted to sue Obama for using his executive authority. They called him lawless, a usurper, a monarch, a tyrant — all for postponing deadlines in the implementation of Obamacare. Now they were begging him to take executive action to compensate for their own inability to act — even though, in this case, accelerating the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied children coming from Central America would likely require Obama to ignore a 2008 law.
This was not a momentary lapse but a wholesale upending of reason.
Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), the Appropriations Committee chairman who had been leading the GOP side in the border legislation debate, told reporters much the same thing after the legislation was pulled from the floor. “I think this will put a lot more pressure on the president to act,” he said, according to The Post’s Paul Kane and Ed O’Keefe. “He has the authority and power to solve the problem forthwith.”
Apparently, if Obama is using his executive authority to advance a policy House Republicans support, it’s a meritorious exercise of presidential authority; if he uses that same authority to aid a policy they oppose, it’s time to write up articles of impeachment.
In another action this week, Republicans acknowledged, at least tacitly, that Obama has the executive authority to postpone deportations. The House majority drafted, and scheduled a vote on, legislation that would forbid the executive branch from anything that would “expand the number of aliens eligible for deferred action.”
But in proposing such legislation (which was pulled from the floor along with the border bill), Republicans implicitly acknowledged that Obama has such power now. Therefore, until both chambers of Congress can pass such a law by veto-proof margins, Obama retains the power. This is probably why House Republicans, just two weeks earlier, scoffed at the suggestion that they pass this sort of legislation when the idea came up before the Rules Committee.
If the GOP position sounds contradictory, that’s because it’s less about the Constitution than cleavages within the party. There are real questions about Obama’s abuses of power — say, the spying on Americans by the National Security Agency or the use of drones to kill U.S. citizens overseas — but the opposition party has left those largely untouched. The planned lawsuit was a bone thrown to conservatives to quiet their impeachment talk. The legislation restricting Obama’s executive authority on immigration was a similar effort to buy off conservatives who had been encouraged to rebel by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
But the efforts to placate conservatives aren’t working. The new House GOP leadership team took over Thursday, but a mere two hours after Rep. Eric Cantor gave his valedictory as majority leader on the House floor, his successor did a face-plant.
All morning, GOP leaders had been predicting that they had sufficient Republican votes to pass Boehner’s border bill. But then conservatives, under pressure from Cruz and far-right interest groups, began to go squishy, and the new leader, Kevin McCarthy, announced that he was pulling the border bill from the floor and that members could depart early for their five-week summer break.
What followed was as close as Congress gets to one of those fistfights in the Taiwanese parliament. Mainstream Republicans besieged Boehner and McCarthy on the House floor, noisily demanding that they do something about the border crisis before going on holiday. Half an hour later, McCarthy announced that “additional votes are possible today.”
Boos and jeers rained down on the new leader. The speaker pro tempore, Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), banged the gavel violently for order. Some lawmakers had to be called back from National Airport.
The hapless new majority leader, and his equally hapless new majority whip, Steve Scalise, called Republicans to an emergency meeting, where after fierce argument it was decided . . . that they would meet again on Friday.
Boehner, earlier in the day, tried to be philosophical. “I take my job one day at a time,” he said.
The problem with day-by-day leadership, though, is inconsistency: What you do on Thursday has a way of contradicting what you said on Wednesday.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 1, 2014
“Epic Incompetence”: Border Failure Rocks House GOP Leadership
It’s hard to overstate what a humiliating failure this is for the House Republican leadership team, especially House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).
House Republican efforts to build support among their more conservative members collapsed Thursday as Congress prepares to cut town for a month-long recess without first passing a funding bill to address the thousands of unaccompanied minors being detained at the U.S. border.
Confronted with the Republican leadership’s inability to shore up enough votes, House Speaker John Boehner pulled the doomed legislation, which would have provided $659 million in emergency aid to the U.S. border.
Congress is still prepared to leave town tonight for a five-week break, but lawmakers will leave having accomplished nothing in response to the humanitarian crisis along the U.S./Mexico border.
There’s still a small chance the House GOP will figure something out – there will reportedly be an emergency meeting within the hour, though it’s unclear what good it will do – but after exhaustive efforts, it appears House Republicans have killed their own party’s policy.
It was the first real test for the new House Republican leadership team and they appear to have failed miserably.
In a statement, Boehner blamed President Obama for Republicans’ inability to pass their own legislation and urged the president to take unilateral action regardless of Congress. The timing is breathtaking: literally yesterday, GOP lawmakers voted to sue Obama for circumventing Congress, and less than 24 hours later, Boehner is publicly urging Obama to circumvent Congress.
The resulting image is a helpless party, lacking leaders, direction, and purpose. House Republicans were desperate to prove they’re capable of being a governing party, and in the process, they’ve proven the opposite.
To be sure, the GOP border bill was, on a substantive level, pathetic. It would have done very little to address the problem, and its demise is a positive development for the country.
But the real story today is one of epic incompetence and a party that’s practically developed an allergy to completing the basic tasks of government.
This is, of course, great news for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who now appears to have more influence over what happens in the House than the actual House Republican leadership team.
But in the meantime, John Boehner’s Speakership is turning into something of a tragedy. How many times has he put together a bill, only to be betrayed by his own followers? A Democratic source on Capitol Hill recently sent around a brutal collection of bills Boehner asked his members to support, only to see his own House GOP conference reject his appeals: a grand bargain, a debt-ceiling bill in 2011, a payroll tax extension, a transportation bill, a farm bill, one fiscal-cliff bill, another fiscal-cliff bill, another farm bill, and then yesterday. I think my source might have even missed a couple, including the collapse of Boehner’s debt-ceiling bill in February 2014.We’ll have more on this later, but for now Boehner has to be asking himself about the value of a leader with no followers. As if we needed additional evidence, he remains the Speaker In Name Only.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 31, 2014
“Little Boys Playing With Fire”: House GOP Just Making Stuff Up To Hide Its Own Impotence
In an interview on Fox News over the weekend, incoming House Majority Whip Steven Scalise of Lousiana was asked repeatedly by Chris Wallace about the prospect of impeaching President Barack Obama. The exchange was illuminating, both for the lack of illumination that Scalise was willing to offer, and for his sheer mendacity.
After Wallace pressed him on the impeachment issue, here’s how Scalise responded:
SCALISE: You know, this might be the first White House in history that’s trying to start the narrative of impeaching their own president. Ultimately, what we want to do is see the president follow his own laws. But the president took an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this land and he’s not. In fact, the Supreme Court unanimously more than 12 times, unanimously said the president overreached and actually did things he doesn’t have the legal authority to do.
WALLACE: Again, on executive action to defer more deportations, what will the House do?
SCALISE: We’ve made it clear. We’re going to put options on the table to allow — to allow the House to take legal action against the president when he overreaches his authority. Others have already done that. Cases are going to the Supreme Court. Like I said, more than a dozen times the Supreme Court unanimously — I’m not talking about a 5-4 decision — 9-0, unanimously said the president overreached.
So, we’re going to continue to be a check and a balance against this administration.
WALLACE: But impeachment is off the table?
SCALISE: Well, the White House wants to talk about impeachment, and, ironically, they’re going out and trying to fundraise off that, too.
WALLACE: I’m asking you, sir.
SCALISE: Look, the White House will do anything they can to change the topic away from the president’s failed agenda — people paying higher costs for food, for health care, for gas at the pump. The president isn’t solving those problems. So, he wants to try to change the subject.
Some points to consider:
1) By my count, Wallace asked the impeachment question four times. Scalise evaded it four times. Yes, politicians evade questions all the time. Yes, Democrats are attempting to fundraise off the impeachment possibility. But Scalise could have pulled the rug from beneath that effort with a simple statement that the House would not consider impeachment. Despite repeated opportunities, he did not. He pointedly left the option on the table and tried to change the subject, ironically by accusing the president of trying to change the subject.
2) Scalise claimed that instead of impeachment, the topic should be what he called “the president’s failed agenda — people paying higher costs for food, for health care, for gas at the pump.” OK, let’s take a look at those issues.
—People are not paying higher costs for food, with a few notable exceptions such as pork and fresh produce. Those costs spikes are temporary, driven by widespread drought perhaps associated with climate change, as well as by a virus that killed millions of piglets last year. I’m not sure how Obama might have intervened with those problems. Maybe he should have issued an executive order banning piglet-killing viruses, but then again, the House would have added it to the list of impeachable offenses.
—Gasoline prices are dropping, not rising, falling nine cents a gallon in the last two weeks. They have recently been 9.5 cents below what they were a year ago. If the president is to be blamed when prices increase, I suppose Scalise is willing to give him credit when they fall. Or maybe not.
—Contrary to Scalise’s claims, health care inflation also remains at near-record-low levels.
3) In an effort to document the conservative narrative that Obama has become some sort of tyrant run amok, Scalise twice repeated the claim that “more than a dozen times the Supreme Court unanimously — I’m not talking about a 5-4 decision — 9-0, unanimously said the president overreached.”
That too is a complete fabrication, and Scalise knows it.
As Politifact documented a month ago, eight of the 13 Supreme Court cases referenced by Scalise were initiated by actions taken in the administration of President George W. Bush and were inherited under Obama. Factcheck.org also studied the claim; it too rejected it as false.
In addition, most of the 13 cases had nothing to do with presidential overreach. “For example, in United States v. Jones, the court was ruling on whether the FBI had the power to use a GPS to track a suspect and gather evidence,” Politifact points out. A second case involved a court ruling that “police could not search your cell phone without a warrant if you were arrested.” A third case involved a state law in Massachusetts that regulated protests outside abortion clinics. A fourth case — begun under Bush — involved tax law on overseas income. A fifth — also a Bush case — involved the statute of limitations in securities law.
In other words, the core piece of evidence behind the GOP’s narrative of executive overreach by Obama — evidence cited by Ted Cruz, by National Review, by the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and now by Scalise — is fraudulent. But those spreading it do not care. They have fed the base this “Obama-is-an unconstitutional-tyrant” line to keep it riled up, fearful and distracted, and it has worked. That is all they care about.
And if by creating this image of Obama as tyrannical threat to constitutional government, they create a groundswell for impeachment that they cannot control? Like little boys playing with fire, they don’t seem worried by that either.
By: Jay Bookman, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Published in The National Memo, July 31, 20114
“None Dare Call It Impeachment”: We Will Look Back On This Moment In Washington As The Week That Irony Died
Let’s talk about something cheerful. How about impeachment?
Hey, it’s been a depressing month for news. If you want to look on the bright side, you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.
The possibility of actual impeachment is not something that keeps Barack Obama up at night. Modern history suggests there’s nothing Congress could do that the American public would hate more. Yet impeachment talk has been bounding around the Republican right for ages. The South Dakota Republican Party passed a resolution calling for impeachment at their annual convention this year. (We all know the famous saying: “As South Dakota goes, so goes North Dakota.”) Sarah Palin brings up impeachment virtually every day. Some members of Congress use it to energize the crazy base.
For instance, Representative Ted Yoho of Florida once posted a list of arguments for impeachment on his campaign website. I am mentioning this in part because it’s always fun to write “Ted Yoho.” Also because I don’t think I’ve ever had an opportunity to note that during his previous election season, Ted Yoho told a church group that he wished the right to vote was limited to property owners.
Last week, the Democrats started picking up the impeachment banner in the form of pretending to take the Republican threats seriously. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said it would be “foolish to discount the possibility.” Democratic fund-raisers sent out warnings of impending impeachment danger to their own base and were tickled by the enthusiastic response.
Now, Republican leaders are desperately trying to change the subject. The House speaker, John Boehner, called impeachment talk “a scam started by Democrats at the White House.” Karl Rove claimed Obama was trying to create a “constitutional crisis where none exists.”
“Do you think anyone in Washington in the G.O.P. is serious about impeachment?” demanded the radio host Glenn Beck. “Do you think one person? Have you spoken to one person? No one. So who wants it? The president does.” Actually, as Kendall Breitman pointed out in Politico, Beck had called for impeachment his very own self about a year earlier.
Meanwhile, in the House of Representatives, the majority party was busy showing the nation its serious side by voting to sue President Obama for violating the Constitution. Look, everybody has their own way of demonstrating that they’re sticking to the business at hand. Republicans are upset about the president’s attempt to deal with problems by executive order when Congress fails to address them with legislation. Obama’s record when it comes to executive orders is actually rather paltry compared with some of his Republican predecessors. Nevertheless, the Republicans have many, many complaints, all of which involve mention of the founding fathers.
You could not help but suspect that if Speaker Boehner had it to do all over again, he’d never have brought this idea up. Democrats cheerfully urged a really, really long debate on the subject, but the Republican-dominated Rules Committee decided that the whole thing should be dispatched with as quickly as possible. So fast, in fact, that it gave the lawsuit against the president the same debate time as a bill on deregulating pesticides.
The Republicans focused on — yes! — the founding fathers. It was, said Representative Candice Miller of Michigan, a battle against “tyranny, Mr. Speaker. Tyranny.” She is the leader of the Committee on House Administration, the only woman to lead a House committee under the current leadership. We will not dwell on the fact that Miller’s committee is basically in charge of housekeeping.
Meanwhile, the Democrats kept bringing up the I-word. “I sincerely believe that you are trying to set the stage for a despicable impeachment proceeding,” said Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina. Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, the House Rules chairman, denied that suing the president was a step on the slippery slope to impeachment. He did that by defending the impeachment of President Clinton, which was, of course, so exceedingly successful that Clinton now is the most popular individual in the nation except perhaps for Boo the World’s Cutest Dog and the hamster that eats tiny burritos.
Rather than suing the president for everything he’s ever done, the Republicans tried to improve their legal prospects by picking a particular executive order. They settled on the one postponing enforcement of part of Obamacare that requires businesses to provide health coverage for their employees. “Are you willing to let any president choose what laws to execute and what laws to change?” demanded Boehner.
“Not a single one of them voted for the Affordable Care Act,” said Louise Slaughter, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee. “They spent $ 79 million holding votes to kill it. And now they’re going to sue him for not implementing it fast enough.”
We will look back on this moment in Washington as The Week That Irony Died.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 30, 2014
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