“The Problem Of Political Precedents”: When Failure Is Rewarded, It Encourages More Failure
In a democracy, fear is supposed to be a powerful motivator for policymakers. There’s a constant realization that there’s always another election coming, and those who want to keep their jobs – and avoid voters’ wrath – will have to be responsible stewards of the public trust.
But what if these norms start to break down? What if the incentives baked into the cake prove to be faulty?
Kevin Drum made a comment last week that struck a chord, noting that Americans seemed inclined to blame Democrats, not Republicans, “for the rising dysfunction of the federal government.”
[This] is especially galling for Democrats, but it’s a win for Republicans and yet another sign of change in the way Washington is likely to work in the future. Republicans have discovered that a sufficiently united party can obstruct everything and anything but largely escape blame for the resulting gridlock.
This lesson has not been lost on Democrats, and it bodes ill for the future regardless of who wins our next few elections.
I think that’s correct and it’s a point that’s not repeated nearly enough.
In a democratic model, the last couple of years have been a mess of historic proportions. Republicans, consciously or not, decided to roll the dice – they would ignore the 2012 election results, refuse to govern, and kill measures regardless of their merit, popular support, or bipartisan appeal. They would shut down the government. They would eschew compromise. They would ignore calls to present policy solutions of their own. They would create the least productive Congress in modern American history.
And then they would wait for the American people to give them a reward.
Which voters delivered yesterday with a lovely bow on top.
When there is no accountability in a political system, there is no incentive for even well-intentioned policymakers to behave responsibly. It seems quite twisted: an unpopular party with unpopular ideas failed miserably at basic governance, and was rewarded handsomely for its efforts. The process isn’t supposed to work this way, and yet we now know it works exactly this way.
The resulting precedent is more than a little discouraging. When failure is rewarded, it encourages more failure. When obstruction is rewarded, it encourages more obstruction. When radicalism is rewarded, it encourages more radicalism. When a refusal to compromise is rewarded, it means politicians will be led to believe they, too, should refuse to work on bipartisan solutions.
It’s not a recipe for sound governance.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, November 7, 2014
“The GOP Didn’t Deserve To Win”: Congressional Republicans’ Behavior Over The Last Four Years Deserved No Reward
Voters on Tuesday gave Republicans control of the Senate. But the GOP did not earn this victory.
That’s not because Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), deserved to win in the GOP’s stead, and it’s not because this country can do without a sensibly conservative party. It is because the GOP has not been a sensibly conservative party. Congressional Republicans’ behavior over the last four years deserved no reward.
This is the party that repeatedly used the country’s full faith and credit as a bargaining chip during successive, manufactured budget crises.
This is the party that still cannot bring itself to admit that climate change is a risk that deserves a serious response.
This is the party that scuttled even modest immigration reform because elements of the GOP base will label seemingly any viable bill “amnesty.”
This is the party whose leaders resist bringing broadly popular bills up for an up-or-down vote because its right fringe is in constant preparation to stage a revolt.
This is the party so in thrall to comical anti-government activists that it treated simple lightbulb efficiency standards as severe attacks on personal liberty.
This is the party that voted dozens of times to dismantle Affordable Care Act — but never united behind a credible, or even a non-credible, alternative, despite promising for years to offer one.
This is the party that took its fixation with Obamacare so far that it shut down the government in a bizarre political tantrum.
This is the party that has styled its refusal to compromise as a virtue rather than as a pernicious insult to responsible leadership.
Unsurprisingly, exit polls showed little regard for the GOP. It is a measure of midterm voters’ dissatisfaction with the state of the country, President Obama and feckless Democratic candidates that they held their noses and empowered Republicans. The results also fit into a broader trend of red states becoming redder. Yet Republicans — and Democrats — might also take the message that reckless, shortsighted, counterproductive behavior makes for good politics — better, in fact, than having actual results to run on. If fully internalized, that lesson would shut down Congress most of the time.
With President Obama still in office, it is up to Republican leaders to conclude that voters outside the hardcore GOP base did not demand more pettiness in this year’s midterm elections. Among other things, they will have to reign in hectoring partisans such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the architect of the shutdown who, on CNN Tuesday night, argued that Washington can compromise over the next two years — if you define compromise as doing exactly what Republicans want.
And if GOP leaders fail at that, it will be up to voters to give them what they really deserve.
By: Stephen Stromberg, PostPartisan, The Washington Post, November 5, 2014
“The Face Of The McConnell Campaign”: Should Chuck Todd Be ‘Disqualified’ For Saying The Midterm Elections Don’t Matter?
A few developments today in the all-important Kentucky Senate race: Bill Clinton is expected to draw large, enthusiastic crowds for Alison Lundergan Grimes in Owensboro and Paducah; Mitch McConnell is on day two of his three-day fake-enthusiasm bus tour (the state GOP party is giving all-expenses-paid trips to volunteers as long as they “contribute to an enthusiastic atmosphere” at his events, according to an e-mail obtained by The Hill); and Chuck Todd continues to defend his now-infamous declaration that Grimes “disqualified herself” by refusing to say whether she voted for Obama.
As you’ve probably seen by now, McConnell put footage of Todd in a heavily rotated TV ad, and, from what I could tell after spending two days in Kentucky, Chuck Todd has become the face of the McConnell campaign.
Now, I don’t know if this exactly disqualifies Todd from moderating the New Hampshire debate tonight between Jeanne Shaheen and Scott Brown, but the host of the storied Meet the Press and a self-described political junkie has said that it really doesn’t matter which political party wins the Senate. He made that case in an interview with President Obama on his debut MTP last month, saying, A couple more extra red or a couple more blue seats, what’s the diff? Three billion dollars, he said, is being spent merely “to see if it’s Harry Reid or Mitch McConnell that’s in charge of gridlock in the Senate.”
Todd then turned to panelist John Stanton, from Buzzfeed, to pooh-pooh Obama’s argument that party control of the Senate is actually, uh, important:
TODD: You know, Stanton, he was trying to make the rationale for why the midterms matter. And when you have to say, “I know some people don’t think, but they really do matter.”
JOHN STANTON: You’ve already lost…..
in terms of legislation passing. If Democrats keep the Senate, and they have, what, a two-seat or a one-seat majority, or if Republicans take it and have a two-seat or one-seat majority, you still are left with essentially the same dynamic in Washington.
But surely Todd, if not also Stanton, knows that even if no legislation passes (presumably the Dems would filibuster and Obama would veto GOP bills), a McConnell-led Senate would still affect the lives of millions of people. A one- or two-seat majority would give Republicans all the committee chairmanships, and that, as Norm Ornstein writes, “would undoubtedly stop confirmation on virtually all Obama-nominated judges, and probably on most of his executive nominees. And we would see a sharp ramp-up of investigations of alleged wrongdoing, with Benghazi and IRS redux. If you like Darrell Issa, you will love having his reinforcements and doppelgängers in the other chamber.”
Even Politico says, “No one should underestimate the significance if the GOP captures the Senate in November…”
Mitch McConnell, who would become majority leader if the Senate changes hands, is already promising to load up the appropriations bills with policy restrictions that could raise the risk of another government shutdown if Obama doesn’t sign them.
With both the Senate and the House in their hands, Republicans could put Obama on defense on everything from Obamacare to the administration’s greenhouse gas regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, education policy and spending priorities.
And even with gridlock, McConnell could reach his dream of repealing Obamacare “root and branch.” Robert Reich warns in a MoveOn video that the R’s could use the Senate maneuver of “reconciliation,” which requires “only 51 votes to pass major tax and budget legislation instead of the 60 votes usually required.” That means, he says, that Republicans could win tax cuts for the wealthy and loopholes for Wall Street and pay for them with cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and education. (The Dems used reconciliation to pass the Affordable Care Act in the first place.)
But issues that matter to real people often evaporate in the heat generated by horse-race pundits like Todd. Grimes is “disqualified” for not answering a question (“By dodging the question, did she cast a spell on herself that reverse-aged her to be ineligible for service in the U.S. Senate?” Jim Newell at Salon asks. “Did her incantation strike names from her ballot petitions, putting her below the threshold to qualify for ballot placement?”). But McConnell lies by claiming he can repeal Obamacare while letting Kentuckians keep their Kynect—without acknowledging that Kynect is Obamacare.
As The Nation’s Reed Richardson writes: “When confronted about his specious reasoning in a subsequent Facebook Q & A, Todd backed off his judgment a bit (‘disqualifying for some voters’ was his new formulation), but still defended his over-the-top analysis as reflecting ‘political reality.’ But for all his cynicism, Todd still tries to have it both ways. For, later in the same Facebook chat he said he was ‘sick’ over the fact the McConnell camp had already stuck his Grimes-bashing soundbite into a campaign ad.”
Todd goes into still longer explanations with Media Matters, saying his wording was “sloppy.” It seems like his judgment that it doesn’t matter who runs the Senate was, at best, sloppy, too.
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, October 21, 2014
“The Right’s Scary Ebola Lesson”: How Anti-Government Mania Is Harming America
If not for serial budget cuts to the National Institutes of Health, we would probably have an Ebola vaccine and we would certainly have better treatment, NIH director Dr. Francis Collins tells the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein. This comes on the heels of reporting that the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by half since 2006, and new revelations about how botched protocols at the Dallas hospital that turned away Thomas Eric Duncan and then failed to treat him effectively also led to the infection of one of Duncan’s caregivers.
Yet most of the media coverage of the politics of Ebola to date has centered on whether President Obama has adequately and/or honestly dealt with the disease. “I remain concerned that we don’t see sufficient seriousness on the part of the federal government about protecting the American public,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told reporters. Cruz is probably the wrong guy to talk about seriousness: his government shutdown forced the NIH to delay clinical trials and made the CDC cut back on disease outbreak detection programs this time last year.
I find myself wondering: When, if ever, will the political debate over Ebola center on the way the right-wing libertarian approach to government has made us less safe?
My fans at Newsbusters and other right-wing sites were outraged last week when I raised questions about whether Texas Gov. Rick Perry shared some responsibility for the nation’s Ebola crisis with President Obama, since the outbreak occurred in his state on his watch. Now that a second person has been infected there, I think the question is even more relevant.
The GOP approach to public health was crystallized at the 2012 debate where Rep. Ron Paul – another Texas politician — said it wasn’t the government’s responsibility to take care of a hypothetical young man who showed up in the emergency room very sick after he decided not to buy insurance. “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risks,” Paul said, deriding “this whole idea that you have to prepare to take care of everybody …”
“Are you saying that society should just let him die?” moderator Wolf Blitzer asked. And the crowd roared “Yeah!” (For his part Paul answered no, but said hospitals should treat such cases as charity and not be compelled to do so.) Lest you think either Paul or that Florida audience represented a minority sentiment in the GOP, recall that none of his rivals, not even Mitt Romneycare, challenged Paul’s approach at the debate.
But now we know what happens when hospitals fail to adequately care for uninsured people who turn up in the ER: They can die, which is awful, but they may also spread disease and death to many other people. It’s pragmatism, not socialism, that commits governments to a public health agenda.
That agenda, however, has been disowned by the modern GOP. Sarah Kliff got lots of attention for her Vox piece starkly depicting how the Centers for Disease Control’s prevention budget has been cut by more than half since 2006. The chart she used actually came from a piece in Scientific American last week, which I hadn’t seen before. It’s must-reading: it dispassionately explained the way we’ve underfunded and degraded our public health infrastructure. And again, it made me think about the Republican policies that have hampered our ability to fight this crisis.
Isn’t there a fair way to say that cutting 45,700 public health workers at the state and local level, largely under GOP governors, was irresponsible? As was slashing the CDC’s prevention budget by half since 2006, or cutting the Affordable Care Act’s prevention budget by a billion? Sen. John McCain wants an “Ebola czar,” but the Senate is blocking confirmation of the Surgeon General. Isn’t it fair to ask whether the constant denigration of government, and the resulting defunding, now makes it harder to handle what everyone agrees are core government functions?
It seems relevant to me that Texas is 33rd in public health funding. It’s clear now that not just the hospital but state and local authorities responded inadequately to Duncan’s illness. His family and friends were quarantined, but left to fend for themselves; county public health officials didn’t even provide clean bedding. “The individuals, it’s up to them … to care for the household,” Erikka Neroes of Dallas County health and human services told the Guardian a week after Duncan had been admitted to the hospital. “Dallas County has not been involved in a disinfection process.”
When the disinfection process began, belatedly, there’s evidence that was botched as well. The Guardian found a team of contractors with no protective clothing simply power-washing the front porch, for instance, when it should have been scrubbed with bleach. A baby stroller sat nearby.
As the great science writer David Dobbs concluded last week: “So the richest country on earth has no team to contain the first appearance of one of the most deadly viruses we’ve ever known.”
I’ve found myself wondering if Ebola is unquestionably a plus for Republicans three weeks before the midterm, as everyone (including me) has assumed. Certainly Republicans think it is; that’s why vulnerable Senate candidates, from Thom Tillis in North Carolina to Scott Brown in New Hampshire, are fear-mongering about it.
But if Democrats are the party of government, and thus seen as culpable by voters when government does wrong, aren’t government-hating, budget-slashing Republicans politically vulnerable when we need government to do something right, and the cuts they’ve pushed have compromised its ability to do so? Or does IOKIYAR mean the media just shrugs when the GOP fear-mongers, but would punish any Democrat respond in kind?
Blogger Kevin Drum likes to complain about a Democratic “Hack Gap” – the fact that liberal pundits are too willing to criticize Democratic leaders, while GOP pundits more often line up behind theirs. I don’t agree with Drum – in the end, Chris Matthews and I didn’t cost the president his re-election in 2012 – but it’s an interesting debate. Personally I think Democrats have a “Brilliant and Ruthless Campaign Operative Gap,” when it comes to shamelessly exploiting the other side’s political weakness.
The GOP’s anti-government crusade has hampered our ability to face the Ebola challenge. In an election year, there’s nothing wrong with Democrats saying that clearly. Campaigns should be cutting ads right now spotlighting the way Republican budget cuts have devastated the public health infrastructure we need to fight diseases like Ebola. Here’s one such ad from the Agenda Project.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 13, 2014
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