“From Obsession To Insanity”: The GOP Is Unhinged By Obamacare
Whacking yourself on the head with a ball-peen hammer would be stupid. But doing it again and again — that’s insane.
Welcome to your U.S. House of Representatives, presently led by a pack of Tea Party Republicans. They are so crazed by Obamacare that they repeatedly hammer themselves over the head with it, having voted 46 times (so far) to dismantle, defund, delay, deny, and otherwise destroy this landmark health care bill — all to no avail. They would be hilarious, were they not so pathetic.
But now, their anti-government, anti-Obama obsession has turned into insanity. Acting as though the USA is nothing more substantial than a banana republic, this Tea Party clique of petty potentates has forced a shutdown of our national government. The craziest part of their stunt is the duplicitous claim that finally providing health care for millions of uninsured Americans will have, as one leader of the mad-dog pack put it, “horrific effects.”
Yet, even as they publicly insist that they’re heroes for trying to save the people from the horror of receiving fairly decent health coverage, the GOP hierarchy is quietly warning its members that defeating Obamacare now is essential to their own health. Why? Because they know the program will work, providing better care and nearly universal coverage at a cheaper price. It will become widely popular, and any politico who tries to kill it later will become wildly unpopular. Even the senator from Oz, Ted Cruz, understood that the program had to be aborted before it was born. It will be so loved, Cruz candidly conceded (as he desperately tried to suffocate Obamacare with a painfully-long “filibuster”), that the public will be “hooked” on it for the long haul.
Yes, Sen. Oz, the American people tend to support policies that are beneficial to them. What’s crazy is you and your cohorts thinking they’re crazy for thinking that.
So now, Dr. Hightower offers this advice: Don’t fume about the GOP’s lunatic effort to kill health care reform — just laugh at their farcical show. It won’t affect them, but it can improve your mental health.
For starters, take Ted Cruz’s 21-hour blabathon that he said would stop Obamacare in its tracks. Not only did he fail spectacularly, but senators voted 100 to zero against his crazy ploy. Yes, that means that even he ended up voting against it! What a hoot he is.
A shameful hypocrite, too. While going to extremes to keep millions of Americans from getting vitally needed health coverage, Cruz goes to great lengths to keep the people from being reminded of his own health care, past and present.
Having been born in Calgary, Canada, little Ted’s parents were able to take advantage of the country’s universal health care, or as the Tea Party darlings like to call it, “socialized” medicine. That’s right, for the first four years of Ted’s life in Calgary, he was covered under government subsidized healthcare. I find it absolutely hysterical that little Ted would grow up to throw a 21-hour-long temper tantrum over affordable health care for hardworking American people. Recently, Cruz had been repeatedly refusing to answer whether taxpayers covered his health care. Finally, he piously responded that he was eligible for taxpayer coverage, but had nobly declined.
Such slapstick! It turns out that Ted was fibbing, for he’s covered by his wife’s policy. As a millionaire top executive at Goldman Sachs, she and her family are given gold-plated Cadillac coverage by the Wall Street giant. Goldman pays some $40,000 a year for her and Ted’s policy (more than most families make in a year) — a benefit-cost that the firm passes on to us taxpayers by deducting it from its corporate tax bill. Hilarious, huh?
Then there’s the comic twist that’s included in Congress’ current government shutdown. While more than a million regular government workers are going without a paycheck, the congresscritters who forced the furlough continue to collect their $174,000 in annual pay. Some lawmakers are donating their checks to charity, but four out of five are happily pocketing theirs. “Dang straight,” barked Rep. Lee Terry. “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college,” the Nebraska Republican said. “Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly,” Terry told his constituents.
And that’s your Congress at work. Laugh ’til it hurts.
By: Jim Hightower, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 10, 2013
“All Voices Should Be Heard”: The Government Shutdown Shows Contribution Limits Are Needed More Than Ever
The Supreme Court must uphold the overall contribution limit in McCutcheon v. FEC, and certainly should not consider striking the base limits.
The Supreme Court has never struck down a federal contribution limit, maintaining that these limits are valid to prevent corruption and the appearance of corruption. Right now, when confidence in Congress is at an all time low, it would be extremely unwise to toss aside that precedent.
The fact is, contribution limits are already too high. Candidates for office are over-reliant on donors with the capabilities to give the most and current federal limits are far higher than what the average American can afford to give. As evidence of this, one need not look further than the 2012 elections, in which House candidates raised 55 percent of their individual contributions in chunks of $1,000 or more from just .06 percent of the population and Senate candidates raked in 64 percent in contributions of that size from about 133,000 individuals.
Striking the aggregate limit would make that problem significantly worse. Only a small handful of individuals comes even close to the aggregate limit. In 2012 only 1,219 people came within 10 percent of the $117,000 limit, which is not at all surprising when you consider that this is more than twice what the average American household earns in a year.
Based on the behavior and the giving capability of those 1,219 donors, U.S. PIRG and Demos project in our new report that absent an overall limit those donors would increase their giving, pumping an estimated $1 billion dollars into the next four federal elections, making candidates more dependent on a small set of people for big money and minimizing the donations of everyday Americans. To play out what that would look like, we estimated that if the limit had not been in place in 2012, the 1,219 donors would likely have given about 150 percent of what President Obama and Governor Romney raised from over four million small donors.
Now in the second week of the shutdown, we are currently feeling the full effect of what happens when a handful of extreme individuals exerts disproportionate power in government. Lifting the overall limit, as McCutcheon is asking the Court to do, would give even more clout to a small set of very wealthy individuals. This is not only inherently anti-democratic but also has real world consequences. New research from Public Campaign shows that these big donors are highly partisan donors indicating that striking the limits would further exacerbate polarization in Washington.
In order for democracy to function every citizen should have meaningful opportunity to influence the actions of government and we must also have faith that our voices will be heard, regardless of whether or not we can afford to make a $9.9 million, $2,500, or even $200 political disbursement. The Supreme Court has long recognized this, emphasizing the importance of protecting against the appearance of corruption. However, it severely miscalculated the effect its decision in Citizens United would have in that arena.
Most Americans do not feel that our voices are being heard on Capitol Hill and who could blame us? In Citizens United the Supreme Court handed a giant megaphone to the wealthiest interests and on Tuesday it will consider turning up the volume even higher. It’s interesting that those who argue that limits threaten free speech seem unconcerned with the speaking ability of the majority of Americans who cannot afford to write a $50,000 check to a political party.
The last thing we need right now is to increase the giving of the donors with the deepest pockets. Rather, we should be increasing the breadth of Americans providing the funds needed to run campaigns. We need policies that encourage more everyday Americans to engage in politics by making small contributions to candidates and causes: low contribution limits, matching public funds, and a tax refund for small dollar gifts. We need the Supreme Court to respect longstanding precedent and to uphold the aggregate and the base contribution limits.
By: Blair Bowie, U. S. News and World Report Debate Club, October 8, 2013
“A Slow-Moving Disaster”: Republicans Remain Ignorant Of Disastrous Sequester Effects
Both the New York Times and Politico have reports out today on the debt-ceiling-denial caucus, the Republican lawmakers who believe that defaulting on America’s obligations by failing to raise the debt ceiling in a timely fashion would be no big thing. “I think it’s a lot of hype that gets spun in the media,” said Florida Republican Rep. Ted Yoho. Pronouncements of a debt ceiling disaster are part of “a false narrative that’s been perpetuated by this administration,” adds Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa.
But the Times also noted that some unnamed GOPers believe that breaching the debt ceiling won’t be a catastrophe because, they say, the government shutdown and the budget cuts under the so-called sequester were both supposed to be bad, but so far haven’t been:
But the voices of denial are loud and persistent, with some Republicans saying that the fallout from the continuing shutdown and the automatic, across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration has been less severe than predicted.
Perhaps these unnamed representatives haven’t been paying attention, as they’ve been too busy trying to deny people health insurance, but the personal and economic effects of both the shutdown and, perhaps more importantly, the sequester, have been serious and extremely detrimental to the country.
For starters, the shutdown is costing the U.S. economy some $300 million per day in economic output. Thousands of children were thrown out of Head Start, mine safety inspections have been cut back and a national computer network that helps track food-borne illnesses was closed down during a salmonella outbreak that, so far, has sickened 278 people in 18 states.
But those effects pale in comparison to those caused by the sequester, the across-the-board automatic spending cuts that came into effect due to the Budget Control Act, which was the piece of legislation that arose out of the last debt ceiling debacle. Here are just some of the problems that have resulted from the abysmally low spending levels under the sequester:
- Federal employment is plummeting; 100,000 federal jobs will disappear over the next few quarters.
- Overall the economy will lose up to 1.6 million jobs through the end of fiscal year 2014, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
- Government watchdogs have far less money to do their jobs.
- The public defender system is being gutted.
- The National Institutes of Health are being forced to cut hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of research grants. “God help us if we get a worldwide pandemic that emerges in the next five years, which takes a long time to prepare a vaccine for,” says NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.
- Programs aimed at helping low-income, first-generation students get to college are being slashed.
- Head Start spots for tens of thousands of children are being eliminated.
- Thousands of meals from Meals on Wheels, which provides food to low-income seniors, have been eliminated.
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Just because Republican lawmakers in D.C. haven’t noticed these things, doesn’t mean they aren’t happening. (And matters aren’t helped by a media with little patience for slow-moving disasters, which is how the sequester has played out.)
Remember, the sequester was never supposed to actually come into effect. But the sad fact of the current state of play when it comes to the shutdown is that the sequester seems here to stay. Even the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has railed against the deleterious effects of the sequester, is willing to reopen the government at sequester levels of spending; Democrats have already swallowed a bill that would re-open the government with most of the sequester intact.
In that sense, Republicans have already won when it comes to government spending, which is what a shutdown is traditionally about (though Republicans do have an on-again, off-again love affair with the sequester, which for a time they dubbed the “Obamaquester“).
But make no mistake: Funding the government at the level outlined in the sequester means crippling cuts to programs upon which people depend and foregoing crucial investments in the coming years. Continuing the sequester is by no means as bad as defaulting on the national debt, but it’s still a self-inflicted catastrophe. The debt ceiling deniers, then, are doubly ignorant: ignorant of the mess they’re trying to cause and ignorant of the mess that’s already here.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, October 9, 2013
“Disarming A Weapon Of Economic Destruction”: The Debt-Ceiling Crisis To End All Debt-Ceiling Crises
The most important fact about the shutdown crisis, which is soon to become the shutdown/debt-ceiling crisis, is that Democrats are not making any demands. The only thing they want is for the government to reopen and for the United States not to default. Since these are things Republicans also claim they want, they can’t be considered demands. Republicans, on the other hand, have lots of demands, even if they keep changing. That’s why the current Republican talking point—”Why won’t the Democrats negotiate?”—is fundamentally misleading. One way for this whole thing to end is for Republicans to give up their demands and admit they’ve lost. Unsurprisingly, they’re reluctant to do this. But what if Democrats started making a demand of their own?
Today, White House press secretary Jay Carney said something encouraging: that Barack Obama is never again going to negotiate over the debt ceiling. “Whether it’s today, or a number of weeks from now, or a number of months from now, or a number of years from now, it will always be Congress’s responsibility to raise our debt ceiling so that the United States can pay the bills that Congress has incurred,” Carney said. “It will always be, as long as he’s president, President Obama’s position that that responsibility is not negotiable. That there’s not a game of trading for political priorities or agenda items that Republicans have not been able to achieve through legislation or the ballot box.”
That’s a good start, but how about this. As part of the resolution to the crisis, Obama should demand that whatever agreement they come to include eliminating the debt ceiling. Not raise it, blast it to oblivion. The fact that we have a debt ceiling at all is ridiculous. It essentially requires Congress to approve every budget twice, once to spend the money, and once to pay the bills for the money they just spent. There’s only one other democracy in the world (Denmark) that has such a thing, and they set theirs high enough that it never matters. In the days before the Republican Party descended into madness, the debt ceiling was nothing more than an occasion for some harmless grandstanding by the opposition party, but now it has become a weapon of economic destruction that needs to be disarmed. So get rid of it. If Republicans don’t want the country to take on debt, they can try to put together a balanced budget and see if it can pass. But this insanity has to stop, and the way to do it is to take away the minority party’s ability to initiate what Bloomberg News calls “an economic calamity like none the world has ever seen.”
That’s what Obama ought to demand.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 7, 2013
“The New Three-Party System”: Democrats, Republicans And The De Facto Radical Ted Cruz Party
Why another shutdown? Our government has three parties these days: Democrats, Republicans and the new radical Republicans.
That “radical Republican” label has some history. The old radical Republicans were the Grand Old Party’s progressive wing. They were opposed during the Civil War and through Reconstruction by the party’s liberals and conservatives.
They strongly opposed slavery, demanded harsh policies against ex-Confederates and pushed civil rights and voting rights for newly emancipated slaves. Abraham Lincoln and other moderates sought compromise and unity for the party and the nation. Today’s radical right would probably call Lincoln an appeaser or a “RINO” — Republican in Name Only.
Today’s radical Republicans are quite the opposite in ideology, if not in temperament, of the originals. Today’s Tea Party-era radicals call themselves “conservative” but they radically challenge, block and overturn established laws, policies and traditions that get in the way of their ideological goals — even if it means a federal government shutdown or a possible default on the nation’s debt obligations.
Long-running partisan battles over taxes, spending, deficits, the debt ceiling and other fiscal concerns have come to a head this season in pitched, last-ditch battles by Republicans to block, repeal or defund the Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.”
Democrats believe that their hard-won Obamacare law — having survived congressional opposition, the Supreme Court and a presidential election in which it was a central issue — should be given a chance to work.
Republicans like Texas senator Ted Cruz fear that once Obamacare kicks in, as he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in July, it “will never, ever be repealed” after Democrats “get the American people addicted to the sugar.”
In other words, if people get a chance to try Obamacare, they might like it as much as they like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other programs long decried by conservatives as socialistic.
They have a right to hold objections to programs they don’t like. But conservatives do their country a disservice by holding the normal functions of government hostage to their tests of ideological purity. That’s not just coming from me. It also comes from many of their fellow conservatives.
Some of the party’s best known conservatives have come under attack from the GOP’s Tea Party wing for failure to be conservative enough. The Senate Conservatives Fund, for example, has been running ads that attack Republican senators Jeff Flake of Arizona, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. Their sin: reluctance to support their party’s self-destructive strategy against Obamacare.
“Tell Senate Republicans to stand with Ted Cruz and [Utah senator] Mike Lee,” says the group’s website, “not [Senate Minority Leader] Mitch McConnell [of Kentucky] and [Senate Minority Whip] John Cornyn [of Texas].”
Other conservative groups, including the Tea Party Patriots, For America and Heritage Action have mounted ads attacking Republicans in both houses who don’t rigidly support their efforts to defund Obamacare.
Over on the House side, Cruz has thumbed his nose at traditional protocols by plotting strategy with Tea Party House members — against Speaker John Boehner’s wishes.
But what is Boehner to do? He’s been warned by the Tea Partiers that he’ll be voted out of his speakership if he passes any major legislation with less than a majority of House Republicans. The radical right may be a minority of the House but they appear to leverage a majority of the power against Boehner’s lack of a counter-strategy.
Cruz has taken de facto leadership of the new radical Republican assault on Obamacare, most visibly by speaking for more than 21 hours in a pseudo-filibuster about his objections to the program. This has won soaring support for him in the party’s right wing, setting him up for what most likely will be a presidential run in 2016. One wonders whether he cares more about Republicans or the Ted Cruz Party.
So far, the strident GOP push to overturn Obamacare, even as Americans in need of health care sign up for its state insurance exchanges, shows Republicans to be holding on to the same self-defeating strategy that lost the 2012 presidential race: Talking ceaselessly to themselves.
Worse, they’re arguing among themselves, battling for their party’s political soul instead of real solutions to the problems that voters sent them to Washington to solve.
By: Clarence Page, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 7, 2013
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