“A Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free Card”: Boehner Offered Free Pass Out Of Shutdown Mess, But He Doesn’t Want To Take It
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen’s Monday night ruling temporarily blocking President Obama’s Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program provided a political lifeline for congressional Republicans. But whether or not they’re smart enough to take it remains unclear.
For weeks, Republicans have been hurtling towards another catastrophic shutdown debacle. Furious over President Obama’s immigration action, congressional Republicans devised an illogical scheme to fight back: They would separate the Department of Homeland Security from December’s government funding bill, and then use it as a hostage. Unless President Obama abandons his policy by February 27, DHS would enter a partial shutdown.
The strategy never had a prayer of working, for several reasons. President Obama has long since proven that he is done giving in to Republican ransom demands. Shutting down DHS would not actually do anything to stop President Obama’s deferral plan. And the American public was always going to blame the GOP for any shutdown crisis. (This was confirmed by a CNN poll released Tuesday, which found that 53 percent of Americans would hold Republicans responsible, while just 30 percent would blame the president, and 13 percent would blame both.) Unless they planned to never pay DHS workers again, the only possible outcome for the GOP was embarrassing defeat.
But still, Republicans went all in. One month ago, the House passed a bill linking DHS funding with blocking DAPA. Although it repeatedly failed to pass the Senate, House Speaker John Boehner insisted that “the House has done its job,” and has flatly refused to consider a clean funding bill. Meanwhile, even if the Senate somehow does pass a bill limiting Obama’s authority, the president would veto it. A politically catastrophic shutdown seemed increasingly inevitable.
So one might think that House Republicans would welcome Judge Hanen’s ruling as a get-out-of-jail-free card. With DAPA blocked, pending appeal, they could pass a clean DHS funding bill with a clean conscience, tell their constituents that the matter is in the courts’ hands now, and save the fight for another day.
But it’s never that easy with the Republican caucus.
Speaker Boehner’s reaction to the ruling suggests that he’s still committed to taking this all the way.
“The president said 22 times he did not have the authority to take the very action on immigration he eventually did, so it is no surprise that at least one court has agreed,” Boehner said in a statement. “We will continue to follow the case as it moves through the legal process. Hopefully, Senate Democrats who claim to oppose this executive overreach will now let the Senate begin debate on a bill to fund the Homeland Security Department.”
In case there was any doubt, Democrats are still not ready to begin debate on forcing a maximum-deportation policy on the White House.
“It’s perfectly appropriate to take this issue to court, but it is completely unacceptable for Republicans to hold up funding for the Department of Homeland Security while the case wends its way through the legal system,” Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement. “This procedural ruling, in our opinion, is very unlikely to be upheld, but regardless of the outcome Democrats remain united in our belief that funding for the Department of Homeland Security should not be used as a ransom by Republicans, period.”
Republicans clearly learned the wrong lessons from their last government shutdown, which they overcame at the ballot box in November. They are extremely unlikely to be so lucky again in 2016, when the elections will be fought on a much friendlier terrain for Democrats. On Monday night, Judge Hanen threw the GOP a lifeline; they’d be wise to grab it.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, February 17, 2015
“A Long History Of Pleasing Conservatives”: Meet Conservatives’ New Favorite Judge
Few outside of a tiny Texas border town knew who Federal District Court Judge Andrew Hanen was until Monday night when he became a right-wing hero.
But this isn’t the first rodeo the judge who delayed implementation of the Obama Administration’s executive order on immigration.
Hanen, a federal district court judge in Brownville, Texas, has a long history of taking a conservative approach to immigration issues in his courtroom, which is located just over a mile from the Mexican border.
The once obscure justice, whose only other previous claim to fame was serving as the President of the Houston Bar Association 15 years, has now made himself a right wing celebrity.
But his ruling on Monday is by far the most consequential that the George W. Bush appointee has ever issued.
He first gained notice for his willingness to entertain the arguments of landowners on the Mexican border who opposed the construction of a fence on their land by the federal government.
The Texas Observer described him in 2010 as “the only federal judge in the nation who forced Homeland Security to acknowledge landowners’ constitutional protections. In case after case, Hanen refused to rubber-stamp the condemnations and ruled that the government would have to provide ‘fair compensation’ for the land it was taking.”
But Hanen became a darling of immigration hawks in a 2013 order in which he vented against a decision made by the DHS not to deport a woman in the country illegally who had paid for her daughter to be smuggled into the United States.
While the smuggler was sentenced to jail, the government allowed the woman and her daughter to remain in the country under a 1997 settlement agreement.
Hanen was not pleased.
In an order he attacked the DHS’s “apparent policy … of completing the criminal mission of individuals who are violating the border security of the United States” and compared the action to “taking illegal drugs or weapons seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation/exportation.”
Hanan’s order may not have been binding but it certainly electrified many conservatives as one of the most powerful statements from a federal judge on the issue.
On Monday he made good for conservatives again.
Hanan ruled in favor of 25 states that sued the federal government to stop the implementation of a 2014 executive order to allow millions of undocumented immigrants to apply for “deferred action” from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This executive order enabled the undocumented immigrants to work legally and avoid deportation for several years—a move many Republicans have decried as “executive amnesty.”
Hanen didn’t reach a final decision but instead issued a preliminary injunction, which keeps DHS from enforcing the executive order until a final decision is issued.
His injunction though is not expected to last.
The federal government is expected to appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans and is considered likely to get Hanen’s ruling overturned in that venue.
However, in the mean time, the decision to delay the executive order has major political ramifications in Washington DC where a potential partial government shutdown is looming over this issue.
But no matter what happens in this standoff, there is one clear winner: Judge Hanen.
Immigration reform is likely to remain a quagmire and Congress will continue to be dysfunctional. But, at least, Hanen will increase his Q-rating and become the most consequential federal judge ever to sit in the Brownsville Division of the Southern District of Texas.
By: Ben Jacobs, The Daily Beast, February 17, 2015
“The Rolling Disaster Of John Boehner’s Speakership”: He’s Sure To Be Known As One Of The Weakest Speakers In American History
For years now, John Boehner’s continued occupation of the House speakership has been in doubt. Would the tea partyers evict him in a coup? Would he simply not want this thankless task anymore? The presumption, which I’ve always shared, is that Boehner is in a nearly impossible position. Pressed by a large right flank that sees any compromise as a betrayal, he is constrained from making the deals necessary to pass legislation. While Mitch McConnell can successfully corral his caucus to vote as a unified bloc, the one over which Boehner presides contains so many extremists and cranks that it’s just impossible to hold together.
All of that is true. But might it also be true that Boehner is just terrible at his job?
Look at the two stories about Boehner making the rounds today, both of which were addressed in an appearance he made on “Fox News Sunday” yesterday. The first is the possibility of a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security if Congress can’t pass a bill to fund the department. At a moment when the news is being dominated by terrorism, both in the Middle East and in Europe, a shutdown would be a PR disaster for the GOP (even if, in reality, the key functions of the department would continue with little interruption). The House passed a bill to fund the department, including a provision revoking President Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Everyone knows that such a bill is going nowhere — it failed to overcome a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, and even if it had, Obama has made clear that he’ll veto it.
Asked repeatedly by host Chris Wallace whether the House would revisit the Homeland Security spending bill, Boehner kept repeating that “The House has done its job.” And he couldn’t have been clearer on the possibility of a shutdown:
WALLACE: And what if the Department of Homeland Security funding runs out?
BOEHNER: Well, then, Senate Democrats should be to blame. Very simply.
WALLACE: And you’re prepared to let that happen?
BOEHNER: Certainly. The House has acted. We’ve done our job.
Boehner can say “Senate Democrats should be to blame,” but that won’t make it so. Everyone knows how this is going to end: Both houses are going to pass a “clean” spending bill, which Obama will sign. The only question is whether there’s a department shutdown along the way. If and when that happens, Republicans are going to be blamed, just as they were when they forced a total government shutdown in 2013. His calculation now seems to be the same as it was then: I’ll force a shutdown to show the tea partyers that I’m being tough and standing up to Obama, and then once it becomes clear that we’re getting the blame, that’ll give me the room to end the crisis by giving in and allowing the vote that will bring everything to a close. It’s not exactly a strategy to maximize his party’s political gain.
That brings us to the second ongoing PR catastrophe Boehner has engineered, the upcoming speech to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both here and in Israel, where Netanyahu faces an election next month, the speech has been roundly condemned for politicizing the relationship between the two countries, essentially turning the Israeli prime minister into a partisan Republican coming to the U.S. to campaign against President Obama’s approach to negotiating with Iran about their nuclear program. Worst of all, Boehner invited Netanyahu to make the speech without informing the White House, a bit of foreign policy usurpation that people in both parties find somewhere between inappropriate and outrageous. Here’s how Boehner talked about it yesterday:
BOEHNER: And then when it comes to the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon — these are important messages that the Congress needs to hear and the American people need to hear. And I believe that Prime Minister Netanyahu is the perfect person to deliver the message of how serious this threat is.
WALLACE: But when you talk with [Israeli ambassador] Ron Dermer about inviting Netanyahu, you told him specifically not to tell the White House.
Why would you do that, sir?
BOEHNER: Because I wanted to make sure that there was no interference. There’s no secret here in Washington about the animosity that this White House has for Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I frankly didn’t want them getting in the way and quashing what I thought was a real opportunity.
WALLACE: But it has created a — if not a firestorm, certainly a controversy here. It has a created a controversy in Israel. And shouldn’t the relationship between the U.S. and Israel be outside of politics?
BOEHNER: It’s an important message that the American people need to hear. I’m glad that he’s coming and I’m looking forward to what he has to say.
It may be that by now Boehner thinks that having come this far, he can’t rescind the invitation without making the whole thing look even worse. That’s possible, but by making the invitation in the first place, and keeping it secret from the administration, he created a truly epic blunder, one that not only makes him look bad but also damages American foreign policy interests.
So on the whole, Boehner is managing to combine legislative incompetence with PR incompetence. He’s already sure to be known as one of the weakest speakers in American history, for at least some reasons that are out of his control. But he might also be known as one of the least effective. Perhaps no one could have done a better job in his place, but since no other Republican seems to want the job, we may never know.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line, February 15, 2015
“Risky Business”: Brinksmanship And The Return Of Financial Crisis
A government shutdown once again loomed, and familiar deadlines and ultimatums flew around Washington. And Congress just used the threat to loosen the rules created in the wake of the financial crisis, a victory for Wall Street banks in their constant and well-funded campaign against reform.
The rules they have targeted are designed to reduce the risk of another financial meltdown, like the one that drove us into the Great Recession and could have been much worse. Though the repeal has been styled by some as a technical amendment, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Think about the best way to decide legislative policy in the devilishly complex and risk-laden area of derivatives. These are the financial contracts that brought down AIG, the event that triggered the crisis. You might imagine careful deliberation and debate, leading to a thoughtful vote in Congress in which elected representatives must stand up and be counted so that they could be held responsible for a difficult decision.
Of course, that is not how the House of Representatives works, especially not the current lame duck version. A 1,600 page Omnibus Spending Bill appeared Tuesday night and passed the House late on Thursday night. We have become familiar with these spending bills that have replaced reasoned budgeting and serially risk shutdowns just so the administration can be bullied every few months.
This time around, House sponsors attached a provision amending the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They did this in the dead of night and at the last minute. Lobbyists, who are paid to make certain that the banks can continue to do as much risky business as possible despite the new regulatory regime, pushed to have a provision repealing the “swaps push-out” section of Dodd-Frank slipped into the spending bill so that any resistance to the repeal would risk another shutdown. Citigroup lobbyists wrote 70 out of 85 lines of the original bill.
That’s Washington style representative democracy for you.
The swaps push-out provision requires banks to transact their swaps business in separate subsidiaries. The concept is that any bank swaps business should be done outside the bank itself, which is backed by FDIC deposit insurance and the many supports provided by the Federal Reserve.
Swaps are complex derivatives contracts requiring payments in the future that change as markets prices for stocks, bonds, oil and many other traded assets change. Thus, they create large and volatile financial obligations going back and forth between a bank and its contract “counterparty,” either a company (like AIG), a government or another bank.
Counterparties to the banks who rely on the banks’ performance of its obligations can rely on these federal supports and can assume that the government will step in if a problem occurs. This can embroil the government in any bank default making a bailout more likely, good news for bank creditors like the swap counterparties. To avoid this, the swaps push-out requires a separate corporation, not entitled to the federal supports, to create a firewall, insulating taxpayers from the riskiest trading.
Though swaps were regulated in Dodd-Frank, there were plenty of loopholes, so a great deal of that business will go forward just as before. The swaps push-out section now under threat was already watered down in the original Dodd-Frank deliberations. Nonetheless, it still provides important protection. With swaps push-out, there’s some possibility that the federal government wouldn’t be dragged into a bank default because of the bank safety net.
But members of Congress, urged on by big money from Wall Street, decided that this sensible buffer between casino-like derivatives trading and the American taxpayer was such a bad idea that it had to be discarded through surreptitious and disguised means.
The banks have been out to kill the swaps push-out from the beginning. That makes sense for them since the capital needed to back a subsidiary would cost them more than their basic capital. Banks can raise general capital cheaply since investors have learned that failure is not a concern for banks that are too-big-to-fail. Capital funding for a subsidiary that is separated from this safety net is more costly because a bail out is less likely.
The banks also got some of their customers who often enter into swaps with the banks to urge repeal. The customers complained that their swaps would cost more. Of course they would, since the bank subsidiary’s capital backing the swaps would cost more. But the customers, as contract counterparties, have been relying on the too-big-to-fail safety net. Like investors in the banks, these customers simply should not benefit from a pipeline to the American taxpayers. Any additional cost is an element of elimination of that benefit, nothing more.
In Washington, banks have been allowed to set the terms of the regulatory debate. The financial crisis provides many lessons, but one of its central was that allowing banks free reign leads to disastrous results for all Americans. Six years after the onset of the financial crisis, it’s too soon to forget that lesson and revive too-big-to-fail.
By: Wallace Turbeville, The American Prospect, December 12, 2014
“Whose Civil War Is Worse?”: Personal Distrust Far More Intense Among Republicans. They Really Don’t Like One Another
For some reason that I should probably determine one day, I’ve always found internal disputes with the conservative movement/Republican party somewhat more interesting than internal disputes within the liberal movement/Democratic party. Perhaps it’s because, as a liberal, I get a little Nelson Muntzian charge out of watching the folks on the other side tear themselves apart. Or perhaps it’s because, immersed as I am in the liberal world, the disputes on the left make more sense to me and therefore plumbing their mysteries isn’t so compelling.
Regardless, it has often been the case that one side is unified as the other is engaged in intramural battles; for many years, it was the Republicans who were together while the Dems were in disarray, while in the last few years the Democrats have been more united while the GOP has been riven by infighting. But could both sides now be at their own compatriots’ throats? And if so, whose internal battle is more vicious? Charles Krauthammer insists that it’s the Democrats who are on the verge of all-out civil war:
I grant that there’s a lot of shouting today among Republicans. But it’s a ritual skirmish over whether a government shutdown would force the president to withdraw a signature measure—last time, Obamacare; this time, executive amnesty…
It’s a tempest in a teapot, and tactical at that. Meanwhile, on the other side, cannons are firing in every direction as the Democratic Party, dazed and disoriented, begins digging itself out of the shambles of six years of Barack Obama.
To summarize him, congressional Republicans may be repeating the battles that led to a government shutdown, but Chuck Schumer made a speech that some other Democrats disagreed with, so obviously it’s the Democrats who are practically on the verge of dissolution.
Now let’s take a look at what conservative journalist Byron York is reporting:
A headline by Breitbart News—”Boehner Crafts Surrender Plan on Obama Executive Amnesty”—echoes the idea that GOP leaders will back down even when they have full control of Congress. It’s a view that is shared by many conservatives, from Twitter devotees to radio talk-show hosts.
Underneath it all is a toxic distrust among Hill Republicans. In conversations and email exchanges in the past few days—none of it for attribution and some of it completely off the record—GOP aides on both sides of the issue have expressed deep suspicion of the other side’s motives.
“Conservative Republicans believe leadership will cave to Obama because conservative Republicans are not stupid,” said one GOP aide. “Leadership is bound and determined to never have a funding fight on executive amnesty.”
“Ask them what their backup plan is after the government shuts down,” said another GOP aide, referring to the forces who want action now. “They don’t have one. They know their plan is a dead-end strategy, but they don’t care. All they care about is making themselves look good to the Heritage Action/purity-for-profit crowd.”
In both cases, there’s wide agreement on policy. There really isn’t any significant policy that Ted Cruz supports but John Boehner doesn’t, and you could say the same of almost any two major Democratic figures. Everybody’s arguing about tactics. But the differences seem much more meaningful on the Republican side, where the question is whether they should engage in a kamikaze mission to shut down the government, not whether some new phrasing to describe longstanding ideological values might yield a few more votes. And the personal distrust and dislike York describes seem far more intense among Republicans. They really don’t like one another.
The other major difference is that the GOP is actually divided into organized factions in a way that Democrats aren’t. As Joel Gehrke reports, there could be as many as 50 to 60 House Republicans who will vote against John Boehner’s plan to fund the government, which would mean Boehner would once again need to go on his knees to Nancy Pelosi asking for her help to avoid a shutdown. There’s nothing remotely comparable on the Democratic side.
But if it makes people like Krauthammer feel better to say, “We’re not the ones in disarray, they are!”, then I guess they should go right ahead.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 5, 2014
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